David Michael Miller
As the Green Bay Packers struggled in the early part of their 2015 season, their quarterback Aaron Rodgers went on his weekly radio show and offered some advice to worried fans. “R-E-L-A-X,” Rodgers said in a whisper.
And, sure enough, the Pack went on to win a bunch of games and make the playoffs yet again.
“Relax,” is also sound advice for another losing team that could have brighter days ahead. I speak of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. The Dems are growing restless over the lack of a promising candidate to take on Gov. Scott Walker. About as many potential candidates have taken a pass as those who are still considering it. The only announced candidate is a 25-year-old Californian and one of their potential contenders, Mike McCabe, can’t decide if he really wants to be a Democrat or maybe a Republican or, no wait, maybe he’s an Independent.
And it feels like it’s getting late. Let me offer a handful of reasons why it’s not as late as you might think.
Keep in mind that when the last Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, decided not to run for a third term it was August 2009, about 15 months before the November 2010 election. And the party’s top candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, was in the hospital, his body broken from an attempt to intervene in a domestic dispute. Barrett, still recovering from the attack, didn’t formally enter the race until months later. And while he lost the election, nobody blamed a late start for that result.
Then there’s deeper history. Two of my personal political heroes are Gaylord Nelson and Bobby Kennedy. In 1958, Nelson began his successful campaign for governor of Wisconsin in May of that year, only about six months before the November election. And RFK finally got into the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination in March for a convention that would take place in late summer. Had he not been killed after winning the final primary in California, he might well have gone on to capture both the nomination and the presidency.
Now, you might point out that the world has changed some in five or six decades. True enough, but here is the main way it has changed with regard to the length of campaigns: the perceived need to raise truckloads of money. In the days before campaign finance rules (to which we’ve almost returned), Kennedy and his family could pretty much fund his campaign while Nelson’s biographer Bill Christofferson reports that Nelson never once personally asked for a contribution.
So, modern orthodox political belief is that a candidate must spend a half to three-quarters of his time begging for bucks and he’d better get started with the groveling as soon as possible. That’s a big part of the reason that the most serious Democratic candidate up to this point, former Janesville state Sen, Tim Cullen, aborted his campaign.
But this time I think that’s wrong. Hillary Clinton had tons of money and she lost. All the money in the world can’t overcome a losing message or a political tide. Bernie Sanders also had plenty of money, but it flowed in through the magic of online fundraising in a famous average amount of $27 because he did have a compelling message.
So, I would argue that any candidate who can raise lots of money in big chunks from rich folks and special interests is exactly the kind of candidate who is destined for about 47% come election day. A winning candidate for the Dems will have enough money to win by virtue of message, posture and appeal. And none of that is dependent on getting in early.
The problem with establishment Democrats and the institutionalized Democratic consultancy is that they start with money and want to use it to find and promote a message — not the least of which because the money pays the consultants. That comes off as phony because it is.
It actually works the other way around. Get a candidate with a natural message that resonates and the money will show up. The fewer consultants involved the better.
Look, Scott Walker isn’t going anywhere — literally or figuratively. Walker has saturation name recognition and an approval rating stuck below 50 percent. Voters’ opinions of their governor are fixed and not likely to change in response to an opponent who gets in the race now, as opposed to sometime later.
And that brings us to the final hackneyed reason to start early: the myth of name recognition. Professional pols are obsessed with that, but it really doesn’t matter much. Walker’s problem is that everybody knows his name and something over half of his constituents don’t like the job he’s doing. Better to be a candidate who nobody knows, and who has the ability to shape their own image from the start, than to be a candidate that everybody knows and, half of whom, don’t like him.
So, my advice to worried Democrats is to go fishing this summer, enjoy the Packers season, celebrate the holidays and start worrying seriously about all this come the New Year. In short, R-E-L-A-X.
