David Michael Miller
The day after Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th president, millions of people in cities around the world marched in protest. A half million showed up in Washington, while between 75,000 and 100,000 rallied in Madison.
It was all good for the liberal soul, but there is not much evidence that it will do much to advance liberal causes. In fact, it might hurt.
The crowd on the Capitol Square was reminiscent of the Act 10 protests in 2011. Some of those gatherings were of similar size, but the sustained protests lasted weeks. Still, Act 10 passed in the end and then things only got worse. Gov. Scott Walker has since won two elections and the Republican majorities today are even larger than they were before the protests.
We can go back further to the epic Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, when Madison was a focal point of that movement. Whether or not the protests can be blamed, the facts are that Richard Nixon won the presidency twice and kept the war going for several more years. Nixon won Wisconsin in both 1968 and 1972.
And when one of those protesters finally reached the presidency in 1992, he declared the end to welfare as we know it and he famously said that the era of big government was over. Then, when his wife and fellow protester Hillary Clinton ran for the same office, she was defeated by a conservative populist authoritarian.
The track record of marching protest is not so good. You can take it to the street but that does not mean you can take progressive policy to the bank.
In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, who has studied what she calls “networked protests,” claims that we can be easily led to believe that large turnouts indicate more power than they do. Her theory is that large protests are easier to organize because of social media, but that they often lack any kind of cohesive structure to carry on the movement.
Part of the problem could be that protests are inherently about rallying the true believers, not about expanding the base. And in rallying the faithful, the preaching tends to get more heated and one-sided, which can actually serve to turn off swing voters.
Then there was the fact that the marches were designated as women’s events. At the heart of the Democrats’ problem is their desire to parse up the electorate into interest groups with unique agendas based on race, gender or sexual orientation. What gets lost in that is a common, overarching message. Worse, it does not go unnoticed that less-educated white folks who are not union members get left out of the litany in the Democratic liturgy. The great project of Democrats and liberals needs to be to win back blue-collar voters, some in rural areas. Identity politics just does not help that cause.
And, no, simply doubling down on the Democratic coalition of African Americans, Hispanics, women, the LGBTQ community and younger voters is not likely to work, especially in states like Wisconsin. The reason can be found in simple math.
White men and white women each make up about 44 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. In 2014, Democrat Mary Burke lost white men by 25 points while she split white women evenly with Walker. She won black women with an astounding 96 percent of their votes, but they make up only 4 percent of voters here. So, the problem for Democrats is that they cannot afford to lose such a large cohort as white men by such a large margin and expect to make it up with much smaller minority groups.
And even if a statewide candidate could sneak through, the identity politics strategy is not likely to ever work to regain legislative majorities because those voters are so tightly clustered in urban areas.
It’s not that it can’t be done. Barack Obama won 22 mostly white and rural Wisconsin counties twice, only to have Hillary Clinton lose them to Trump. Obama’s message was always more inclusive, while Clinton ran a campaign heavy on identity politics.
Bernie Sanders showed that blue-collar voters are reachable with a liberal economic message if it comes off as straightforward and authentic. Future rallies built around a message about jobs, wages and fairness for everyone might be more successful at building a broad-based movement.
In fact, a good exercise for Democratic strategists would be to imagine a middle-aged man with a high school education in Racine or Richland Center. He and his wife have three jobs between them and two kids, who they can’t afford to send to college. They voted for Obama twice and for Trump this time. Before Democrats say or do anything, they should ask themselves how it would go over with that couple.
It comes down to this. Liberals and Democrats need a message that can be heard and felt beyond the echo of a bullhorn on the Capitol Square.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
