From left: Susan Webb Yackee, Rick Esenberg and Mike Wittenwyler.
From left, Susan Webb Yackee, Rick Esenberg and Mike Wittenwyler offered their takes on the 2024 election.
The Madison Literary Club is a small overlooked jewel in the city’s cultural cluster. Founded in 1877, the 147-year-old social group brings together town and campus to host, as its website promises, “presentations on subjects of current interest and engage in lively conversation about them.”
The club delivered on its promise a few days after the Nov. 5 election with an expert panel exhuming the election results that so shocked Madison. Only 20 or so people showed up, but one of them was Charles Franklin, director of the celebrated Marquette Law School Poll. Just an observer, he demurred when asked to join the conversation. He was, as he explained later, on a “busman’s holiday.”
Center stage were Susan Webb Yackee, director of UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs; elections attorney Mike Wittenwyler, of Godfrey & Kahn S.C.; and Rick Esenberg, founder and president of the Wisconsin Institute For Law & Liberty.
Yackee’s presentation was significant, in part, for what it didn’t mention: Complaints that UW-Madison has gone overboard in advancing left-wing policies and programs with public dollars. As Tom Hefty, a retired healthcare executive, puts it, “The UW-Madison was always progressive, but never so openly and extremely partisan as it is today.”
Yackee’s presentation was anything but that. Instead, she sounded like she was reading from the “Wisconsin Idea” playbook. What can the UW do to heal the state’s angry political rifts? For the La Follette school, it meant embarking on road trips to the farther reaches of the state for a series of town hall meetings and community conversations. Led by trained facilitators, these sessions purposely mixed people of different political opinions in tables of six to eight to converse over dinner.
“What we learned overall is that the status quo is not working for a lot of folks,” Yackee said. She cited national polling showing a stunning 75% of respondents feel the country is headed in the wrong direction, while 30% liked the idea of “a total upheaval” disrupting politics.
“We weren’t sure what to expect,” maybe even violence, she said. “But in the end people were exchanging phone numbers and hugging.”
“It wasn’t all roses,” Yackee said, but many people came up to her after it was all over to say how refreshing it was to hear from someone who thinks differently.
“Their own thinking hadn’t changed,” she added, but now they had a better idea of how the other side saw things. That was the purpose of the dinners and forums, Yackee explained: To get people out of their self-contained information bubbles where they only hear things that reinforce what they already believe.
Look for future reports on what La Follette’s researchers learned from their travels.
Esenberg is one of Wisconsin’s powerhouse attorneys. His Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty functions as a litigation center and conservative think tank, but as a nonprofit does not endorse or work for candidates.
WILL’s litigators have won major cases furthering the conservative principles of constitutionalism, limited government and free enterprise. The group has been especially successful in advocating for “school choice” vouchers in Wisconsin as a mechanism to improve education and empower parents. This infuriates Democrats and teacher unions who criticize WILL for what they see as an undemocratic effort to undermine and privatize public education.
Given WILL’S enemies, you might assume Esenberg would be thrilled by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. You would be wrong. “Trump drives me crazy,” he told the literary club, describing himself as a “classically liberal Reaganite conservative.”
“My team did not make it to the playoffs,” he said, drawing a comparison to the hapless New York Jets football franchise.
As for Trump, Esenberg wondered if his “lizard brain thing” explains how he can mobilize people who otherwise rarely vote. Espousing a five-point plan to control the border won’t get them to the polls,” he said of this demographic. “But if you say they’re eating the dogs and eating the cats then those people will vote.
“Apparently that strategy works,” he said.
Esenberg wasn’t just puzzled at the behavior of down-market Republicans. He had his issues with rich Republicans, too.
He recounted a closed-door meeting of Wisconsin Republican megadonors, whom he knows from fundraising for WILL. “One guy got up and said, ‘All right, here we are, 20-some of us — all big Republicans. How many of you like Donald Trump?’
“Do you know how many hands went up?” Esenberg asked. “None. Yet they all voted for Trump.”
Esenberg dodged around what that sentiment portends for the Republican future: “I always tell everybody that as a political prognosticator I am a really good lawyer.” He said that with a smile and left it at that.
Wittenwyler occupies an entirely different political niche. “I move money around the country to influence elections,” he said in introducing himself. Huh? What? Are one’s worst fears confirmed that easily? Well, no, actually.
Wittenwyler is a behind-the-scenes player — a hired hand essentially — who provides legal advice to the interest groups that invest heavily in the outcomes of American political campaigns.
He keeps clients — they include trade associations, independent-expenditure groups, super PACs, pollsters, lobbyists (in short, most anybody in the business of politics) — in compliance with a myriad of state and federal campaign regulations. This includes monitoring filing benchmarks, spending limits, disclosure requirements, tax implications, and the exacting phraseology of political accusation.
Who does he not represent? Actual candidates and political parties because of potential conflicts of interest.
October found Wittenwyler “chained to his computer,” as he put it, reviewing from 100 to 200 ads a day for compliance. This included not just broadcast TV spots, but direct mail, video and streaming products.
And the money fueling it? There was no end to it.
“I was working with organizations that literally ran out of things to do with the money they had,” Wittenwyler said. “There was no more digital to buy, no more streaming to buy. And there are only so many billboards, robo-calls and text messages you could do.”
His own wife, who missed a recent election, attracted no less than 50 people to their door making sure she would vote in November, he said. Half were volunteers, half were paid for their door-knocking. “It was their job to make sure this one individual voted.”
That’s the future of campaigns, Wittenwyler said in a later interview. “It’s not broadcast TV anymore. Because of the power of databases, it’s become important to narrowcast your messaging to get right to a particular voter. That’s what a canvasser can do.”
Wittenwyler has worries about the future of American politics, but this last election left him largely pleased with how the mechanics of it unfolded: “Democracy works. Democracy works really well, and our elections work really well. (He said the fact there were exceedingly long voter lines in Whitewater was concerning.)
For Wittenwyler, it all came home seeing the Badgers men’s hockey team and the Milwaukee Bucks the weekend after the election, and being choked up at how two arenas filled with people of disparate political values were in one voice belting out the national anthem.
“I’m a cynical person,” he said, but public displays like that give him faith in America’s future.
For more information about the Madison Literary Club, membership and its speakers, check its website: madlit.org. The club meets at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 4100 Nakoma Road. The next event on Dec. 9 features a lecture on the arcane world of forensic accounting at 7:30 p.m.
