David Michael Miller
Wisconsin elections teeter on the greased tip of a needle.
It doesn’t take much to make the result flop to one side or another. So Brian Hagedorn has apparently won a 10-year term on the state Supreme Court by all of about 5,000 votes or about a half of one percent.
Last fall Tony Evers beat Scott Walker by only 30,000 votes out of 2.6 million that were cast. And in 2016 Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by just 22,000 votes out of about 2.8 million .
That’s not always the case. Tammy Baldwin won reelection last fall easily and Rebecca Dallet won her Supreme Court race a year ago by a 12-point margin.
But what seems clear is that while conservative extremists can sometimes win, Democrats do better with moderate, or at least low-profile candidates. Evers, Baldwin and Dallet are all smart, sensible and measured politicians. And even if Baldwin’s voting record is quite liberal, she knows when to shade toward the center. Take, for example, her position in favor delisting gray wolves before her last election.
The mistake that Democrats seemed to make in this Supreme Court race was that they came out of the gate attacking Hagedorn for being anti-gay. Hagedorn very skillfully reinterpreted that as an attack on his religious beliefs.
The decision to fight the race on a culture war issue certainly did fire up the liberal Dane County base but that was more than compensated for by the conservative counter-reaction it seemed to provoke in the rest of the state. Judge Lisa Neubauer outperformed even Dallet in Dane County, but in the Green Bay media market there was a 20-point swing. Dallet won that market by three points last year while Hagedorn took it with a 17-point margin this time.
In retrospect, Democrats and liberal groups might have done better by running a low-key race on the theory that liberal voters are fired up enough and that the best strategy is to do nothing that mobilizes conservatives. That worked well for Evers.
The Hagedorn debacle is especially bitter because he’ll be there for 10 years, because he won a seat that liberals thought was in the bag for them, and because his victory eliminates any chance that there will be a liberal majority before redistricting.
But Democrats and the liberal third-party groups that support them should learn from the defeat, not become embittered by it. The lesson seems to be that when you match a fired-up liberal base with a fired-up conservative base the conservatives can still win even with a candidate as badly flawed as Hagedorn. The trick is to keep liberal voters motivated in a way that does not provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the other side.
That argues for continuing to nominate low-key, even bland, candidates who run mostly positive campaigns or who attack their opponents on issues rather than on hot-button culture wars stuff.
Overall the left is winning the culture wars. Ten years ago not even Democratic candidates would touch gay marriage. Today it’s the law of the land and no Democrat running for president would even consider opposing it. A decade ago transgender issues weren’t even on the radar for most Americans. Despite Trump’s recent moves, transgender Americans will inevitably be able to serve openly in the military. It wasn’t too long ago that no state allowed the recreational use of marijuana. Now there are ten.
Those issues are being won mostly outside of politics. In fact, I have a whole theory on this. The reason cultural conservatives tend to win in politics is that they have nowhere else to go with their frustrations. They’re being routed in the other major realms of American life: Hollywood, most media outlets and business.
Just a few examples. Today Show host Matt Lauer was at the top of his game until he was credibly accused of sexual improprieties on the job. He was gone within 24 hours. “Papa” John Schnatter, the founder of the pizza chain that bears his name, was quickly forced out after using a racial slur in a conference call. Bill O’Reilly was once the hottest host on Fox TV. But when allegations of sexual harassment began piling up his show lost about 60 advertisers and he was gone shortly thereafter.
And even the Mormon Church just loosened their rules to allow the baptism of the children of gay couples.
And yet, in the realm of politics, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) remains in office despite a history of making outrageous remarks, most recently questioning why the term “white nationalist” was offensive to anyone. Paradoxically, politics is the last bastion of conservative cultural opinion — both legitimate and extreme.
My point is that politicians are not leading on these issues; they’re following changes that first happen in the broader culture outside of elections. Even Barack Obama didn’t support gay marriage until he felt the political winds blowing in that direction. That’s why it’s a mistake for Democrats to run campaigns on cultural issues, but they often feel pressure to do that because liberals tend to view government as the answer to every problem. Clearly, it’s not, especially when it comes to race, gender and other cultural conflicts.
The Hagedorn victory sure is bitter, but it will be worse if liberals don’t understand why they lost.
