Tammy Baldwin for Senate
Tammy Baldwin campaigning.
Sen. Baldwin makes it a point to spend time in all parts of the state, and not just at election time.
I think Tammy Baldwin will win in November.
There. I said it. Now, if I were Baldwin, and given my record of predicting political outcomes, I’d demand an immediate retraction. Nonetheless, I will soldier on.
In the latest Marquette Law School poll, Baldwin holds a five point lead over her Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde. That’s not overwhelming, but it’s just outside the margin of error. And it feels right. I would expect Baldwin to run well ahead of Joe Biden and Biden is in a dead heat with Donald Trump. So, if the margin for or against Trump in November is about 20,000 votes, just as it has been in the last two elections, I’d expect Baldwin to run, say, 50,000 votes ahead of Biden, and she’ll win either way.
But why is that? Why is an out lesbian, Madison liberal the odds-on-favorite to win a third term in a purple state?
I think it’s because she largely follows the lead of another unapologetic Dane County progressive, former Sen. Russ Feingold — but with one big exception. We’ll get to the exception later, but the two things she does just like Russ are get around and get strategically independent.
Feingold made it a point to hold listening sessions in each of the state’s 72 counties every single year. Baldwin doesn’t do it in quite that way, but she makes it a point to pop up all over the state, both during her six-year terms and at election time. When you’re running statewide, it doesn’t matter if a vote comes from Dane or Rusk county. It’s still a vote.
Also, in a counterintuitive way, the extreme polarization in Wisconsin politics actually means that Baldwin is free to spend more time in parts of the state that are unfriendly to Democrats.
When Russ Feingold won his first Senate race in 1992, the local congressman in Dane County and the sheriff were Republicans, a Republican had recently served as county executive, and half of the county board was made up of conservatives. Feingold couldn’t take votes in Dane County for granted. He beat incumbent Sen. Bob Kasten here by 54,000 votes.
In 2024, there are no Republican elected officials in the county and the last conservative on the county board just survived reelection last month. Baldwin’s Dane County margin in 2018 was 89,000 votes. And that wasn’t even a presidential election year. There’s no reason not to think she’ll beat Hovde by an even greater margin this year.
In other words, Baldwin doesn’t have to spend much in the way of time or resources to win Dane County by a huge margin and she doesn’t have to worry about turnout, especially in a presidential year with Donald Trump on the ballot. She can focus her efforts on finding some votes in unconventional places.
Also like Feingold, Baldwin will take the odd conservative position. Feingold famously bucked his party by voting for Pres. George W. Bush’s nominee, Sen. John Ashcroft, for attorney general. Baldwin has supported delisting the gray wolf, a popular position in northern Wisconsin. Dane County liberals don’t like it, but not enough to make them refrain from voting for her against Hovde.
But here’s the final piece that helps Baldwin win more votes than you’d think she should in rural Wisconsin and it’s a departure from Feingold: Tammy Baldwin believes in pork. Feingold made it a point to eschew bringing home the bacon while Baldwin orders it up by the pound. She even made dishonorable mention in Reason magazine for getting $1.4 million for a solar energy project in Wisconsin. Good for her. I like solar energy.
On every level, Baldwin is right about this and Feingold was wrong. First, the politics. If you’re offended by pork barrel spending, let me ask you this: Would you rather have Russ Feingold in the Senate or Ron Johnson? It’s true that Feingold was swimming upstream in 2010. The tea party movement was in full swing. People were in the streets, furious that their government was trying to provide them with affordable health insurance. But it didn’t help his cause that Feingold had not spent any of the previous 18 years going around the state cutting ribbons and smiling next to a big cardboard check held up by him and the local dignitaries.
Baldwin, by contrast, is a master at this stuff. She even touts it on her own website. When I was mayor of Madison she was always eager to get federal money to help us complete local projects. For example, the very expensive rebuilding of State Street and East Washington Avenue and the bike/ped bridge over East Wash were done with the help of federal money secured for us by then-Congresswoman Baldwin. We always made it a point to thank her with a shovel or pair of scissors before the cameras.
Which leads me to my next point about pork: most of it is like this. These are worthy projects, supported by local officials, that the public wants to get done. If some of it is done with federal money that means less of it is paid for by the regressive property tax. The “bridge to nowhere” stuff is the rare exception, not the rule. And, by the way, this “member-directed spending” amounts to less than one percent of the federal budget.
In Wisconsin, pork is one way of getting a little bit more of our federal tax dollars back into the state. Wisconsin ranks 38th in terms of getting back from the federal government what we pay into it.
Finally, pork greases the skids. It helps provide House and Senate members with the motivation to vote for bills they might not otherwise like. In fact, that same tsk-tsking article in Reason pointed out that 6,000 earmarks were included in the recently passed budget bill. Fine by me. Would you rather have the government shut down? And while Reason breathlessly tallied up all those earmarks to $12 billion, they didn’t point out that this represented (you guessed it) one percent of the total $1.2 trillion package.
So, Feingold’s principled stand against bringing home the bacon didn’t help him keep Ron Johnson out of the Senate and it wasn’t even necessarily such great public policy. His refusal to play that game played well only with Unitarians and League of Women Voters members (mostly one in the same). Nobody else cares.
That sizzling you hear? It’s the sound of Tammy Baldwin winning another election.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
