Ron Johnson Mandela Barnes illustration
It turned out to be a pretty good night for Democrats. We woke up Wednesday morning to find, amazingly, that control of the House was still in doubt and that Democrats were slightly favored to keep control of the Senate.
Here in Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers won re-election by a margin about three times greater than it was four years ago and Attorney General Josh Kaul followed Evers to victory.
But there were two results that weren’t so happy. The infamous Sen. Ron Johnson will return for a third term of embarrassing Wisconsin in Washington. Democrat Mandela Barnes ran almost 50,000 votes behind Evers and he’s even a few thousand votes behind him in Milwaukee County, which is Barnes’ home county and a place where he would have been expected to run up the Black vote.
It also looks like Democrats will lose at least one more seat in the state Senate and one or two in the Assembly. The Republicans are likely to have no less than a 22-11 seat advantage in the Senate and 64-35 in the lower house. That makes for a veto-proof majority in the Senate while they might be only two seats short of that in the Assembly.
Barnes, while he came pretty close to wresting the seat from Johnson, represents a missed chance for Democrats. RoJo should have been beaten. His approval ratings have been consistently below 40 percent and he broke a promise to not run for a third term. Moreover, he said and did one bizarre thing after another. Mouthwash could prevent COVID. The Capitol rioters did not present an armed threat. If you don’t like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion law, well, just move. A chance to build electric U.S. Postal vehicles in his hometown of Oshkosh? Nah, we’ve got enough jobs.
How did Barnes lose to this guy? He is a good retail politician, but a fair analysis is that his loss was years in the making. His social media and public statements were strewn with landmines that he couldn’t defuse. He had suggested that he was for defunding the police before he said he wasn’t. He held up an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt, but said he wasn’t for abolishing ICE. He said on camera that the founding of America was “awful.”
Barnes’ effort to court the party’s hard left made it all but impossible for him to beat even a deeply flawed opponent. In my view, Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson was the party’s best bet, but State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski also had a better shot than Barnes. I felt that Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry’s chances were not as good.
Exit polling that showed that Pennsylvania Republican Mehmet Oz’s relatively short tenure as a state resident may have doomed his candidacy reinforces my view on Lasry. He had lived here only for a few years, having grown up in New York, where he also still keeps a residence. Republican Tim Michels’ strong ties to his Connecticut mansion may also have played a role in his defeat.
My overall point is that we had a test case between a more moderate Democrat in Evers and a full-throated progressive in Barnes. Arguably, Evers had the tougher opponent in a businessman without much of a record who could write his own script while Johnson had already dug a deep hole for himself. And yet, the moderate won and the progressive lost.
Moreover, Democrats can’t afford to just throw up their hands and say that gerrymandering dooms them to a deep legislative minority — possibly one that gives the Republicans a veto-proof majority in both houses at some point — for at least another decade.
I think the answer might be to create a party within the party. A party of Moderate Democrats.
This fall I stumbled on a great read, Jonathan Kasparek’s Fighting Son. It’s a biography of Phil La Follette, younger son of Fighting Bob. Phil served as Wisconsin governor in the 1930s and he was generally recognized as the leader of the Progressives in their latter years after Robert La Follette, Sr., died in 1925. Phil’s older brother, Bob Jr., took his father’s seat in the U.S. Senate, but he was much more a creature of Washington while Phil stayed mostly at home and tended to the family business, which was the Progressive movement.
But here’s the thing. For most of their half-century-long history and for all of the time that they were most influential, the Progressives were not their own party. They were a subset of the Republican Party. They held their own conventions, had their own platforms and nominated their own candidates, but that was all leading up to trying to win Republican primaries.
By the time they actually broke away from the Republicans and became their own Progressive Party, they were already on the down slope. That short-lived party faded away by mid-century and its remnants formed the foundation for a new, reinvigorated Democratic Party in Wisconsin.
I recount that history because I think it may form at least part of the answer for the current dilemma faced by any of us who are to the left of Attila the Hun.
I am a moderate Democrat. I wasn’t always. I used to be quite liberal, but after Trump won in 2016 my party lurched to the left while I either stayed where I was or maybe nudged a bit toward the center. I’m not alone. Actually, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, half of Democrats consider themselves to be moderate or even conservative and only 15 percent say they are “very liberal.”
And yet it’s that 15 percent that defines our party in the public mind. That’s why the Democratic label is so toxic in so much of America outside of big cities and college towns. That’s why Brad Pfaff, a guy who grew up on a dairy farm and served as Wisconsin ag secretary, lost to a Republican election denier in the Third Congressional District, which moderate Democrat Ron Kind held down for two decades. The fact that Pfaff was able to keep the margin within five points, without any help from national Democrats, may have helped deliver a second term for Evers, but it’s a seat Democrats should be able to win.
Over on my other blog last week I wrote about how a center-left guy like me, whose views match up pretty well with where the majority or a plurality of Americans are at on a bunch of issues, would wander around the forest of interest groups searching in vain for a kind word. He wouldn’t get one in either set of single-issue interest groups supporting either party. For moderates it’s a wilderness out there. There simply is no infrastructure to back up a set of views that are held by most Americans.
I’ll take just one issue to illustrate my point. On abortion, I like the Bill Clinton formulation that it should be “safe, legal and rare.” And, in fact, that’s where most Americans still come down on the issue. They’re for freedom of choice, but not without some restrictions and caveats. But “rare” is now out of fashion on the hard left. To speak that word in this context is to touch one of the many third rails among the elites who run the Democratic Party.
But for the hard right “rare” isn’t good enough. They’d prefer “never.” So safe, legal and rare is also a third rail among Republicans for just the opposite reason.
My point is that the position on abortion that captures where the bulk of voters are at is not welcome in either party. And the same is true on a host of other issues.
That leaves me uncomfortable with the Democrats but repulsed by the Republicans. The answer might be a third party, like the new Forward Party. And maybe that would work in the eight states that allow “fusion” voting. Under fusion, a candidate can run under more than one party banner and then add his votes together. But that’s not allowed in Wisconsin, so I won’t bolt the Democrats for Forward or any other third party because I don’t want to help elect Republicans.
Until I read Kasparek’s book I thought I was stuck. But what if moderate, conservative and maybe even some practical liberal Democrats took a page from the Progressives? What if we formed our own sub-party with its own agenda, organization and infrastructure? What if we nominated our own candidates to compete in Democratic primaries? Better yet, what if we started in non-partisan races for county board, town and village board and city council seats and other local offices all over the state?
A Moderate Democratic sub-party might have been able to push the nomination away from Barnes to a more electable candidate and we wouldn’t be faced with six more years of Ron Johnson.
Interestingly enough, the Progressives of Phil La Follette’s era saw themselves as the true moderates, fending off conservative “stalwarts” in their own party on the one hand, but also socialists and communists on the other. The Progressives’ aim was not to overturn capitalism but to make it more humane and to make it work for the broader public interest. They saw themselves as the voice of reason and responsibility, not revolution.
The current Democratic Party has all but thrown in the towel on winning outside of urban areas. The party left a dozen Republican Assembly seats go uncontested. That sort of fatalism simply won’t cut it. Even under fair legislative maps, we’d still lose because we don’t connect with enough average voters across the landscape. We have to stop whining about what a bad hand we’ve been dealt in redistricting and figure out how to win back non-college voters, especially those in rural areas and small towns, who have abandoned us and mostly for very good reasons.
But wouldn’t a less liberal Democratic Party run the risk of reducing enthusiasm and votes in deep blue places like Dane County? It might, but if the tradeoff was an equal number of votes in other places that would be a net plus because it would give Democrats a better chance at picking up more seats in the Legislature and a better shot at two more Congressional districts.
Democrats did okay this week, but they still ended up retreating overall, losing seats in the state Senate and Assembly, one Congressional seat and the State Treasurer’s office. One way to turn this around might be a new party within the old one.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. Both his reporting and his opinion writing have been recognized by the Milwaukee Press Club. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos. He’s the author of Light Blue: How center-left moderates can build an enduring Democratic majority.
