Red and blue arms hold out checks for a Brewers baseball glove.
I think it’s still likely that the Milwaukee Brewers will wind up ripping off taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain and improve AmFam Field. But it’s not the slam dunk I thought it would be when Gov. Tony Evers included $290 million in a taxpayer handout to the club in his proposed state budget back in February.
The deeper question goes beyond the issues at hand. Fundamentally it comes down to what’s left of the legacy Democratic and Republican parties.
Taxpayer subsidies for the billionaires who own professional sports teams are always unpopular pretty much everywhere. They happen anyway because what have been traditionally the most powerful interests behind each party want these things to happen. In Wisconsin those interests are unions for the Democrats and the Milwaukee business community for the Republicans.
Why did an otherwise progressive governor propose handing almost $300 million to billionaires in a move that would make their already valuable asset worth even more? Because the construction projects involved translate to a lot of union jobs.
And why did Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos reject Evers’s proposal only to more than double the ante to $600 million in state and local taxpayer handouts? Because the Milwaukee business community views this as existential.
But these aren’t your grandfather’s parties anymore. Heck, they’re not even your older brother’s parties. Much of Vos’ current caucus is made up of Trumpy, hard-right rural populists. They couldn’t care less about big business interests out of Milwaukee. In fact, they probably despise them.
And the Democratic Party is no longer a blue collar organization. The party is now all about racial and gender identity. Along those lines it’s important to note that Milwaukee’s Black population is as large as its white demographic and the city has a Black mayor and county executive. Moreover, baseball is not a popular sport among Black people, according to a national March 2023 survey by the market research firm Statista. Over 60% of white folks describe themselves as baseball fans and 24% say they are avid fans. Meanwhile, only 50% of Blacks say they are fans of the game at all and only 15% describe themselves as avid. That may have something to do with the number of Black players, which is flirting with an all time low since the days of Jackie Robinson.
And that reality is reflected in a recent poll which found that 56% of Milwaukee County residents oppose another subsidy for the Brewers’ stadium while only 25% support it. Ask those same folks how they’d feel about it if the Brewers were to leave if they didn’t get their payoff, and support creeps up to just 29%. And if that’s the case in the team’s home county, imagine what those numbers would look like in the rest of the state.
All of which is to say that there isn’t a lot of political juice for this on either side of the aisle among rank-and-file legislators. Evers and Vos are pushing it, albeit with competing plans, because, as their party’s leaders, they still need to pay attention to their legacy interests.
But it’s no accident that Evers’ proposal was funded entirely from state coffers while Vos would have a third of it coming from Milwaukee County residents with city of Milwaukee taxpayers getting hit doubly hard since they pay both county and city taxes. Evers saw no political advantage in taxing his Milwaukee base while Vos can only sell even part of his caucus on the deal if it’s perceived as soaking Milwaukee.
It’s possible that this could fail because nobody’s plan can find the sweet spot. Vos’ rural members will vote against it because any money coming from the state is objectionable and Democrats will oppose it because any special tax on Milwaukee is a nonstarter. But if some plan does find a way to cross home plate it will mean that the old line parties still have some life. If it fails we might conclude that for them the ballgame is over and the transitions are complete.
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.
