Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I like to write something that I know will fall on deaf ears.
Such is the case this week. Making an argument for moderation to an Isthmus readership is like offering a nice big bowl of Caesar salad in lieu of turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. My guess is most readers will be repulsed, push themselves away from the table and go watch a football game.
Nonetheless, he persisted.
The basis for my argument can be found in Dylan Brogan’s election analysis piece, "No Contest." In it Brogan reports that Democrats won every statewide race this November and their Assembly candidates garnered about 200,000 more total votes than Republicans. And yet, the Democrats picked up only one seat in the lower house and still find themselves in a deep minority with only 36 seats to the Republicans’ 63.
But here’s the problem. Even Assembly Democratic leader Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) concedes that the fairest district maps possible, free of gerrymandering, would result in somewhere around 45 seats for his party, about a half dozen short of a majority. That’s because of the way we sort ourselves out across the landscape. In short, liberals like community, we tend to cluster in tight urban areas. Conservatives enjoy space between themselves and their neighbors. They sprawl. And so even map drawers with the best of intentions will find it hard to create politically balanced districts.
The answer should be obvious, but it comes in two parts. The first task is to get fair maps drawn after the next census and in time for the 2022 elections. That’s likely now that Democrat Tony Evers will be governor. Most likely a Republican-controlled Legislature will draw districts heavily weighted in their favor and Evers will veto them, tossing the whole thing to the courts.
But progress can’t really get going until Democrats control both houses and the governor’s office and that can’t happen without a Democratic majority in the Assembly. (It’s not like the Senate will be easy either. The Democrats found a way to actually lose a seat there. But the larger districts make it somewhat easier to draw competitive maps.) And here’s the crucial point: The Dems can’t win a majority in the Assembly without picking up at least a handful of moderate- to conservative-leaning districts even under the best maps possible.
The irony is that if you really want a progressive government you have to have a Democratic Party that doesn’t come off as too far to the left. Evers is getting off to a good start in that regard. He was the most centrist in the crowd of primary candidates, he ran the general election campaign on nuts and bolt issues like education and roads, and now he’s talking about putting some Republicans in his cabinet.
So one answer is that the party needs to recruit candidates who fit their districts and it needs to allow the candidates to take positions that might not comport with liberal orthodoxy.
But just as important, the party needs to tend to its brand. For too many moderate voters the Democratic brand is toxic because it stands for government giveaway programs and an obsession with identity politics. In my view, the party needs to emphasize the kinds of issues that Evers did: invest in education, fix the roads, expand high speed internet, tie environmental policy back to science. And it needs to talk more about personal responsibility and the future and less about individual rights and historic grievances.
Most important, somebody has to reject the tribalism that has come to define our politics and start trying again to define a common, unifying vision for what it means to be an American or a Wisconsinite. Ironically, rebuilding the center is the only way for progressives to make progress.
