David Michael Miller
This wasn’t my original column. The column I had written for this week sifted through the Hillary Clinton and Russ Feingold victories to try to find a route for Democrats to take back the Wisconsin governor’s office. Then a funny thing happened.
After the Republicans lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama again, despite a record turnout of white Americans for Mitt Romney, the party launched a soul-searching study overseen by party chair and Wisconsin guy Reince Priebus. The conclusion was that white men couldn’t jump far enough to elect a president and that the rest of the down-ticket ballot would also be threatened unless the GOP expanded its base, especially among Latinos.
So what did they do? They nominated a man who started his campaign by insulting Hispanics. He went on to insult virtually every other demographic group that Republicans thought they needed to make inroads with. And not only did Trump win, but Feingold, once considered a lock to regain his U.S. Senate seat, was turned back, and the Democrats, who had considered the pickup of at least one state Senate seat a certainty, wound up losing at least one instead.
Still, while I know it sounds close to ridiculous right now, I believe the Democrats do have a chance to win back the governor’s office. And, in fact, they have to, or Republicans will once again draw legislative district lines after the next census, locking in their majorities for yet another decade.
Here’s what the harsh lessons of 2016 might teach the Democrats.
They need to expand their base.
The GOP wasn’t wrong in its conclusion that the party needed to rely less on older white voters. These voters just way overperformed in this election. It’s the flip side for Democrats in Wisconsin. They need to reconnect with blue-collar whites, especially men. These voters once formed the Democratic base, but the loss of manufacturing jobs and the unions that represented these workers and the Democrats’ turn to identity politics drove them off. For a long time, the Democrats seemed to be the party of everybody but working-class white guys. In a state with such a large white population, they can’t be ignored. White men made up 44 percent of the vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election, and the Democratic candidate lost them by 24 points. That’s a recipe for failure every time.
These voters should be reachable, and had the Democrats nominated someone like Joe Biden, or even Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, they might have done it. Even our first black president carried rural white counties that Clinton lost this time. Hillary Clinton, for all her virtues, was the embodiment of the establishment in a year when there was no stronger single theme than anger at the established order.
They need to turn out their diverse base.
African Americans seem to have underperformed for Clinton and, while black voters remain a relatively small part of the Wisconsin electorate, they helped deliver the state to Obama twice because they voted so overwhelmingly for him. And the Latino vote is expanding, if somewhat more slowly than in other parts of the country. The Democrats need to get them to the polls in off-year elections like 2018. The party needs to find a way to motivate young voters, blacks, Latinos, women, and the LGBTQ community but without alienating straight, white voters in the process. That could be the biggest challenge of all.
Look, this is the first time Wisconsin has gone for a Republican for president since 1984, and demographic trends don’t make it likely that it will happen again next time. Tammy Baldwin, America’s first openly gay U.S. senator, was elected here just four years ago, and she did it by painting her opponent, Tommy Thompson, as a Washington insider, essentially discovering four years ago what worked for Donald Trump this time. And Democrat Jim Doyle found a way to get elected governor twice in a row in 2002 and 2006. As bad as things look right now, recent history doesn’t tell us that in statewide races we are as deep red as we appear.
Moreover, Gov. Scott Walker’s approval ratings have remained in the low forties ever since he started running for president in 2015, and that has been a function of plummeting support in the rural, northern parts of the state, exactly where Trump did his best. Assuming he runs again and doesn’t join a Trump cabinet, after two full terms as governor he’s the establishment now. That makes him ripe for a challenge.
So there’s a path out of this mess and it is basically just doing what Democrats used to do: build as broad a coalition as possible and motivate voters to vote. But they need to do that not by parsing the electorate into distinct identity groups, but by appealing to what we have in common. What people might be hungry for in two years isn’t more us-against-them acrimony but a message about our common interests and aspirations as Wisconsinites. That’s a candidate I’d vote for.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison.
