David Michael Miller
Brace yourself. The closer we get to the 2020 election, the more attention Wisconsin is going to get. The Democratic Convention in Milwaukee will pack hotels all the way up I-94 into Madison. The political ads will be relentless. Chuck Todd is parachuting a reporter into our state to help explain the hinterlands to his inside-the-Beltway viewers. Both major parties and a major national media contingent will be making our state a top target all the way up until November.
Which way will Wisconsin go?
After all the bitterness here about how we were ignored in the presidential election of 2016, most notoriously by the Democratic nominee herself, maybe we will long for a break from the spotlight.
At least there’s a chance that some of the attention focused on Wisconsin will continue the gains of 2018 and help push back the rightwing takeover of our state even more. Maybe we’ll even move back into the blue column again in the presidential election.
But it will be a heavy lift.
It was not a hopeful end to 2019. Just before Christmas, a judge in Ozaukee County ordered the state elections board to purge 234,000 voters from the rolls — more than the number of voters who made the difference for Gov. Tony Evers in 2018, as the governor himself pointed out.
The lawsuit brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty will be appealed, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the likely final destination, is not exactly a friendly forum for democracy lately.
Several justices on the court are quite cozy with the plaintiffs, including Dan Kelly, a possible beneficiary of the voter purge when he defends his seat in the upcoming spring Supreme Court election.
Members of the board of directors of WILL donated to Kelly’s campaign while he was in the midst of deciding a case in their favor, One Wisconsin Now discovered. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did report on Dec. 23 that Kelly has decided he would recuse himself if the Supreme Court decides to hear the voter purge case.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin continues to have some of the most heavily partisan gerrymandered maps in the country, keeping Republicans in control of our state Legislature despite winning fewer votes, overall, than Democrats. Gerrymandering makes it hard for Democrats to win either house of the Republican-dominated Legislature, and it makes the 7th Congressional District — a massive prize, which will likely be viewed as a bellwether for 2020 — a difficult reach.
Meanwhile, the impeachment drama in Washington seems to have had very little effect on support for Donald Trump in the swingiest areas of our swing state, according to the Marquette poll.
So what will it take to turn the tide in 2020?
Justin Myers, who runs the “permanent progressive field program” of For Our Future, a labor-funded group that is knocking on doors in seven swing states, says the key is setting aside the national political fights and connecting with voters and finding out about the issues they care about.
For Our Future is putting eight field offices and hundreds of staff into every area of Wisconsin to ask voters what matters to them.
And, Myers takes pains to note, they are staying year-round and building relationships with grassroots groups here, including Milwaukee BLOC and Voces de la Frontera — not just parachuting in for a single election.
“If you look at a lot of the paid messaging that’s happening,” says Myers, “it’s about national issues, for the most part, right? You’ll see an ad about Social Security this year. We’re going to see an ad about some national issue. But at the end of the day, there is a large subset of voters that don’t consume media, specifically political media in the way that we do. So you’re missing them when you’re talking about those issues.”
“If you want to enlarge the electorate, which is what we want to do,” Myers says, “We want to connect on hyperlocal issues.”
The polls seem to bear him out. Voters care more about schools than Trump’s impeachment.
But there is still the problem of the Ozaukee court decision mandating the voter purge, not to mention gerrymandering. It’s easy to despair that the system is rigged.
Myers, persistently cheerful, views it as an “opportunity.”
“You should always look to register voters,” he says, “particularly the people that were most affected by this voter purge, which are young people and people of color, right?…I think it’s just another opportunity to organize, another opportunity to engage this subset, but also another reason, another conversation that we can have to try to tell folks this is what government will do when it is in the wrong hands.”
Let’s hope the word gets around.
