David Michael Miller
January 20, 2009: the day Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. After eight long, long years of President George W. Bush, I was excited to see the dawn of a new progressive era. Not just in Washington, but in Wisconsin, where Democrats controlled the governorship and both houses of the state Legislature for the first time in decades. I imagined a 2015 where I’d be enrolled in a public-option health care plan and taking high-speed rail across the county.
My vision for 2015 was as far off as the hoverboards and flying cars of Back to the Future II.
Instead, Democrats lost statehouses across the nation in 2010. A wave of anti-Obama and anti-government sentiment among midterm voters swept Republicans into power. Winning that crucial election allowed Republicans to redistrict themselves into a decade-long majority. News organizations ranging from Vox to The New York Times have covered this in great detail, but few states have felt the impact as severely as Wisconsin.
For the last five years, Obama’s agenda has been stuck in gridlock at the federal level while Republicans in our state Capitol have been able to pass a list of extreme bills so long that I could spend the rest of this column just naming them.
So while my fellow progressives debate between Bernie and Hillary, I have to ask the question: Do we want another Democrat in the White House? Midterm elections tend to work against the sitting president. Midterm elections also tend to lean more conservative than presidential elections. Combine the two, and a Democratic presidency becomes a recipe for Republican midterm wave elections like 1994, 2010 and 2014.
It might be easier to win back some power at the state level with a Republican in office. The next midterm election in 2018 will be huge for state Democrats, as it will help determine who will be in office for the next round of redistricting. Winning back the Assembly is virtually impossible, but it could happen in the Senate.
A Democratic Senate majority at the beginning of the next decade means that partisan redistricting maps get tossed out and the courts draw up new, fairer lines. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin has only one really good potential state Senate pick-up in 2016, District 18. Republican Sen. Rick Gudex won by only 600 votes in 2012 and he just announced he is not running for reelection. If Democrats win that open seat, they will still need to pick up two more seats in 2018 to win the Senate majority. That’s a tall task but one that would be easier with a Democratic midterm wave.
Of course, there are also some major drawbacks to a Republican president. Supreme Court nominations alone are pretty damn important. Four of the current justices were born in the 1930s, so it’s likely the next president will get to replace a couple of them. Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and/or Anthony Kennedy with a conservative justice would be truly painful, particularly if President Marco Rubio nominates some judge in his or her 40s who is going to stick around for decades. A Supreme Court pick lingers even longer than a round of Republican redistricting.
There’s also been a concentration of power in the executive branch over the last century. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have fought too hard against it. The power of the modern presidency makes it too important not to fight for, no matter what happens in the midterms. Given the recent events in Paris and Turkey, I’m terrified about what happens if the wrong person becomes commander-in-chief.
And, of course, nothing is a certainty in American politics. It’s a good bet, but not a sure bet, that Democrats will do better in the midterms with a Republican president. Many analysts thought George W. Bush was going to be a one-term president after winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote in 2000. Sept. 11 changed that, making him the rare president whose party picked up seats in a midterm election. We could easily see a scenario where a Republican wins the White House and the GOP maintains its stranglehold on statehouses.
More importantly, it’s kind of lame to blame the Democratic Party’s problems entirely on national waves. Neither Tom Barrett nor Mary Burke were great gubernatorial candidates. The Democrats have let their rural voter bases wither away, leaving them dependent on Milwaukee, Madison and a scattering of small cities like La Crosse and Superior.
Wisconsin Democrats should support the presidential nominee but it’s probably a better idea to focus more energy on rebuilding the party around the state. And, in the case of a loss come Election Day 2016, it’s good to remember that the midterms aren’t too far away.
Alan Talaga co-writes the Off the Square cartoon with Jon Lyons and blogs at isthmus.com/madland.
