Wisconsin State Capitol, Madison, Wis.
The following content originally appeared on the Minoqua Brewing Company website. For more information about the brewery and their Super PAC, please click here.
We’re in election mode right now, which means we’re spending a lot of Super PAC money on billboards and radio ads to get the vote out for Governor Tony Evers and U.S. Senate Candidate Mandela Barnes.
What’s scary is that Democratic candidates are chasing opinion/political polls that have been shaped by Republican messaging, and how that takes attention away from the existential issues of saving our democracy and getting women’s reproductive rights back.
Think about it. What are some of the Republican gimmicks that have dominated the news but are way less important than Trump almost getting away with stealing an election and Roe being overturned?
- DeSantis/Abbott shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard/ VP Kamala Harris’ house.
- Calling to for the FBI to be abolished because they raided Trump’s house to take back stolen documents.
- Blaming inflation on Biden/Evers when it is a global problem caused by pandemic-related supply chain issues and the Russian oil embargo.
- Linking Evers/Barnes to increased crime, even though Wisconsin ranks fourth lowest violent crime rate in the Midwest and 20th lowest nationwide.
- Blaming Evers on declining student test scores after a pandemic that disrupted education across the globe, Republicans defunding public education for over a decade, and screaming anti-mask lunatics attacking teachers and disrupting school board meetings across the state for months.
- Creating a boogeyman out of “Critical Race Theory”—a subject that doesn’t even exist in K-12 curricula.
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All of these gimmicks are ways to deflect attention away from the dominant issues of our time—an authoritarian cult of personality threatening to destroy democracy, and a movement to take control over women’s bodies.
The problem is, it’s working.
Mandela Barnes has been defending his position on crime. By doing this, he has allowed himself to be framed by Republican rhetoric that plays on fear and racist tropes linking a Black candidate to urban crime.
Instead, Mandela should keep reminding Wisconsin voters that Ron Johnson agreed to hand over a fraudulent slate of electors from Wisconsin and Michigan to Mike Pence, played a criminal role in Trump’s conspiracy by repeating the Big Lie about election fraud, and supports Wisconsin’s 172-year-old law banning abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.
The Evers’ campaign is doing a pretty good job because he’s largely framed his own issues. His campaign has reminded voters that he has kept his promise to fix Wisconsin’s roads and helped small businesses rebound from the pandemic through the Main Street Bounceback Grant program.
But just like Barnes, Evers’ has responded defensively to his opponent attacking him on education even though everyone knows he started out as a science teacher and has probably worked more passionately for public education than any other governor in America. He should never play defense and instead beat the drum that his Trump-backed opponent refuses to acknowledge that Wisconsin’s elections were legitimate and supports Wisconsin 172-year-old abortion ban.
Why aren’t Evers and Barnes laser-focused on these two issues? It’s possible they are letting their pollsters get into their heads too much about what Wisconsin voters care about.
What do voters care about? Unfortunately, too many of them care about the issues that show up in their social media echo chambers and from the news media they consume. So if they’re hearing more about inflation or crime than the “Big Lie” or abortion because that’s the rhetoric they’re being fed, how do you think they will respond when a random pollster asks them what they care about?
This is called the “tail wagging the dog.” Somehow along the line, the Republican Party figured out that they could create issues out of whole cloth if they just told a lie or half-truth and hammered away at it for months at a time.
The problem is that if Democratic candidates in Wisconsin tailor their campaigns to talk about the issues their pollsters are telling them matter to voters the most, they too often fall into the trap of talking about issues created out of thin air with lies by Republican misinformation campaigns.
That’s why we should be wary of spending too much time listening to polls. Not only do they often reflect issues framed by Republicans, they are often way off.
It’s no secret that our country is on the precipice of becoming an authoritarian state and that women will suffer throughout our country now that Roe has been overturned. We don’t need polls to tell us this.
Let’s hope that Wisconsin Democrats focus on these two existential issues throughout election day, Nov. 8.
The Minoqua Brewing Company Super PAC is laser-focused on these two issues, and we’re putting them out in radio ads in areas where gerrymandering all but guarantees Republican wins for every office on the ballot—like Merrill, Medford, Amery, Hayward, Richland Center and Wisconsin Rapids. These areas all have or will get soon getting new progressive radio stations that we’ve mentioned in past emails—a godsend for rural Wisconsin.
Why are we focused on areas where Democrats can’t win? Because the Democratic Party of Wisconsin can’t really spend a lot of money in these places when they’re trying help Democratic candidates get elected. But what so many people forget is that in all of these areas, there are still plenty of Democratic voters who might stay home on Nov. 8 because they see Trump signs on every corner and feel overwhelmed. If we can show them that they’re not alone and help them realize that their vote is essential to holding Wisconsin’s democracy together, Evers and Barnes will win their races.
