Confirming what everyone knew anyway, Dan Bice is reporting that you won’t have Mike Tate to kick around anymore.
Tate sent out an email announcing he’s stepping down as the head of the state Democratic Party in June, when his term ends.
It’s been a rough few years for Democrats, Wisconsin Dems in particular.
Let’s start with the high point: the election of Barack Obama in 2008, breaking the Republicans’ eight-year hold on the White House.
I hope you enjoyed that high, because that was also the beginning of the end.
Republicans vowed to oppose anything Obama proposed, including a badly needed stimulus package, Wall Street reform, a Republican-drafted health care reform effort—you name it, the Republicans opposed it. Not only were they terrified that Americans would like what Obama proposed, but they were doubly—probably triply or exponentially—terrified that nonwhite Americans would actually become a political force to be reckoned with.
Call me racist, but I believe that much of the opposition to Obama is race-based. What you’re hearing now is the last primal scream of white men, primarily conservative, who are desperately clinging on to their last few years as the dominant decision-makers. They understand the demographic factors in play. They know the country is becoming less white. They know that Fox News’s audience is made up of old, white folks. They know that the white men who idolized Reagan growing up and are now in leadership roles—including Paul Ryan and Scott Walker—only appeal to conservative whites, who vote in droves but will soon be outnumbered.
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But I digress.
The GOP and its affiliated Astroturf groups so successfully demonized Obama that the party swept into power in 2010. That allowed Republicans to redraw legislative maps around the country, cementing their lock on power in Congress and state legislatures, even when they generate fewer votes than Democrats.
Wisconsin wasn’t immune to any of these factors, of course.
Whether Tate, in his second year as head of WisDems, could have turned back the tide in Wisconsin in 2010 is another matter.
Could Tom Barrett have beaten Walker in 2010? I doubt it. Voters wanted a change; Walker was the un-Doyle. But could Russ Feingold have beaten Ron Johnson in 2010? With the right campaign, I think he could have. Was that the Feingold team’s fault, Tate’s fault or merely an inevitable result of talk radio’s all-in promotion of Johnson and Walker?
Fast-forward to the 2011 and 2012 recalls.
From what I know, the party reluctantly backed the recalls. They were driven by outraged activists who really wanted to unseat Walker. I don’t blame them, of course. But the party did have a role in the campaign to unseat Walker and three candidates were on the primary ballot. Again, could Tate have fielded better candidates? Or should the party have coalesced around one candidate and prevented a primary? Did the party and the Barrett folks run the right campaign? Or is unseating a governor in a recall a fool’s errand?
Fast-forward to 2012 and 2014. Once again, the legislative map was hugely unfavorable to Dems, yet they were somehow able to get enough people out to support Obama and Tammy Baldwin at the state level. Was that Tate’s doing? Or the national party’s? And why couldn’t Tate capitalize on that success in last fall’s gubernatorial campaign? Yes, I know that Dems do poorly in midterm elections. But didn’t the party learn anything after the losses against Walker and the GOP in 2010, 2011 and 2012?
Looking ahead, the state Legislature is going to be a lonely place for Dems until at least 2021, when the next map is drawn. There are lots of great Dems coming up in the ranks who could be viable statewide candidates in 2018, the next time the governor’s office is up for grabs and an important election in determining how the next legislative map is drawn. If a Democrat becomes governor then, while the Legislature remains in GOP hands, as it likely will under the current map, that forces some sort of bipartisan or nonpartisan redistricting plan after the 2020 census, upping the Dems’ chances in the next decade.
Tate stepping down now was always inevitable to relaunching the state party ahead of the 2016 presidential election and 2018 gubernatorial election. He couldn’t have stayed on. He just couldn’t.
What do you think—did Tate do a good job when national GOP wave elections impacted Wisconsin, or could he have reversed that trend here?
