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Two major off-year state elections—one in Virginia and the other in Kentucky—should have made the blood of Wisconsin Republicans run cold heading into the 2020 elections. Apparently, they didn’t, though. State Republican legislators proved just two days later they hadn’t learned anything at all about the importance of taking the concerns of their state’s voters seriously.
Virginia was the party’s most dramatic loss nationally. Overnight, the Republican Party lost majority control of both houses of the legislature, giving incumbent Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam total freedom to pass a progressive agenda.
One of the Democrats’ biggest prizes was control over legislative and congressional redistricting following the 2020 census. Democrats won’t even have to corruptly gerrymander districts (like Republicans did) to increase their legislative majority. All they need to do is draw fair voting districts that reflect the actual Democratic majority in the state. The proof of how corrupt those Republican-gerrymandered majorities were is the fact that Republicans in Virginia haven’t won a statewide election since 2009.
“The Republican Party is toast in Virginia for the next 10 years,” lamented Corey Stewart, the white nationalist Republican who hastened his party’s toasting when his racist campaign was buried under 2018’s landslide reelection of Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.
The Republican Gun Problem
It’s easy to pinpoint when Republicans guaranteed they would begin wandering in Virginia’s wilderness as a powerless minority. It was Tuesday, July 9, the day Gov. Northam called a special legislative session to act on gun legislation after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach resulted in 12 people being killed and four others injured. It was the state’s second horrific mass murder. In 2007, a Virginia Tech student killed 32 and wounded 17 others on campus.
Republicans totally misread public reaction by adjourning the session on guns after 90 minutes without considering a single gun reform proposal. Pro-gun NRA demonstrators distributed T-shirts from a conference room of the House speaker’s office.
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Passing gun restrictions was the top issue cited by voters going into this year’s election. The other leading issues were health care and passionate opposition to Donald Trump, which began the Democratic surge in 2017 by flipping 15 legislative seats previously held by Republicans. They gained six more seats this year to take control. The year before Trump took office, Republicans had a 66-seat majority in Virginia’s House of Delegates (equivalent to the Wisconsin Assembly). They’ll be a 45-seat minority in January.
Wisconsin Republicans should be feeling a chill about now, since anti-Trump sentiment—as well as their refusal to act on guns or expand health care—are the same issues riling Wisconsin voters. It was only their own extreme gerrymandering that retained their 63-36 majority in the Assembly last November when Gov. Tony Evers, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Atty. Gen. Josh Kaul and every other Democrat running statewide defeated Republicans. Evers is now poised to end state gerrymandering by vetoing any dishonest Republican redistricting after the new census.
Changing Public Opinion
Now, Wisconsin Republicans have shot themselves in the other foot by using the same unrestricted, deadly weapons as Virginia Republicans. Two days after Virginia voters ended Republican leadership for refusing to consider even mild gun regulations—universal background checks and “red flag” laws—Wisconsin Republicans shaved 89½ minutes off the 90 minutes Virginia Republicans spent not doing anything at all to reduce mass murders. They gaveled the legislative session on guns closed in both chambers in less than 30 seconds.
Before you say, “Oh, but Wisconsin is way more pro-gun than Virginia,” you need to get current on changing public opinion toward guns at a time when moms are buying Kevlar backpacks for their children, and kids themselves are walking out of school to protest adult indifference to the likelihood of their homeroom slaughter. A September Marquette University Law School poll showed 80% of all state voters and 75% of gun owners supported background checks for all firearms sales.
The impeachment investigation’s focus on Trump’s political corruption amped up the Democratic vote in both Virginia and Kentucky this year, but the result was especially delicious in Kentucky. Trump won Kentucky by 30 percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. This year, Kentucky elected Democrat Andy Beshear as governor the day after Trump flew in to rescue a virtual carbon copy of himself: unpopular Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. Trump turned out the same haters he always does at his rally, but the voters elected Beshear.
It turns out voters really do have a limited tolerance for obnoxious demagogues who vilify immigrants, poor people, the LGBTQ community and those they consider the real villains among us, public schoolteachers.
A common factor in the Democratic victories in Virginia and Kentucky—as well as in other elections that took place in Pennsylvania and Indiana—was solid support for Democrats in formerly Republican suburbs among college-educated voters, especially women. Republicans in Wisconsin and everywhere else around the country can’t succeed much longer by primarily attracting only voters with limited educations in small towns and rural areas where not very many people live.
