Photo by Phil Roeder Flickr CC
When I began my journalism career in Wisconsin, one of the added attractions was that the state’s presidential primary was one of the earliest and most influential in the nation.
Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy’s victory over Sen. Hubert Humphrey from neighboring Minnesota in 1960 was credited with putting Kennedy on the path to the presidency at a time when party elders dismissed the junior senator as the shallow, young Marco Rubio of his day.
For decades afterward, Wisconsin’s primary had presidential candidates tripping over each other until the parties began bundling states into earlier Super and Super-Duper Tuesdays, reducing Wisconsin’s standalone primary to an afterthought.
Suddenly, in a bizarre election year, people in both parties are once again claiming the April 5 Wisconsin primary could really matter. But they might just be kidding themselves.
Republicans probably have the most to lose and they very likely will.
A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times reported behind-the-scenes preparations by Republican leaders for a frantic 100-day campaign beginning in Wisconsin to try to prevent frontrunner Donald Trump from winning their party’s nomination.
The first goal would be to boost the candidacy of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to block Trump from winning Wisconsin and as many subsequent states as possible.
If that fails—and several involved acknowledged it’s an uphill struggle—some anti-Trump forces within the party were even prepared to back a conservative third party to give Republicans a more palatable alternative. Former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry were mentioned as potential candidates.
It shows how desperate and perhaps how doomed this Republican effort is that party leaders would actually try to attract voters to Cruz, a candidate most of them find almost as repellent as Trump.
In fact, Republicans are going to have a hard time explaining to Trump supporters why Cruz is a better candidate since Cruz supports virtually every offensive, anti-American policy Trump has espoused.
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Cruz not only supports that ridiculous multibillion-dollar Great Wall to barricade the U.S. from all those imaginary Mexican hordes of rapists and murderers, but he says he’ll hire Trump to build it.
Instead of opposing Trump’s undemocratic, unconstitutional plan to ban followers of Islam, the world’s second largest religion, from entering the U.S., Cruz further inflamed such religious bigotry by calling for police throughout the country to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods after the terrorist attack in Brussels.
So far, just about the only issue on which Cruz hasn’t echoed Trump is that Cruz hasn’t leveled any vicious, sexist attacks on his own wife, Heidi.
The fact Republican leaders prefer one hateful, offensive candidate over the other suggests the real objection to Trump is based more on their own fear of losing power than any real disagreement with Trump’s (or Cruz’s) racial and religious bigotry.
Impact on Supreme Court Race
The Democratic primary contest is heating up for very different reasons. Unlike Republicans, Democrats aren’t trying to eat each other alive or wreck each other’s families.
But the two largest Democratic power centers in Wisconsin are strong bases for each candidate—the racially diverse city of Milwaukee for Hillary Clinton and the activist, liberal campus and city of Madison for Bernie Sanders.
Just like Republicans though, Clinton and Sanders aren’t nearly as far apart ideologically as their supporters sometimes pretend. They share the same goals as their much more intelligent debates have demonstrated. The biggest differences are in style.
Sanders takes pride in being an uncompromising, revolutionary outsider. Clinton would rather be known as a practical, experienced insider who can achieve progressive change within our existing system of government while she’s working to improve it.
Clinton’s more diverse support has put her even farther ahead for the Democratic nomination than Trump’s formidable lead among Republicans. But even if it doesn’t really change the outcome in either party, turnout for the Wisconsin primary could be the highest in years.
Perhaps the most significant outcome could be the effect of heightened interest in the presidential primary on the most important statewide election.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race has been dominated by controversy over ugly writings in college and since by Gov. Scott Walker’s embarrassing appointee, Justice Rebecca Bradley, who attacked gays as “queers” and “degenerates” and compared contraception and abortion to murder.
Will Bradley benefit from Republican haters turning out to vote for either Trump or Cruz, or will a large Democratic turnout for Sanders and Clinton help elect her opponent, Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg?
There’s no question the spectacular self-destruction of the Republican Party and its total abandonment of every standard of campaign decency have drawn an incredible amount of public attention to politics in general this year.
But it might not be the kind of attention that benefits Republicans. It’s more like gawkers rushing to witness the horrible aftermath of a plane crash in Downtown Milwaukee that’s scattered bodies and flaming wreckage along Wisconsin Avenue.
