Purple Wisconsin
It’s Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Wisconsins. It was the best of times and the worst of times in American politics. Wisconsin played both roles in what turned out to be one of the best midterm elections for a first-term incumbent Democratic president in history.
The red wave Republicans thought might retake the House and Senate crashed on the rocks. Democrats retained control of the Senate over the weekend and Republicans are shocked to be still struggling to gain House control.
First-term presidents nearly always lose dozens of House seats in their first midterms. In 2018, President Trump lost 41. This year Republicans need to net only five more House seats than Democrats. But even if they succeed, they’ll have a slim majority with factions at war with each other.
The Republican problem was self-inflicted. They did nothing to distance their party from Trump’s angry, hateful presidency after he was defeated for re-election by the largest vote in American history. Trump made the midterms about himself by campaigning for terrible candidates who supported his destruction of democracy.
Here's the best and worst of what happened in Wisconsin and throughout the nation. There were far more positive signs for the future of our democracy than Republicans expected.
The Best Thing that Happened in Wisconsin
It joined blue states and red states nationwide battling to restore abortion rights in the first election since Trump’s rightwing Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Voters re-elected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Atty. Gen. Josh Kaul to continue Kaul’s lawsuit to overturn an archaic 1849 ban on abortion for any reason other than to save a mother’s life. Kaul is refusing to prosecute anyone under the law and Evers promises to grant clemency to anyone charged by local prosecutors.
That lawsuit ultimately will go to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The next important state election isn’t the presidential election. It’s April’s election to finally end the rightwing Supreme Court majority that consistently sides with the Republican legislature against Evers.
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Democrats also successfully blocked Republicans from winning a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. For the second decade, corrupt Republican gerrymandering of voting districts guarantees Republican control of the legislature even when Democratic candidates win more votes. Abolishing Evers’s veto of rightwing legislation would have allowed Republicans to ban abortions without exceptions and declare Republican election victories regardless of the actual vote.
“With the Governor’s veto power intact,” said Assembly Democratic leader Greta Neubauer, “Republicans in the legislature will be prevented from turning Wisconsin into ground-zero for dismantling our democracy.”
The Worst Thing that Happened in Wisconsin
By a single percentage point, the state narrowly failed to elect Mandela Barnes, a dynamic young African American leader, to replace Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the worst Wisconsin senator in history. That’s saying something since Sen. Joe McCarthy previously held the title.
For 12 years, Johnson has used his office to fill his own pockets and those of his two most generous billionaire donors. No one really knows how many deaths Johnson caused during the pandemic by discouraging vaccinations and recommending simply gargling with mouthwash. He’s the only senator to advocate voting on Social Security and Medicare benefits every year.
Johnson was the only supporter of violent crime in the Senate race. He praised the violent January 6 insurrectionists as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” That it worked for Johnson to flood airwaves with racist ads fraudulently linking Barnes to Black crime because he’s Black, you know, is Wisconsin’s shame. The ads intentionally darkened Barnes’s skin tone.
The Best Thing that Happened for American Democracy
The long lines of young voters on college campuses in Madison, Milwaukee and around the state were a national story. It was the second largest turnout by voters between 18 and 29 in three decades. The 2018 midterms were slightly larger.
With Republicans are on the wrong side of every issue they care about—democracy itself, abortion and women’s rights, climate change, mass shootings and LGBTQ rights—more than 60% voted Democratic. It was 89% among Blacks and 68% among Latinos.
Young voters made the biggest difference in battleground states. That included strong support for Evers, regularly insulted in the media as uncharismatic. “As it turns out, boring wins,” Evers said in his victory speech. In Pennsylvania, 70% helped flip a Republican Senate seat to Democrat John Fetterman. Large numbers of first-time young voters are added to the rolls in every election.
Finally, Some Kind Words about Wisconsin Republicans
College-educated Republicans in Waukesha County, once one of the most Republican counties in America, have had the good sense to continue to flee the party as it’s become more dangerously ultra-MAGA. Waukesha’s still Republican, but Evers lost it by 34 points four years ago. On Tuesday, he lost it by 20.
