Eight years ago, Wisconsin Democrats were in the catbird seat; they held the Governor’s office, the majority in both chambers of the state legislature, two U.S. Senate seats, five of the state’s eight congressional seats and handed Barack Obama a rousing victory in the presidential election.
So it’s no wonder that Wisconsin’s winning election night results for Republican president-elect Trump and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were a bit of a jolt to most pundits’ sensibilities; for years they have believed that Wisconsin was a deeply blue state, powered by the public sector unions, that traditionally supports Democrat candidates in a big way.
It isn’t.
For the past seven years, beginning with Reince Priebus taking over Wisconsin’s Republican Party in 2009, the state has been anything but trending blue.
A quick tally shows Republican Gov. Scott Walker has won his seat three times (there was a recall election in between his two outright wins) and Republicans have twice taken the state attorney general’s office, won control of both state legislative chambers (and retained them twice) and won a bruising state Supreme Court race.
They also hold the majority of the state’s House delegation (five of eight) and one of the two U.S. senate seats.
In short, the only two state wide races the Republicans have lost since 2010 were the presidency in 2012 and former Gov. Tommy Thompson’s try for the Senate in 2012.
Still, a Republican presidential candidate winning the state has eluded them since 1984; that is, until this year.
While some experts have chalked up Trump’s win as part of the populist movement that has swept across the country in this cycle, that is only partly true. There is also a deep grassroots conservative movement located in this state. One with a solid infrastructure that has been slowly winning over blue-collar Democrats and independent voters who are at odds with the rigid, radicalized progressives who run the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has played a big role in the redirection traditional Democrats towards the Republican Party with his stabilizing, responsible economic message; while his district voted for Barack Obama in 2008, it supported Mitt Romney in 2012 when he was on the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee.
It is a realignment that began long before Donald Trump began running for president last year; but his win shined the national spotlight on the efforts that have been building for years that experts largely ignored.
And despite the news media nationalizing the raucous 2011 state capitol protests in Madison when Walker passed Act 10 — which curtailed collective bargaining for most public employees — the conservative movement stubbornly continued to attract independent and Democratic voters to their message and their candidates.
Walker won the recall election the unions forced with more votes than he did when he ran the first time. He won reelection in 2014 even as experts also predicted he would lose.
Brad Todd, founding partner of OnMessage and a Washington-based Republican strategist, said for the longest time outsiders looked at the Walker wins and all of the down-ballot victories as a stroke of luck or a fluke, “What they have missed is that the state has fundamentally changed,” he said.
Folks have altered their allegiances politically said Todd. “The government sector unions broke the bank and forced a reckoning that surprisingly found trade union members on the taxpayer’s side,” he said.
Outside of the very progressive island of Madison, Wisconsinites are not very transitory. Most of the population outside of the state capitol have lived in the same communities all of their lives, as had their forbears.
This is a state where people of every political persuasion have strong cultural and nostalgic ties to their community said Todd. “Those folks were already more comfortable with Republicans on cultural issues and once you gave them economic reasons it flipped the math,” he said.
Democrats simply cannot work any harder than they already have. They have attracted great big gobs of outside money and bodies to defeat Walker, Johnson, Ryan and the House Republicans but have lost consistently, largely on their progressive message and an unhealthy brand, said Todd.
Despite his win in Wisconsin in the general election, Trump struggled with his relationship with Badger State conservatives’ during the primary season when he failed to understand the deep relationship they had with their elected officials. It was a miscalculation that ultimately caused him to lose that race to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Trump quickly remedied his misjudgment in time for the general election and gave a solid message of growing the manufacturing base that, coupled with his signature make-America-great-again line, prevailed with voters, many of whom had voted for Obama twice.
The one remaining state-wide elected Democrat in Wisconsin is U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who will have to try to defend her seat in 2018, the same year that Walker will likely seek a third term as governor.
Those two races will be a true test to see if the Democrats understand their faults and display a willingness to comprehend and reconnect with their electorate.
If not, they risk placing Wisconsin on the battleground map in 2020 alongside Ohio.
