MADISON — Some see Wisconsin’s long, hot summer of state Senate recalls as a test of voter sentiment nationally, a compass tracking the political direction of the nation.
Others see the divisive elections as proof positive of democracy, giving the people a grand opportunity to hold lawmakers accountable for their actions.
Shannyn Franklin said she is left with a lingering sense of sadness, having seen her South Kenosha neighborhood and her own family politically torn apart from what she describes as a miniature civil war played out in the 22nd Senate District recall election.
“We had people outside our house, two doors down, yelling across the street over their signs, and we live in a respectable neighborhood,” the 37-year-old wife and mother told Wisconsin Reporter. “There are kids in school pitted against one another, and we have members of our family not talking to each other.”
Wisconsin’s nine state Senate recall elections stemmed from a monumental disagreement among political parties that spread into the streets surrounding the Capitol through mass protest and counter marches, and even reached into Wisconsin’s bitterly divided Supreme Court.
When all was said and done, Republicans maintained control of the Senate, most of the national media went away, and now the state is left with the heavy lifting and healing of political cleanup.
‘You’ve got to pick a team’
Franklin said she cast her vote against Senate District 22 incumbent Democrat Bob Wirch, who joined 13 other Senate Democrats in fleeing the state for several weeks this winter, a move that only proved to stall the inevitable passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget-repair bill. That law removed most collective-bargaining privileges for public employees.
Her candidate, attorney Jonathan Steitz lost handily to Wirch, who picked up 58 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s final recall election.
While her position cost her some relationships, Franklin said Wirch’s decision to leave his post was a disservice to his constituents, and he needed to face the consequences.
“You’ve got to pick a team and play, regardless of the outcome,” she said “I would have been fired if I would have done that in my job.”
But the damage to her community, her neighborhood, her family, may remain in these politically charged times, Franklin said.
For other voters, there’s a sense of resignation, the idea that in the outcome of the recall elections not much will change.
“I guess we have to live with it,” said Penney Melvin, 67, of Wyocena.
She would have preferred a different outcome in her 14th Senate District, where incumbent Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, easily defeated challenger Rep. Fred Clark, D-Baraboo in the Aug. 9 recall elections.
Four of six Republicans survived ousting in those elections, giving the GOP a definitive, albeit narrow, majority in the Senate.
A taste for recalls?
Melvin sounds hopeful if not convinced that Tuesday’s recall elections, which also saw Sen. Jim Holperin, D-Conover, keep his job in the 12th Senate District, will be the last in Wisconsin for some time, judging that Democrats may have lost a little bit of their fire in the fight.
There doesn’t seem to be any such admission from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin or labor-lead special interest groups, who have signaled the fight will go on, particularly in the Democrats’ quest for big game — the recall of Walker.
Joe Heim, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, agreed with Melvin, that recall action will fizzle out.
“I think there will be talk of it because it’s on the edge of the tongue, but not necessarily people going through with it,” he said of further recalls. “There may be some signs of the fire dissipating somewhat. Clearly Democrats did not sweep through here; that’s pretty basic. And I think that fire has abated.”
Perhaps there’s another hindrance to the possibility of more recalls in the immediate future — experience.
“The reality is that recalls are not fun. People miss the obvious point that recalls are very difficult to go through,” Heim said.
For the senators recalled, whether they lost their jobs or held on to their seats, recall goes on their record as a black mark, Heim said. Such experiences, he said, can be damaging, and lawmakers have seen just how damaging.
$100 a vote
A lot of money has been pumped into the recall elections during the past few months. Projections peg outside or third-party interest groups dumped more than $30 million into Wisconsin’s nine recall campaigns. Candidates chipped in between $6 million and $7 million more.
Heim joined a chorus of snickering observers who argue that the special interests didn’t get their money’s worth. He estimates that based on the higher voter turnout in Wisconsin, surpassing 43 percent in the seven Senate recall races before Tuesday’s voting, that third-party organizations and the candidates paid about $100 per vote.
“And all of those millions spent seemed to have been directed at 2 percent of the voting public,” Heim said, referring to the small numbers of undecided voters, particularly in the 32nd Senate District, which includes La Crosse.
Janet Smith lives just outside of the 14th Senate District, but squarely in range of the mass media campaign for the hotly contested senate seat. The Sauk City 69-year-old said she felt captive by all of the negative ads.
“I don’t think the commercials changed anybody’s mind,” she said.
And Franklin said she’ll be glad to get her airwaves back.
“The first thing I thought when I got up this morning and went to the polls was how glad I was not to get junk mail, and that there wouldn’t be any more commercials on TV and radio,” the Kenosha woman said. “My drive to work is 15 minutes and (during the campaigns) I might hear one news story or one song when I was flipping through the channels because there would be one commercial after another.”
Despite all of the shouting, the yelling, the rattled nerves, the hostilities, Heim said the recall elections solidify the strength of the people’s voice.
“Over time, we have become more of a democracy, allowing for greater participation and accountability,” Heim said. “I like Wisconsin in that element … recalls are rarely used but they are used fairly.”
Examiner contributor M.D. Kittle writes for the Wisconsin Reporter.
