Kevin Nicholson spent part of the Clinton era as president of the national College Democrats. Now he is seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in Wisconsin. If you ask his opponents, Nicholson’s left-to-right journey discredits him. If you ask Nicholson, though, he’ll tell you it’s a virtue. That dynamic has been especially evident over the past week.
This week has seen the rising prominence of a social media hashtag, #WalkAway, highlighting the stories of people who have decided to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. With the Wisconsin primary less than a month away, this notion couldn’t have materialized at a better time for Nicholson. After all, isn’t winning over converts the point of conservative evangelism? “It’s hardly an untraveled road, between Donald Trump and Mike Pence and many others,” Nicholson said in a Tuesday interview. “It’s worth reminding people that as we experience life — you know, mature, figure things out — that, yeah, you do typically become more conservative.”
Nicholson seized on #WalkAway this week, penning an op-ed on his conversion story and making the rounds on Fox News and Fox Business. This was Nicholson’s response to stinging attack ads from a super PAC supporting his opponent, State Sen. Leah Vukmir. The ad strung together video clips of Nicholson vocalizing support for abortion rights during his time at the helm of the College Democrats. “We can’t trust him,” the narrator concludes.
Nicholson argued that the ad constituted “a direct affront to the pro-life movement.”
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Like the pro-life movement exists in order to change the hearts and minds of people and to pull them into understanding the importance of protecting innocent life. You know, that’s not always easy to do, and when you sit here and chastise people who you know, 21- or 20-year-old person who hadn’t figured that out, boy, are you in dangerous waters.”
“It’s quite clear to me that many of us have to go through a process to come to understand the obligation we have to protect innocent life. But when we do, I think it should be celebrated, not maligned like I’ve seen from my primary opponent,” he contended.
Vukmir won the state party’s endorsement overwhelmingly in May and has the backing of GOP power brokers like House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, and former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Nicholson, on the other hand, has a cash advantage and support from national groups like Club for Growth and Tea Party Patriots. A Marquette poll conducted in mid-June found Nicholson ahead of Vukmir by five points, a lead that fell within the survey’s margin of error. It’s a tight race, and both candidates have an advantage their opponent is framing as a disadvantage. For Vukmir, it’s her successful career in state politics, and for Nicholson it’s his conversion.
Nicholson has never tried to hide his high-profile work for the other team — probably in part because it would be impossible in the age of multimedia. But in a purple state like Wisconsin that swung red for the first time since 1984 in the last presidential election, it’s easy to see the strategic benefits of a compelling conversion story that might reflect the personal movement of some voters. “I saw the Democratic Party from the inside,” he told me in December, “and saw the way that the party racially and ethnically balkanizes our country and encourages people to turn on each other and to look at each other as competing interests and not as fellow Americans.”
Now, Nicholson says he hears from fellow converts to conservatism “all the time.”
“I think a lot of us look at kind of the establishment, the insiders in my own state that are trying to drag out to the fact that I was a Democrat 20 years ago, and laugh at it. And we should, because it’s nonsense. I mean the goal is to grow, certainly the Republican Party, but more important, the conservative movement.”
Nicholson expounded on his story in that #WalkAway-themed op-ed published Monday. “In contrast with my time as a Democrat, my evolution to becoming a conservative Republican was a fully mindful and deliberate decision, based on my life experiences that left me with no other option. While my choice was made clear to me through the experience of my marriage, the birth of my three children, my acceptance of Jesus Christ as my savior, my time fighting in two wars, and my experience in business since leaving the Marine Corps, it came at personal cost.”
That personal cost was the subject of viral interest earlier this year, when his parents’ donations to the incumbent senator he hopes to face in November, Tammy Baldwin, came to light. He says he has not spoken with them since the news broke. In fact, Nicholson said on Tuesday that it’s probably been a year and a half to two years since they last talked. “We weren’t particularly close before that because the strains were evident,” he reflected.
“We had disagreements about things like life and faith, and these are real things, right? I never rubbed my family’s face in this at all, but yet they had disagreements with me on these things, and I think that certainly affected our relationship,” said Nicholson. “And more recently, as many other families have experienced in modern American politics, they made a decision unfortunately to cut off relations with their entire extended family, not just me, my wife, and our kids, but also to other siblings nephews and nieces.”
“Again this is unfortunate,” he emphasized. “I don’t relish this. I don’t think it’s great. I think it’s terrible. It’s never a decision that I would make.”
The Harvard-educated business consultant thinks his time in the Democratic Party would actually give him an advantage against Baldwin. “I have a clear idea of how to reach out to people that have not always voted for Republicans,” Nicholson noted, pointing to former President Ronald Reagan as an example of someone who effectively did the same.
With Nicholson’s conversion story the subject of ads on both sides of the race, the question of whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage in a Republican primary will be on the table until Election Day. Until then, it’s at least worth noting the president was also once a pro-choice Democrat.
