GOP facing headwinds in Wisconsin after years of running the tables
Salena Zito
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VEROQUA — Ten years ago, Wisconsin was the heartbeat of the conservative populist movement that was reshaping the Republican Party in ways not broadly understood not just by the Democrats but also the national media and establishment Republicans.
At the end of August 2014, most of the national media reported that the then-upstart Republican Gov. Scott Walker was well on his way to finally losing the Wisconsin governor’s mansion. After all, no one expected him to win in the first place in 2009, certainly no expected him to win that spectacle of a recall election shortly after, so clearly his reelection was doomed.
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By November, a Walker 6-point margin of victory told a story that few understood had been happening here since 2009 when then state party chair Reince Priebus took over and rolled a number of victories in addition to Walker that included control of the state Supreme Court, the attorney general’s and lieutenant governor’s offices, the U.S. Senate seat and twice control of the state legislature.
While many observers thought it was a fluke, it was actually ground zero for the movement of blue-collar voters to the Republican Party after the progressives in the state became so rigid in their ideology that those voters had nowhere else to go but rightward.
And like clockwork, year after year Republican voters— enhanced by culturally conservative Democrats and independent voters—showed the door to a Democrat Party that had become radicalized by the Left. This was no more evident than in 2019 when, against all odds, conservative state Supreme Court candidate Brian Hagedorn won the state, including the two Left-leaning counties of Racine and Kenosha.
With little money, Hagedorn’s win was a heavy lift that was taken over the finish line when the Christian school he founded went under the attack from outside leftist groups. The attacks backfired and turned voters’ sentiments about religious freedom in his favor.
The wind in the Republicans’ back started to sputter in 2018 when Scott Walker narrowly lost his third bid for governor to Democrat Tony Evers and continued to do so in 2020 when that slim win Wisconsin voters gave Donald Trump in 2016, the first win for a Republican candidate for president in decades, swung back to the Democrats and handed Joe Biden a slim but significant victory.
That slide leftward really hit home in April when Democrats’ pick for the state Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, won the most expensive state judicial race in American history, with the Democrats the only side flush with money to pour into the race.
Thanks to the amount of outside money Democrats have invested in retaking this state, they have rebuilt the state party’s now-formidable organizing machine and are poised to now be able to eliminate the Republicans’ near supermajority in both legislative chambers, as well, perhaps, as their edge in the congressional delegation. Protasiewicz promises to challenge the district lines as political gerrymanders.
At the heart of the Democrats’ takedown of the Republicans is Ben Wikler, the chairman of the state Democratic Party. He is a brilliant political mind who has understood how to get outside money into the state, use it effectively, and win.
As Republicans enter the state on Wednesday for the first debate among the primary challengers for the Republican nomination for president, their focus after all of the hoopla ends is how to win back the voters in the WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington — who have started to trend Democrat in past few years.
Republicans did have some small signs of hope in April in a special election race when Republican state Rep. Dan Knodl defeated Democratic attorney Jodi Habush Sinykin in a special election for a Milwaukee suburban state Senate seat. It was a victory that restored Republicans to the supermajority in the upper chamber of the state legislature.