“We’re just beginning. It’s one direction and it’s not down,” a local businessman and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) board member lectured me from across his metal Formica desk. At the time, I was serving as a Democratic representative in the state assembly.
It was November 2006, in the wake of the second George W. Bush midterm elections, and Democrats coast-to-coast had racked up wins from the statehouses to the U.S. House. Wisconsin was no exception. Democrats won back the state senate, kept the governor’s office, and netted a seat in the U.S. House.
Like a toddler mimicking an airplane, the industrialist arched his palm and forearm up and ever so close to my chin. The cocksure second-generation businessman, totally dependent on the professional acumen of his father, was trying to tell me he knew something I didn’t.
But I did.
Despite a banner year for Democrats, a sore spot stood out. Crushed by a last-minute onslaught of negative ads by WMC, Democrats lost the attorney general’s office to rightwing upstart J.B. Van Hollen. It would be a prelude for things to come.
The following spring, WMC dumped $2.2 million to flip a seat on the state supreme court. One year later they repeated the feat when they underwrote the campaign of a little-known circuit court judge by the name of Michael Gableman who would knock off the incumbent justice.
Conservatives were firmly in control of the judiciary. The other two branches would soon follow.
“Republicans have never been about the next election but the next one hundred people,” a friend told me as he tried to explain the scrum of MAGA fans around a Trump kiosk at the top of the Lawe Street bridge in the former Democratic stronghold of Kaukauna, Wisconsin. What he meant is that Wisconsin Republicans viewed their cause less as a campaign, and more like a movement.
“Scott Walker might be the first governor-elect in history who never asked, ‘Ok, now what do we do?’” Milwaukee-based Democratic strategist Thad Nation told me in the wake of Walker’s election and the Republican takeover of the legislature in 2010.
Walker and his legislator counterparts knew exactly what they were going to do after they completed the trifecta: tax cuts for the rich, billion-dollar subsidies for trillion-dollar corporations, and the end to most public-sector unions.
“Republicans have never been about the next election but the next one hundred people.”
And they knew how they were going to do it. But like any movement cast in cynicism, it ultimately failed.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory,” Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu famously wrote. Republicans may have strategy but their tactics—money, money and more money—are fast becoming old tricks.
In Wisconsin, Democrats are catching up thanks to a Scott Walker-era law that allows political parties to transfer unlimited money to individual campaigns. Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) Chair Ben Wikler, one of the country’s most prolific fundraisers and successful state party leaders, transferred more than $8 million to Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign for state supreme court this spring. A few months earlier, Wikler and the DPW kicked in $11.3 million to the re-election campaign of Governor Tony Evers, who outspent his Republican opponent by $12.5 million. Both Democrats won.
Today, all that is left of the once-heralded Cheesehead Revolution of the Wisconsin GOP is Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who is threatening impeachment trials of Evers appointees and other state officials. Senate leaders do not share his enthusiasm, though, because it would be up to them to finish the job. The assembly impeaches; the senate removes.
More bad news for GOP leaders: Recent history offers a cautionary tale and highlights the rule of unintended consequences. In 2019, the state senate rejected the nomination of Evers cabinet appointee Brad Pfaff. He went on to unseat a GOP state senator in the next election and came within a few points of winning a seat in Congress in 2022.
As for the state supreme court, legal analysts believe it is highly unlikely Vos and the legislature would prevail in removing a justice because it is almost legally unprecedented and requires a two-thirds vote from both houses. This is even more unlikely when you consider upcoming constitutional challenges to state GOP gerrymandered maps that would add Democratic seats to both houses.
The state and national Republican Party now face their own undoing. The problems that working families confront are legion—rampant school shootings, the end of reproductive freedom, union busting, catastrophic climate change—but the solutions offered by the GOP are few.
Never has there been a better time for Democrats to run on solid, progressive campaign policy agendas that speak to the basic needs of working families and respond to their existential threats. Even better, the answers are pretty simple: ban assault weapons, codify Roe v. Wade, pass the PRO Act, and end unconstitutional gerrymandering.
All that is left to do is to find the candidates with the fire in their belly to win and the political will to do it.