Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Scott Walker went out with a whimper. Wisconsin’s two-term Republican governor became a national rightwing star by stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights and then turning Wisconsin into a right-to-work state, generated massive public protests, survived a recall election, and ushered in a new era of political divisiveness that helped elect Donald Trump. But he lost his re-election bid on November 6.
Walker didn’t even appear at his own Election Night party. Instead, he acknowledged his defeat in a statement released by his office the following afternoon.
How did eight years of attacks on teachers, public institutions, employee rights, environmental protections, and democracy finally peter out? The answer is instructive.
Tony Evers, the soft-spoken, white-haired state superintendent of public instruction, did not beat Walker by taking sides in the culture wars Walker stoked between urban Democrats and rural Republicans. Instead, Evers talked about the rural schools that have been closing, because Walker wouldn’t fund them, and the roads up north that were going back to gravel because the state wouldn’t pay to maintain them.
As Evers put it in his victory speech, “I’ll be focused on solving problems, not picking political fights.”
“I’ll be focused on solving problems, not picking political fights.”
That was welcome news to exhausted Wisconsin voters, who have had enough of Walker’s “divide and conquer” politics, and a balm in an era of division and conquest nationwide.
The governor’s race in Wisconsin was emblematic of midterm elections across the country. In several other states that helped put Trump in the White House, Republican governors were replaced by Democratic challengers. Democrats captured control of the House of Representatives, even as they fell short in the Senate. The scales tipped on Election Night in favor of the Democrats and against Trump, but the whole country is still teetering on a razor’s edge.
- day after the midterms, Trump began stoking the outrage machine that has served him so well. Sounding like a tinpot dictator, he shouted at reporters to “sit down,” told CNN’s Jim Acosta he was a “terrible person” for daring to persist in asking questions, and then yanked Acosta’s White House press pass. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and installed his own crony to supervise a Justice Department investigation that has been a thorn in his side. He sowed doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections, accusing Democrats of engaging in “fraud” in Georgia and Florida, and tweeting an unfounded accusation of “electoral corruption” in the close Arizona Senate race, which Democrat Kyrsten Sinema ultimately won.
But across the country, in districts that moved away from Trump in 2018, voters and candidates were focused on other things—schools, roads—in a word, local issues.
In Wisconsin, a group of public-school advocates pounded the pavement in a “vote public” campaign that made a big difference, not only in the governor’s race, but in school referenda that passed overwhelmingly, as taxpayers voted to spend at least $1.3 billion more on local public schools, making 2018 a record year for referenda to exceed state revenue caps. Seventy-seven of these referenda passed, while only five were voted down.
Education, the major theme of the Wisconsin governor’s race, was a galvanizing issue across the country.
In Arizona, voters handily defeated a ballot measure that would have taken school vouchers statewide, overcoming massive backing by wealthy interests, including the Koch brothers-financed Goldwater Institute.
Brutal budget cuts to schools and privatization schemes including school vouchers, which redirect money from public to private schools, have proven unpopular. Scott Walker was the national face of school privatization, budget-cutting, and aggressive attacks on unions. His defeat, part of a Democratic sweep of governors’ mansions in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, turned a national political tide.
And despite big spending by business groups and rightwing billionaires, citizens elected progressive candidates who promised to address voters’ real needs—for health care, education, and adequate infrastructure.
“I’m proud to be a Wisconsin progressive,” Senator Tammy Baldwin told the crowd at her victory party at Monona Terrace in downtown Madison on Election Night.
“The Koch brothers hit me with $14 million worth of nasty attack ads, and in the end it didn’t matter, because I had something they did not: you,” Baldwin said.
That message summed up the hard-fought battle between organized citizens and rightwing candidates, including Baldwin’s opponent, Leah Vukmir, former national chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a proponent of school privatization, and the beneficiary of rightwing billionaire support.
If the 2018 midterms show one thing, it’s that a common-sense appeal to the citizenry to defend public institutions against greed and corruption can prevail, even against the daunting power of organized money.
It just takes a lot of work.
Baldwin’s ten-point margin of victory also showed that an outspoken progressive (and an out lesbian) can win decisively, even in a divided state that helped elect Donald Trump.
All in all, the outcome of the midterm elections was encouraging for Democrats and for anyone who cares about democracy and a fairer and more equal society.
Even in Texas, Florida, and Georgia, where insurgent progressive candidates ran exciting campaigns, but fell short of victory, the vote totals were impressive.
Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke came closer to beating Ted Cruz—losing by about 220,000 votes out of 8.3 million—than any Democrat has come to beating a Republican in a statewide Texas election for a generation. Demographics are shifting in Texas, and O’Rourke’s rise is a sign of the times.
Likewise, in Florida, razor-thin margins pushed the race for governor between Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis, and between Senator Bill Nelson and Rick Scott, to recounts, both of which ended in near losses after Republicans screamed bloody murder about these efforts to get an accurate result.
In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would have been the nation’s first African American woman governor, demanded a recount because the declared winner, Brian Kemp, purged black voters in his role as secretary of state. Abrams’s historic run, though unsuccessful, involved a massive coalition of groups brought together by black women.
While media attention quickly turned from the election results back to Trump and his Mussolini routine, the real action is at the grassroots.
“The movements that are sweeping through this nation and shaping our democracy are happening at the local level,” Philadelphia City Councilwoman Helen Gym told a fired-up group of public-school advocates at the Network for Public Education summit in Indiana in late October.
Gym was part of a grassroots group that turned back brutal school-budget cuts in Pennsylvania, elected progressives, and turned the state blue again.
She pointed to the “amazing rising force of resistance” visible in teacher walkouts around the country last spring, as well as in Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives, and the Fight for $15 campaign.
Gym, who helped form a coalition that ended the state’s hostile takeover of city schools and propelled progressives into office, reminded the activists to keep their focus on movement-building at the community level.
“I come out of political movements that never, ever saw politics as the starting or end point of power. Instead, our job is to hit the streets, to work alongside communities in crisis . . . to arm people with a different vision about their own capacity and appetite for change."
“I come out of political movements that never, ever saw politics as the starting or end point of power. Instead, our job is to hit the streets, to work alongside communities in crisis . . . to arm people with a different vision about their own capacity and appetite for change,” she said.
On the flip side, Trump voters in Rust Belt states and rural areas were not feeling as motivated this year, and did not turn out in high numbers.
Timothy Carney, author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, offered his theory of Rust Belt Republican disaffection in a New York Times op-ed shortly before the 2018 elections. He accurately predicted that Democrats would retake states that swung from Obama to Trump in 2016.
Carney argued that voters afflicted by job flight and drug addiction voted for Trump to throw a rock at the government, but are not going to be converted into reliable Republican voters. They are not an organized force, because they have suffered a breakdown in community—the key ingredient for political empowerment and social change that Helen Gym identifies.
“Low social trust and low civic engagement defined the places that swung hardest to Mr. Trump,” Carney wrote. “Because the vote was an expression of alienation and dissatisfaction, rather than an expression of partisan fealty, many of those places will swing back enough to give Democrats statewide wins on Election Day.”
That certainly proved true in Wisconsin, where the base failed to show up enthusiastically for Walker in Republican strongholds like Waukesha.
There’s an important lesson there. As Gym told the activists in Indiana, “We only get what we are organized to take.”
Taking back the country is an arduous process. But it is happening, one locality at a time, thanks to the hard work of local activists. As Gym put it, “We are not waiting for doors to open. We’ve got to be ready to kick those doors in.”
On November 6, across the country, a whole lot of people gave those doors a hard kick. And the kicking has just begun.