The Road Back for Wisconsin Democrats
In an election year where incumbent senators outpaced their party's presidential nominee by between 2 and 12 points; where the country's second female nominee for president ran just ten points ahead of the felon-misogynist opponent among women; and Wisconsin voters, for example, were approving referenda for $100 million in school bonds while pulling the other lever for a candidate who has resolved to eliminate the Department of Education, my dad's wisdom could not be more spot-on.
Of course, Democrats can't go into the next cycle without some introspection. Yet, consider this: Wisconsin was the first brick in the blue wall to fall Tuesday morning, yet curiously, the state's Democratic leadership was relatively bullish the following day.
State Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) touted a sweep of all four targeted seats in that chamber, positioning her caucus to claim the state Senate majority in 2026. According to Roys, the ingredients are already in the mix. She pointed to the party's "historically strong fundraising and ground game," which led to down-ballot success.
Much of this strength is due to a campaign finance law that former Gov. Scott Walker signed into law that allows political parties to raise unlimited amounts of money and transfer funds to a campaign committee, dollar for dollar. While the law had been on the books since 2015, its true potential was not realized until state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler took the reins in 2019 and raised $47.8 million in the 2020 cycle, nearly six times their haul in the 2018 cycle.
Roys's legislative counterparts, the Assembly Democrats, netted the most seats (ten at publication) since 1970. While much of it is an unwinding of 11 years of obscenely gerrymandered maps, a win is a win, especially if it breeds success, something minority leader Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) is quite confident in. It just might take an election cycle or two.
"Flipping a legislative body isn't easy, but we have fundamentally shifted the status quo ... and set the stage for more progress in the future," Neubauer said. Neubauer's challenges lie in hitting that last mile to win six more seats, as well as building talent and developing leaders. The Assembly Democratic caucus boasts 23 new members, about one-half of its membership. If they are to put a check on whatever Trump has planned at the federal level, they'll need more than a breeze through to take the lower house.
The beating heart of the Democratic Party is an economic, class-based coalition first and foremost.
And then there is U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Since her first run for office in 1986 for county board supervisor, she is undefeated. Baldwin, like her two predecessors, Herb Kohl (1989–2013) and Bill Proxmire (1957–1989), has figured it out, the "go everywhere approach to every corner of the state," as her campaign manager Scott Spector terms it. There has been and always will be an independent streak within the Wisconsin electorate, which manifests itself in ticket-splitting. But this is shrinking. Twenty years ago, when Kohl clobbered his final opponent, ticket-splitting constituted a mind-boggling 16 percentage points of the electorate. Tommy Thompson posted similar numbers in his run for governor in the 1980s and 1990s.
That same streak is alive today but not so well. Ticket-splitters constituted a handful of percentage points, though just enough to eke out a victory. A win is a win.
Notable congressional candidates waged admirable battles and even outperformed the top of the ticket. One in particular, Rebecca Cooke, who was profiled by the , performed three to four points ahead of Harris, and in some counties a couple of notches atop Baldwin. She could try again in a more favorable environment to defeat Rep. Derrick Van Orden, but Democratic insiders expect her to seek statewide office at some point.
(thus far), Harris was 240,000 away from netting enough electoral votes to claim the White House, similar to the narrow outcomes in 2016 and 2020. The woe-is-me bellyaching, although predictable, is totally unwarranted.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders's election postmortem was classic Sanders. "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," the former presidential candidate said.
Let's interrogate that a bit. Biden was arguably the most pro-labor president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. His CHIPS Act created 115,000 jobs, many of which were in manufacturing and the construction trades, traditionally union industries. (One of the few subgroups where Harris gained relative to 2020 was with union voters, it should be said.) But most of these projects are at the construction stage, made by itinerant workers and not permanent workers with permanent jobs.
Similarly, the bipartisan infrastructure law did what Trump could not, infusing $1.2 trillion into rebuilding the country's crumbling roads, eradicating lead pipes, and expanding multimodal transit. The American Rescue Plan Act injected $1.9 trillion into local government to kick-start communities that had fallen off the pandemic precipice in 2021. And the Inflation Reduction Act has reinvigorated clean-energy manufacturing and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices. But not all of this money has gotten out of the pipeline yet, and the temporary supports of ARPA have mostly faded away.
Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, no Democratic president measured up to the Biden-Harris administration's progressive street cred since LBJ's Great Society. But it's too early in the life cycle to expect a payoff.
The solution to rebuild the Democratic Party in the image of the worker is simple: Rebuild the labor movement.
Sanders intimates a more important point. The beating heart of the Democratic Party is an economic, class-based coalition first and foremost. Great Britain has the Labour Party; Germany, the Social Democrats; and Canada, the Liberal Party. The difference is that Americans have totally lost their moorings. It goes further back than Bill Clinton's notorious neoliberal policies of free trade, tax breaks, and deregulation in the 1990s. Those same components constituted fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter's domestic agenda two decades earlier. The latter is more frustrating because unlike Clinton, Carter had big majorities in the Congress to overhaul the U.S. economy and remake it in the image of the American worker. He didn't. And as they say, the rest is history. A couple of years getting started with class-based policies can't compensate for 40 years of the opposite.
The solution is not recriminations, finger-pointing, and hand-wringing but structural change. And it goes well beyond message. The tried-and-true way to close yawning gaps in income inequality, health care access, and worker satisfaction is with labor unions. Is it any wonder that as labor union membership plummeted, wealth inequality expanded, health care access dwindled, and paychecks stagnated?
The solution to rebuild the Democratic Party in the image of the worker is simple: Rebuild the labor movement. Wisconsin is an outlier not just because it elects Donald Trump and Tammy Baldwin on the same ballot, but because its demographics suggest it should be a red state. Yet Wisconsin, unlike deep-red Iowa or the Dakotas, has historically had a strong union profile. That held until Gov. Walker enacted Act 10 in 2011, which gutted public-sector unions, and several years later established right to work, which makes organizing extremely difficult, as well as rollbacks on prevailing-wage protections.
In the state legislature, Neubauer is well positioned to close the gap further and perhaps flip the lower house in 2026; Roys is correct to claim that her caucus is within striking distance of the majority. And Gov. Tony Evers, should he run for re-election next cycle, will have the upper hand because it's a midterm and his party is not in power—the same scenario that witnessed his election in 2018.
That suggests that Wisconsin Democrats could rebuild the Wisconsin workforce and strengthen the Democratic coalition by repealing Act 10, rolling back the right-to-work law, ensuring skilled trades are paid a fair wage, and counting on voters' short-term memory (never a guarantee) to remember which party made their lot in life better.
When approached by a congregant facing debilitating hardships who asked, "Why me?" my dad responded, "Why not you?" Democrats are not necessarily the victim of their own undoing, and they shouldn't play the victim either. More importantly, there exists a clear and eminently doable strategy to rebuild the party, turn the Dairy State blue, pave the way for new leaders like Cooke, and undo the profound influence of GOP mega-donors like Wisconsinite Diane Hendricks and her Illinois neighbor Dick Uihlein. All it takes is an appreciation for the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and an acknowledgment of its purpose.
