River News: Our View

We don’t like to keep readers in suspense, so we’ll get right to answering the question in the headline. Shortly, anyway.

It’s a perfectly legitimate question given the slaughter that took place on April 1, when progressive (dare we say “far left”) candidate and soon-to-be justice Susan Crawford steamrolled a good conservative candidate, former attorney general Brad Schimel, in the state Supreme Court race by a good 10 points.

For those of you accustomed to sweet dreams, this is what a nightmare looks and feels like. Only it’s real.

Here’s the really embarrassing part: Unlike two year ago, when another conservative candidate, former justice Dan Kelly, ran, the GOP opened up the piggy bank. The Schimel side outspent Crawford by about $54 million to $46 million, and it put boots on the ground. They brought everything, including Elon Musk and the kitchen sink, and let’s not forget that Schimel himself had name recognition as the former attorney general and had campaigned for a year-and-a-half.

He still managed to lose by a whopping 10 points. 

That’s about the same margin Kelly lost by, but in that race arrogant downstate establishment Republicans didn’t raise a finger to help out. Kelly was further weighed down by the issue of abortion, which was hotter than a hot potato then. 

Add this loss to the disappointment of all the other statewide GOP election failures since 2016 — the defeat of incumbent Gov. Scott Walker; Evers’s subsequent re-election; Tammy Baldwin’s re-election and re-election, Josh Kaul’s election and re-election; all those Supreme Court losses, too many to count without drinking heavily — and the question begs: How can the GOP win in Wisconsin again?

Or can it?

To which we happily reply, yes, oh yes, the GOP can win again. All it has to do is Make the Wisconsin Republican Party Trumpian Again. Or for the first time, as the case many be.

What GOP candidates need to be is more like Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and less like Tim Michels and Eric Hovde and Eric Toney and that whole bag of downstate GOP consultant-class and establishment nitwits, and the party will do just fine.

Sure that’s counterintuitive. Ever since April 1, Democrats have been gloating about Wisconsin’s rejection of the Trump agenda and of Elon Musk, never mind that Trump’s agenda is exactly what Wisconsin voters cast ballots for last November.

And of course establishment Republicans have joined them in the chorus because it’s in their best interests to take (or keep) the party from Trump. Even if they lose, the political and consulting class always gets to make a lot of money from their special-interest buddies.

Naturally, the headlines immediately screamed that the Supreme Court election was a rebuke of Trump because Crawford flipped 10 counties that had voted for Trump. But comparing a November presidential general election to a spring Supreme Court race is hardly apples-to-apples. Sure, those flips could indicate shifting voter allegiance, but they could also just reflect turn out, which is what it actually turns out to be.

A better comparison is to the 2023 spring Supreme Court race. Looking at those numbers changes the perspective: Schimel actually got more votes than liberal winner Janet Protasiewicz did against Kelly, and, while Crawford flipped one county that went to Kelly, Schimel won six that had gone for Protasiewicz. Now that suggests shifting voter allegiance from two years ago, but in the favor of conservatives.

The problem is, what conservative shift there was from two years ago was overwhelmed by a massive turn out on both sides, but a lot more on the Democratic side. All in all, Schimel got around 62 percent of the votes Trump got, while Crawford nailed down 77 percent of the Harris vote.

What all that tells us is not that the Trump vote shifted to the Democrats but that a lot of the Trump vote stayed home.

Say it again, Sam: The Trump vote stayed home.

To make it simple, if the GOP wants to win elections again, it needs more MAGA and Trumpian candidates, not big business elites who pay lip service to the America First agenda.

We suppose a lot of downstate and establishment Republicans will quibble with this analysis but here’s the piece that underscores it: The only major statewide Republican candidates who have managed to win in these dark days beginning in 2016 are Donald Trump — twice — and Ron Johnson — twice. And Ron Johnson has become about as MAGA as you can get.

Some say the GOP has “traded” the suburban WOW counties (Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha), which once were massively Republican, for more populist but less dense rural counties. The word “trade” makes it sound like a conscious decision rather than a voter rebellion. The GOP establishment didn’t trade anything; it got taken over by MAGA.

The realignment was national and socioeconomic and the WOW counties aren’t coming back. Schimel got only 58 percent in Waukesha, his home county, and only 51 percent in Ozaukee. Voters in the suburbs are voting differently not just because of abortion but because the Democratic Party has become the party of the wealthy and privileged, upper middle class suburbanites who care only about their privilege and social concerns, just the way the Country Club set used to believe back in the 70s and 80s and 90s when the GOP ruled the roost in those areas. 

Albeit, they had different concerns, but neither cared about the working class. These days Charlie Sykes is a Kamala Harris supporter. That should tell you all you need to know about those suburban voters.

The good news is — and Trump and Ron Johnson have proven it — there are enough conservative independents in those suburban counties that, when paired with a sweeping and rising conservative working-class tide in rural, semi-suburban, and urban working-class strongholds, can take the GOP to victory.

It won’t be easy. As the spring election showed, and as the Democratic Party found out a long time ago, working class voters turn out in far fewer number in non-presidential years than do those more affluent voters in the suburbs. They need to be motivated, and now that the world has flipped upside down, it’s the GOP that needs to motivate them.

So why weren’t they motivated on April 1? After all, Schimel was a good candidate, and the stakes were high — school choice and Act 10 on the line.

Well, they weren’t motivated because they don’t trust the Republican Party, at least not most Republicans and especially the downstate big business consulting and lobbying class. These voters trust Donald Trump, they trust Ron Johnson, and they may loathe Democrats, but they simply don’t feel the Republican establishment will serve them any better than the Democrats.

This distrust goes back a long way. It goes back to a downstate GOP establishment constantly selling out rural Wisconsin for southeastern Wisconsin — rather that cutting taxes for all they slathered big business with subsidies. Exhibit A was FoxConn, a con job against the people for special interests if ever there was one, which this newspaper warned about in editorials at the time. Some Republicans held true to the cause of the people  — Adam Jarchow was one — but most Republicans jumped on the railroad train.

Later it was giving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build the profit-making Bucks a new arena — how many of you have been to a game there? — and now, the worst insult of all, Republican leaders in the state legislature are trying to ram though a “reform” bill that would gift to the state’s biggest utilities a monopoly on future electric generation in the state.

We already have among the highest utility rates in the Midwest; get ready for more when Robin Vos and Co. get through fleecing us, along with the Democratic majority they need to ram the bill through.

What’s embarrassing about this is the way some Republican lawmakers have talked about this. We have previously reported on the fascistic rantings of one of those Republican lawmakers, State Rep. Karen Hurd (R-Withee). Here’s how she puts it:

“Not all square pegs can be forced effectively into a round hole,” Hurd said. “Such is the case with free trade/capitalism and utilities. … Because of the unique nature of utilities, monopolies are the common-sense solution, but they must be highly regulated by the state to ensure fair rates so that consumers cannot be taken advantage of by the utility.”

That’s the Republican case. We need monopoly for the state’s biggest utilities and we need heavy regulation rather than deregulation. In case you’re wondering why the GOP isn’t winning elections, that kind of talk — and action — is it in a nutshell.

Except for a few notable exceptions, voters don’t trust the Wisconsin Republican Party, nor should they.

Knowing that the uniparty political class in the state always stands at the ready to screw us all, many voters decide just to take their chances with the couch on Election Day.

Except when Ron Johnson and Donald Trump run.