About 170,000 people live in Winnebago, Wisconsin, a swing county south of Appleton with the small city of Oshkosh as its county seat. It’s a bit over 86% white and the next biggest ethnic group after whites is Asian. The county voted for Trump both times he ran for president, but flipped, decisively, to Janet Protasiewicz last Tuesday:
2016- Trump- 43,445 (49.9%) to Hillary- 37.047 (42.5%)
2020- Trump- 47,796 (50.8%) to Biden- 44,060 (46.9%)
2023- Protasiewicz- 26,237 (54.1%) to Kelly- 22,246 (45.9%)
Across the Badger State, voters abandoned the GOP in droves. All 5 of the rural white counties in the southwest corner of the state that had voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020— Crawford, Richland, Grant, Lafayette and Vernon— said au revoir to the delusional MAGAt and voted for Protasiewicz. It was a trend, across the board. For the GOP the crucial suburban WOW counties around Milwaukee went for the GOP, but not the way the Republicans needed them to.
Waukesha Co.- Trump (2016- 60.0%, 2020- 59.6%)… Kelly (58%)
Ozaukee Co.- Trump (2016- 55.8%, 2020- 55.1%)… Kelly (52%)
Washington Co.- Trump (2016- 67.4%, 2020- 68.4%)… Kelly (66%)
In other words, Kelly under-performed in even the Republican heartland… and got absolutely crushed in blue strongholds like Milwaukee and Dane counties. Few political observers know more about Republican politics in Wisconsin than Charlie Sykes, for over 2 decades host of the most influential right-wing radio show in the state on Milwaukee’s WTMJ. On Friday, The Atlantic published an essay he penned, How Wisconsin Republicans Got So Angry. They’re angry because they’re caught in the bind that all swing state Republicans are caught in: “What the base wants, the majority rejects. Because they see no way out, they’re angry, and the near future seems extremely volatile.
Republican state legislators are already talking about impeaching Janet Protasiewicz, who hasn’t even been sworn in yet. “Removal from office,” wrote Sykes, “requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Impeachment is obviously supposed to be rooted in some form of misconduct, but we live in a time of raw politics. And on Tuesday night, with the election of the Republican Dan Knodl, the GOP retained its two-thirds Senate majority… Knodl previously said that the legislature’s impeachment power ‘would certainly be tested’ if he won… [A]ccording to the legislators I interviewed— who requested anonymity to speak freely— some Republicans believe the threat of removal should be ‘held over her head’ as the high court takes up issues such as abortion, redistricting, and Act 10, the Scott Walker–era legislation that stripped public employees of many of their collective-bargaining rights.”
Even if Republican leaders ultimately want nothing to do with the chaos that an attempted impeachment would unleash, the wild card is the smoldering rage of the base, which is every bit as angry as Kelly— not to mention Donald Trump. As one of the Republican legislators told me, “It takes only one email from Mar-a-Lago calling us RINOs and asking why we weren’t impeaching her.”
The dynamics of a possible impeachment fight— in which elected Republicans may feel the need to do something futile and chaotic to satisfy the grass roots— speak to the state GOP’s larger problems.
Republicans have lost four major statewide elections since 2018, and this year’s supreme-court election exposed their growing vulnerability, especially on the abortion issue. In a November poll by Marquette University Law School, 84 percent of Wisconsinites— including 73 percent of Republicans polled—said that abortions should be legal in cases of rape or incest.
Accordingly, before the election, leaders of the state assembly tried to craft a bill that would have amended the state’s 1849 abortion ban by including exemptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But Pro-Life Wisconsin lobbied against the bill, declaring that any legislation that allows abortions “is incapable of being justified.”
“A vote to add more exceptions to Wisconsin’s abortion ban is a vote to kill more preborn babies. It is that simple,” the group’s legislative director, Matt Sande, said in a statement. “It is always and everywhere wrong, regardless of motivation or consequence. It may never be employed, even in the narrowest of circumstances, as a means to a greater end.”
The Senate majority leader said he wouldn’t take up the bill. The amendment process failed, and Republicans failed to shore up their electoral prospects.
Indeed, on Tuesday, in the judicial race dominated by the abortion issue, conservatives lost statewide by more than 200,000 votes, as Democratic turnout surged and GOP margins shriveled in key suburban counties. In the so-called WOW counties— Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington— the abortion issue seems to have accelerated the flight from the GOP. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush got more than 64 percent of the vote in Ozaukee; this year, Kelly got just 52 percent. Other once-reliably-red counties are turning purple or even blue, which is affecting down-ballot races.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board is sounding the alarm for the GOP nationally, and Republicans in Wisconsin are waking up to the fact that their electoral misfortunes are likely to get worse. “As long as abortion is an issue,” one Republican legislator told me, “we won’t ever win another statewide election.”
No wonder they are so angry.
And not very gracious... Keep in mind this lowlife turd and sore-loser tried to help Trump overthrow the Constitution of the United States and deserved to have been in front of a firing squad:
Adam Server addressed the basic problem yesterday: Republicans there can’t bear having to compete for power. Even win they lose statewide races, the grotesquely gerrymandered legislative districts keep them in power. “After Democrats got wiped out in the 2010 midterms,” he wrote, “Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin with scientific precision— ensuring that in a state more or less evenly divided politically, the GOP would maintain its grip on power regardless of how the voters felt about it. Democrats would have to win by a landslide— at least 12 points, according to one expert— just to get a bare majority of 50 seats in the assembly, whereas Republicans could do so by winning only 44 percent of the vote. The U.S. Supreme Court has fueled a bipartisan race to the bottom on gerrymandering by invalidating every voter protection that comes before it, but even in today’s grim landscape, the Badger State is one of the standouts.
“Wisconsin is probably the best example of democratic backsliding in a state since the 2000s,” Jake Grumbach, a political-science professor at the University of Washington and the author of Laboratories Against Democracy, told me. “This weakening of democracy has made policy in Wisconsin, including on abortion and many other areas, less responsive to the preferences of Wisconsin voters.”
…Wisconsin hasn’t been a healthy democracy for some time. It’s more of a years-long experiment in Republicans disenfranchising voters whom they’d prefer not to answer to. Just after the 2018 election, in which Republicans retained nearly two-thirds of the assembly despite getting only 46 percent of the vote, Speaker Robin Vos explained that it was only fair that Democratic voters’ ballots should count less.
“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority— we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Vos told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “As much as they complain about gerrymandering and all things that I think are made up issues for their failed agenda, I think we won a fair and square election.”
In other words: The party that should have won the most votes should win, not the party that actually got more votes, because certain people’s votes— the kind of people who live in cities, you know who I mean— really shouldn’t count.
That’s the kind of logic that leads to a mob breaching the Capitol in a violent attempt to overthrow a presidential election. It’s also the kind of logic that leads lawmakers to believe they can do anything they want without ever having to face consequences for it. Bringing Wisconsin back from the brink of perpetual one-party rule won’t make it a blue state. But it would make it a real democracy again.