This morning, conservative types who still bother reading the Wall Street Journal were jabbering about there editorial on the GOP’s debacle in Wisconsin. “The results will energize the left within the Democratic Party,” wrote Paul Gigot and his cronies, “and the Badger State results are a five-alarm warning to Republicans about 2024… [Protasiewicz’s] major issue was abortion, especially the fate of an 1849 state statute that became law after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The law bans abortion in nearly all cases. Republicans who control the state Legislature helped her cause by failing to amend the law. They had ample warning from results last year in Michigan and Kentucky, where abortion drove Democratic turnout.”
The reason the results are a 5-alarm warning and not just a 1 or 2-alarm warning is because “The Wisconsin results show abortion is still politically potent… [T]he Republican candidate barely won in a longtime GOP stronghold in the northern Milwaukee suburbs. If Republicans can’t win in Mequon, their legislative majorities will soon be imperiled, and you can move Wisconsin out of the swing-state column for the Presidency in 2024.” And south of Milwaukee the two pivotal blue collar counties the Republicans have been counting on, went hobby on them. Protasiewicz won Kenosha and barely lost Racine.
Obama had won both counties handily in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, Trump flipped Kenosha with a 47.2% to 46.9% win and took Racine 49.5% to 45.2%. It wasn’t as close 4 years later. In 2020, Biden took the state blue— but not either of those counties. Kenosha stuck with Trump, 50.7% to 47.5% and Racine was even redder— 51.2% to 47.1%. On Tuesday, Kenosha was blue again— 22,946 (54%) to 19,558 (46%). Racine stayed red… but barely: Kelly took 28,962 votes (50.7%) to Protasiewicz’s 28,161 (49.3%). A little harder turn-out work and Tammy Baldwin will win Racine back next year. After all, it was just 801 votes out of over 57,000 cast.
And the Journal editors understood exactly the problem. “Republicans had better get their abortion position straight, and more in line with where voters are or they will face another disappointment in 2024. A total ban is a loser in swing states. Republicans who insist on that position could soon find that electoral defeats will lead to even more liberal state abortion laws than under Roe. That’s where Michigan is now after last year’s rout.”
Referencing that Journal story this morning at Politico, Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniel warned Meatball Ron that he’s running off in the wrong direction like a chicken without a head. They reminded him and his allies that “The short history of post-Dobbs electoral politics is pretty clear. Since the Supreme Court handed down its opinion last June, Democrats have gained control of four state legislative chambers while losing none of the ones they’d already controlled, added a seat to its majority in the U.S. Senate and kept losses in the House well below the historic norm…We suspect The Journal’s warning will be closely read this morning in Tallahassee, where Republicans, who have a supermajority in the state legislature, are poised next week to send Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill to ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. (The previous threshold was 24 weeks, and after Dobbs, a new law reduced it to 15 weeks.) Abortion rights advocates argue that a six-week ban is tantamount to a total ban because many women still don’t know they’re pregnant at the six-week mark. Add to that Florida’s requirement of having two doctor visits and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, and the window is even narrower. DeSantis is sensitive about the fact that Florida’s current 15-week law has made it a kind of abortion sanctuary state in the restrictive Southeast. (Last year saw a 38% increase in non-Florida residents coming to the state for abortions.) The governor is eager to defang that line of attack from his potential 2024 Republican presidential primary rivals. He says he will enthusiastically sign the bill. There is always a gap between what motivates a party’s base during primary season and what wins elections in the general election. But on abortion, the gap is widening for the GOP.”
In his column yesterday, Greg Sargent also noted what an untenable bind the Wisconsin results puts the GOP in, and particularly Gov. Meatball. “To understand the significance of the victory that liberals just pulled off in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, a win largely driven by abortion rights,” he wrote, “consider what is set to happen some 1,100 miles from Madison: In coming weeks, Republicans in Florida’s state capital of Tallahassee are expected to ban abortions after a mere six weeks.
He noted how DeSantis is moving in the opposite direction of swing voters, lurching towards his own political doom. “The Wisconsin results suggest a trend that developed in the 2022 midterm elections will continue. Candidates who stood up for abortion rights— and emphasized that protecting democracy is critical to safeguarding those rights— defeated anti-choice, election-denying MAGA candidates everywhere. That’s the message Protasiewicz and Wisconsin Democrats employed against Kelly, who lent support to Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 reelection loss. Democrats argued that a liberal court majority would likely overturn the state’s abortion ban. But Democrats also spent heavily on spots that cast a conservative court as a threat to democracy. Democrats argued that a right-wing court could subvert the state’s 2024 presidential outcome, and noted that a liberal court might overturn the state’s extremely gerrymandered legislative districts. This combination helped drive the size of the Wisconsin victory, the state Democratic Party believes, as well as record turnout for a state Supreme Court race totaling 1.8 million votes.
This lopsided victory in a state Trump lost in 2020 by less than one point, Democrats say, reflected a large gender gap, high youth vote turnout and inroads by Democrats among non-college-educated White voters.
Democratic sources tell me that internal party modeling showed that in early and absentee voting up to Election Day, women outpaced men by 12 points, and the percentage of voters aged 18 to 29 was far higher than in previous Supreme Court races. While analysis of the Election Day turnout is still needed, it appears those factors held through Tuesday’s voting.
“Spring elections historically in Wisconsin have tended to be older and Whiter and more conservative,” Franklin told me. By contrast, he said, this election’s turnout was relatively high in college areas and in Milwaukee, “the most diverse county and city in the state.”
One big question is what happened with non-college-educated White voters, particularly those in rural and small-town areas, a heavily Republican demographic. Wisconsin has a higher percentage of those voters than the other “blue wall” states Trump won in 2016— Pennsylvania and Michigan— making the state a good test of whether Democrats can recapture them.
One might surmise that a pro-choice message motivated educated suburbanites to swamp non-college-educated White turnout, without Protasiewicz improving among that latter demographic. But Franklin noted that she did surprisingly well in “rural and working-class areas” in southwestern counties that Trump carried twice, and made “inroads in rural counties up the Mississippi River.” He concluded: “That’s really notable.”
In Wisconsin, the state legislature is heavily gerrymandered, which helped Republicans keep tight control of it even though Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won a statewide majority in 2022. That control, in turn, is keeping the state abortion ban in place. The result: Messaging about protecting democracy is unusually potent in the state, since it is directly linked to preserving abortion rights.
All this has important forward-looking implications. Because of its heavy working-class White population, Wisconsin will be strongly contested by the GOP in 2024, especially if the nominee is in the MAGA mold, such as DeSantis or even Trump himself. Relative to the other blue-wall states, Wisconsin is the most likely starting point for Republicans to assemble an electoral college majority.
What’s more, the GOP nominee will have most likely endorsed a national abortion ban (or at least draconian abortion restrictions in their own state) to make the party’s primary voters happy. And if that nominee is a MAGA candidate such as Trump or DeSantis, he’ll also be hostile to democracy and voting rights.
If messaging about defending abortion rights and democracy commanded a sizable majority in this highly polarized, blue collar-heavy swing state, it may well continue constituting Kryptonite to MAGA— all the way through 2024.
I just want to point out the 5 rural counties south of LaCrosse that make up Wisconsin’s southwest corner— Lafayette, Grant, Crawford, Richland and Vernon. All 5 went for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and all 5 went for Protasiewicz on Tuesday. Look at Trump’s 2020 numbers compared to this week’s Protasiewicz numbers:
Lafayette- Trump- 56.4%— Protasiewicz- 51%
Grant- Trump- 55.2%— Protasiewicz- 51%
Crawford- Trump 53.1%— Protasiewicz- 54%
Richland- Trump- 54.0%— Protasiewicz- 52%
Vernon- Trump 51.6%— Protasiewicz- 55%
That’s the 5-alarm fire for the GOP... white, rural Trump counties fed up with all this MAGA extremism and ready to embrace an alternative.
