Dems Aren’t Done

It’s been a tough year for Wisconsin and the year just got started. First, in January the Packers fizzled out in the playoffs, coming up short on sky high expectations at the beginning of the season. Then, last weekend. Wisconsin’s own Ben Wikler, the favorite going in, lost a vote of the Democratic National Committee to become the party’s new chair. Wikler lost to Ken Martin, his counterpart as state chairman in Minnesota. Minnesota. It’s like losing to the Vikings — for the third time.

It’s a disappointment for the home team, but it doesn’t mean much in terms of the fortunes of the party. Both Wikler and Martin are Midwest political pros and mostly technocrats. Neither would have been in a position to change the party’s policy positions or its fundamental message. The chairperson’s job is mostly technical – raising money, finding candidates, organizing the ground game. These are all things the Democrats already do pretty well. Their problem is not on the technical side. 

Still, the vote of the 448-member DNC, which Martin won easily, might have been somewhat significant because of who backed Wikler. His supporters included the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer, House leader Hakeem Jeffries, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and billionaire funders George Soros and Reid Hoffman. 

The latter two each gave Wikler $250,000 for his campaign. One wonders why a guy needs a half million dollars to court fewer than 450 people, and it could be that the DNC members from around the country wondered the same thing and were rebelling against the party establishment — even while they sort of are the party’s establishment. In any event, Martin is hardly an outsider, having run the Minnesota party for many years and being well-acquainted with Washington power brokers. 

This takes me back to my earlier point – this result doesn’t matter much because the winner wasn’t going to be in a position to fix what needs fixing. To that end, consider the following state of the party:

• The Democratic candidate lost the popular vote for President for the first time in 20 years. 

• Kamala Harris lost every one of the seven hotly contested swing states, including Wikler’s Wisconsin, which couldn’t have helped his cause. 

• Democrats lost ground with Black, Hispanic and blue collar voters — the very groups they say they champion. 

• The party has become the party of college graduates. That’s a problem because college grads make up less than 40% of adults. 

• Only 31% of voters have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, compared to 43% who think favorably of the Republicans. 

• The reason for that, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, is that voters think that Democrats are focussed on issues that aren’t important to them. They felt that Democrats were most concerned with abortion, LGBTQ rights, climate change and health care, while the top issues for most voters were inflation, the economy, immigration and health care. Most voters saw the Republicans as better aligned with their concerns. 

One thing Martin will have to do is referee a debate within the party about how it should respond to all this. I think that’s probably a fool’s errand. Anybody who reads the Quinnipiac poll, or several others like it, would conclude that the Democrats need to pull back on their progressive social agenda and become less preachy about climate change. But that just won’t happen because those things are sacred to the party’s activist class. 

The party will end up responding without any overall strategy and without any discipline. Schumer, Jeffries and Polosi will say stuff. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will take a different tack. All of the various activist interest groups will demand that their cause be mentioned. It’ll be a mess and there’s nothing Ken Martin can do – or Ben Wikler could have done — about it.  

But, here’s the thing. Miraculously, it probably won’t matter. Here in Wisconsin, Susan Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate for the open state Supreme Court seat, should win in April. That’s because liberals will be fired up to do something in response to Trump, abortion will still be a salient issue and Trump voters don’t show up to vote for anybody but Trump. 

Then in 2026 the Dems should do well in the midterm elections as the party out of power in the White House almost always picks up seats. They have a good chance of picking up the House, maybe the Senate and either or both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature. If Tony Evers runs for a third term, I’d say he’s got a better than even chance of winning.

And they’ll likely do all that with an assist from Trump. Independent voters who moved from Biden in 2020 to Trump last year discounted the chaos, the cruelty and the sheer inanity of a Trump presidency. There’s going to be some buyer’s remorse. 

And, come 2028, unless he suspends the Constitution (and don’t put it past him), Trump can’t be on the ballot — and again his voters are loyal only to him, not to his party. Meanwhile, whoever the Democrats’ nominee will be, that person will not be an 82-year old with a 40% approval rating who is forced off the ballot at the last minute. 

So, while things may look pretty grim for my party right now, they’ll probably turn around. But they’ll turn around not because the party is likely to do anything to correct its fundamental disconnect with most Americans, but simply because of the normal change of seasons in American politics and because the Republicans’ problem is even worse. 

The Democrats’ problem is that they’re a party whose perceived priorities are out of sync with too many voters. But at least they are a party. The Republicans are a cult of one guy. And when he’s gone what have they got? 

A version of this piece originally appeared in Isthmus.

YSDA stands for:

Free speech.

The rule of law.

Reason.

Tolerance.

Pluralism.