Complaints over campaign comments by Wisconsin Supreme Court justice are dismissed

Posted on September 5, 2023 by Associated Press

A state judiciary disciplinary panel has rejected several complaints lodged against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz that alleged she violated the judicial code of ethics for comments she made during the campaign. It's a setback to Republicans who argued those remarks could warrant impeachment.

Protasiewicz on Tuesday released a letter from the Wisconsin Judicial Commission informing her that “several complaints” regarding comments she had made during the campaign had been dismissed without action.

The commission's actions are private unless released by one of the parties involved. Protasiewicz received permission from the commission to release its May 31 letter to her, which she then provided to The Associated Press.

Protasiewicz’s win in April flipped majority control of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal for the first time in 15 years. Democrats heavily backed her campaign, during which Protasiewicz criticized Republican-drawn electoral maps and spoke in favor of abortion rights.

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have been floating the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz over her comments calling the legislative maps they drew “unfair” and “rigged.”

Protasiewicz never promised to rule one way or another on redistricting or abortion cases.

She took office in August, and in her first week, two lawsuits seeking to overturn the Republican-drawn legislative electoral maps were filed by Democratic-friendly groups. The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether to hear the cases, and Protasiewicz has not responded to a motion from the Republican-controlled Legislature that she recuse herself from the cases.

A lawsuit in a county court seeking to overturn Wisconsin's 1849 abortion ban was filed before Protasiewicz won election. That case is expected to eventually reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The Wisconsin Republican Party in February released one complaint filed against Protasiewicz by Randall Cook, a Republican supporter. His complaint alleged that Protasiewicz had declared how she would rule on cases related to abortion and redistricting, in violation of provisions of the state judicial code.

In the letter to Protasiewicz, Judicial Commission Executive Director Jeremiah Van Hecke referred to “several complaints” it had received and dismissed without action. The letter said the complaints pertained to comments she had made at a Jan. 9 candidate forum and several interviews in December and January.

The complaints also alleged that she had made false comments about her opponent, Republican-backed Dan Kelly, in two campaign ads and in social media posts, according to the commission's letter.

The commission did not give a reason for why it dismissed the complaints, but Van Hecke said that it had reviewed her comments, the judicial code of ethics, state Supreme Court rules, and relevant decisions by the state and U.S. supreme courts.

In one of the cases cited, a federal court in Wisconsin ruled there is a distinction between a candidate stating personal views during a campaign and making a pledge, promise or commitment to ruling in a certain way.

Protasiewicz declined to comment on the commission’s action.

The nine-member Judicial Commission is one of the few avenues through which people can challenge the actions of Supreme Court justices. It is tasked with investigating judges and court commissioners who are accused of violating the state’s judicial code of conduct. Its members include two lawyers and two judges appointed by the Supreme Court and five non-lawyers appointed by the governor to three-year terms.

Republican members of the state Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday and last month grilled judicial ethics commissioners up for reappointment about when justices and judges should recuse themselves from cases, especially if they call a case “rigged,” a clear allusion to Protasiewicz’s campaign remarks.

Republicans, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also say she can't fairly hear the cases because she took nearly $10 million in campaign donations from the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which did not file the lawsuits but has long pushed for new maps.

The legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate. It would take only 50 votes to impeach. It takes 22 votes to convict in the Senate, the exact number of seats Republicans hold.

If the Assembly impeaches her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Liberals fight Republican attempt to boot Wisconsin Supreme Court justice from redistricting case

Posted on August 30, 2023 by Associated Press

Liberals argued in a legal filing this week that Republicans were trying to nullify the election of a Democratic-backed Wisconsin Supreme Court justice by asking her to recuse herself from hearing redistricting lawsuits that could result in drawing new legislative electoral maps.

Attorneys in two separate redistricting cases filed arguments Tuesday objecting to the Republican-controlled Legislature's request that Justice Janet Protasiewicz recuse herself. They argued that there was no legal or ethical obligation for Protasiewicz to step aside, despite her comments during the campaign that she thinks the current maps are “rigged” or because she accepted nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

One motion objecting to Protasiewicz's recusal argued that such a move would be unsupported by fact or law and “it would be contrary to her duties as a justice on the Supreme Court.”

“Unhappy with this electoral result, which they could not prevent through gerrymandering, (Republicans) now seek to nullify the results and pick their Justices," said the filing from Law Forward, a Madison-based liberal law firm, the Stafford Rosenbaum law firm, Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, Campaign Legal Center, and the Arnold & Porter law firm.

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature argued in filings last week that Protasiewicz has pre-judged the cases, which could result in new more Democratic-friendly maps being drawn before the 2024 election. Republican legislative leaders have threatened to impeach her if she hears the cases, a move that they have enough votes to do.

Protasiewicz is part of a 4-3 liberal majority on the court, and her election ended a 15-year run of conservative justices in control. Two redistricting lawsuits were filed in the first week after Protasiewicz joined the court on Aug. 1.

Republicans argued in their recusal motion that “Justice Protasiewicz’s campaign statements reveal that her thumb is very much on the scale in this case.”

During her winning campaign, Protasiewicz called the Republican-drawn maps “unfair” and “rigged” and said there needs to be “a fresh look at the gerrymandering question.” Protasiewicz never said how she would rule on a redistricting lawsuit.

Protasiewicz did not make any “pledges or promises” about how she would rule, which would require recusal, said attorneys in the second redistricting lawsuit representing voters who support Democratic candidates and several members of the Citizen Mathematicians and Scientists.

The U.S. Supreme Court made clear that judicial candidates can discuss political issues, and nothing she said indicates that she has prejudged the case, the attorneys argued.

But her comments have led some Republican state lawmakers, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, to say that impeachment should be considered if she doesn’t recuse from the cases. He was among the Republicans who filed the motion asking that she step aside from the cases.

It would take only a simple majority vote in the Assembly to impeach Protasiewicz, and a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to remove her from office. Republicans have a 65-34 majority in the Assembly and a 22-11 majority in the Senate.

Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most gerrymandered in the country, with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Both lawsuits ask that all 132 state lawmakers be up for election that year in newly drawn districts. In Senate districts that are midway through a four-year term in 2024, there would be a special election, with the winners serving two years. The regular four-year cycle would resume again in 2026.

The state Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. It is up to Protasiewicz, and not the entire court, to decide whether to recuse herself or hear the cases.

Wisconsin Republicans ask newly elected liberal justice to not hear redistricting case

Posted on August 24, 2023 by Associated Press

Republicans who control the Wisconsin Legislature asked that the newest Democratic-backed justice on the state Supreme Court recuse herself from lawsuits seeking to overturn GOP-drawn electoral maps, arguing that she has prejudged the cases.

Republicans argue in their motions filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday and made public Wednesday that Justice Janet Protasiewicz can't fairly hear the cases because during her campaign for the seat earlier this year she called the Republican-drawn maps “unfair” and “rigged” and said there needs to be “a fresh look at the gerrymandering question.”

“Justice Protasiewicz’s campaign statements reveal that her thumb is very much on the scale in this case,” Republicans argue in their motion with the court.

Protasiewicz, who was backed by Democrats in her winning election in April, never said how she would rule on a redistricting lawsuit. She never committed to recusing herself from hearing the case. Her win gave liberals a 4-3 majority on the court.

Protasiewicz did promise to recuse herself from any case brought by the Wisconsin Democratic Party because it donated nearly $10 million to her campaign. There are two pending redistricting lawsuits, neither of which was brought by the Democratic Party.

However, the Republican-led Legislature argues that because Democrats would benefit from a redrawing of the maps, Protasiewicz must recuse herself from hearing the case. Staying on the case would violate Republicans' constitutional due process rights, they argue.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has said that if Protasiewicz does not recuse herself from the redistricting case, he would look into pursuing her impeachment. Republicans have a two-thirds majority in the state Senate, which would be enough votes to remove Protasiewicz from office should the Assembly vote to impeach. However, her replacement would be named by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Protasiewicz began her 10-year term in August. That week, two similar redistricting lawsuits were filed. The Legislature is seeking to intervene in both lawsuits and have Protasiewicz recuse herself from both.

Protasiewicz did not respond to a request for comment left with a court spokesperson.

Attorneys who brought the two redistricting cases had no immediate comment.

Wisconsin’s Assembly districts rank among the most gerrymandered nationally, with Republicans routinely winning far more seats than would be expected based on their average share of the vote, according to an Associated Press analysis.

One lawsuit was filed on behalf of voters who support Democrats by Law Forward, a Madison-based liberal law firm, the Stafford Rosenbaum law firm, Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, Campaign Legal Center, and the Arnold & Porter law firm.

The other case was brought by voters who support Democratic candidates and several members of the Citizen Mathematicians and Scientists. That group of professors and research scientists submitted proposed legislative maps in 2022, before the state Supreme Court adopted the Republican-drawn ones.

Conservatives on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court are having an epic meltdown

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Quinn Yeargain

Justice Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as the newest member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Aug. 1, following an impressive victory over far-right former Justice Dan Kelly earlier this year that gave the court a progressive majority for the first time since 2008. Since Protasiewicz joined the court, a lot's happened: The liberals fired the director of the state court system, a former judge and Supreme Court candidate who holds some extreme social views; moved to adopt new rules for internal court governance; and agreed to hear a lawsuit over the constitutionality of the state's gerrymandered legislative districts.

Republicans in Wisconsin have not taken any of this very well. In the leadup to Protasiewicz's election—before she had even been elected—Republican lawmakers began tossing around the idea of impeaching her for … something to be determined. But that talk went dormant until more recently, when Assembly Speaker Robin Vos resurfaced the idea.

Two of the conservatives on the court, Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Associate Justice Rebecca Bradley, have not handled the changes to the court very well, either. The liberals' earliest moves have limited Ziegler's powers as chief justice, which she's alleged are abuses of power that violate the Wisconsin Constitution—though she's been coy on what provision of the constitution, exactly. Still, that hasn't stopped her from issuing press releases and writing op-eds denouncing the erosion of her power as somehow unconstitutional.

Bradley's reaction, however, has been far more extreme. She's used comments to reporters, tweets, and even official court opinions to launch baseless attacks on the legitimacy of the majority's actions—criticizing them for partisanship and bias in ways that reflect her own partisanship and bias.

From the first day of the Supreme Court's new liberal majority, Bradley's core criticism is that its members are too partisan and biased. She criticized her fellow justices as "political hacks" and "politicians wearing robes," not "jurists." She argued on Twitter that their firing of the state courts director was a "[p]olitical purge[] of court employees"—a point that she made while retweeting one of the state's most prominent right-wing commentators.

And this week, when the Supreme Court allowed a case challenging the state's gerrymandered state legislative districts to proceed, Bradley dissented in furious fashion. She charged that the majority had agreed to hear the case—which in this case included not only the liberals but also fellow conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn—as part of a plan to "shift power away from Republicans and bestow an electoral advantage for Democrat candidates." Her screed even deployed a favorite slur of Republican partisans by referring to the "Democrat Party."

But for Bradley, this is nothing new.

Bradley was first appointed to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. She won reelection in 2013 by defeating—in a gigantic irony—Protasiewicz, her future colleague on the Supreme Court. Walker elevated her to the Court of Appeals in 2015, and then to the Supreme Court later that same year. She was reelected to a 10-year term in 2016 against another familiar name: Joanne Kloppenburg, who had narrowly lost the state's 2011 Supreme Court election.

During Bradley's 2016 campaign against Kloppenburg, many of her old writings for her college newspaper surfaced, revealing some deeply intolerant views. In 1992, during the height of the AIDS crisis, Bradley wrote that gay people "essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior."

She also criticized the attention that AIDS received over diseases like cancer, writing, "How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments," and attacked people who were comfortable with homosexuality as "degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior." She called abortion a "holocaust of our children" and said she found it "incomprehensible" that anyone could claim "a right to murder their own flesh and blood."

Bradley sought to distance herself from those comments during her 2016 campaign, claiming that her views had changed on homosexuality. She refused to say, though, whether she still believed that abortion was a "holocaust" and that the right to obtain an abortion was equivalent to a right to "murder," because the issue might come before the Supreme Court. At the same time, she refused to say she would recuse herself from an abortion case.

She narrowly defeated Kloppenburg and will next face Wisconsin voters in April 2026.

In her time on the court, she quickly distinguished herself with a unique brand of far-right jurisprudence. She compared Gov. Tony Evers' lockdown orders during the height of the pandemic to Japanese internment during World War II—and then recently attempted to whitewash her Wikipedia page to remove her most offensive remarks. She justified these self-edits to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel because, she claimed, "Liberal media has distorted my record since the beginning of my judicial career, and I refuse to let false accusations go unchecked."

In a fairly routine appeal of a criminal conviction for homicide, she wrote a long dissent criticizing the trial judge for mentioning the defendant's gun ownership. "'[H]oplophobia' is the 'irrational fear of guns,'" she explained, and charged that "the sentencing judge's hoplophobia was on full display" in the case.

In a case that prohibited the use of drop boxes to collect absentee mail ballots, she compared their use to the manipulation of democracy by Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-un, Raul Castro, and Bashar al-Assad.

Since Protasiewicz's victory earlier this year, and as the reality of serving in the minority set in, Bradley has amped up her rhetoric. In June, she castigated Hagedorn in extremely harsh terms, writing that he should "revisit the judicial oath and resign if unwilling to fulfill it." Hagedorn's offense? He sided with liberals and didn't allow a parent's lawsuit challenging the Madison School District's trans-friendly policies to skip the state's normal appeals process.

In July, the Supreme Court declined a request by the Wisconsin State Bar to allow attorneys to receive a "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access" credit. Bradley authored a lengthy concurring opinion that has to be read to be believed.

She began by arguing that "the buzzwords 'diversity, equity, inclusion, and access' (DEIA) represent a smoke screen for a divisive political agenda that perniciously reduces people to racial categories and strips them of their unique individuality." Echoing far-right rhetoric, she argued that such concepts are "a disguise for dangerous identity politics" and dismissively referred to diversity training as "woke corporate nonsense." As support for her argument, Bradley actually relied on a 2014 book authored by far-right commentator Ben Shapiro titled "How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument."

For someone with this record to accuse anyone else of partisanship or bias is a stunning display of projection and a total lack of self-awareness. Going from editing your own Wikipedia page to remove your insensitive remarks because the "liberal media" has supposedly "distorted your record" to criticizing your colleagues as "politicians wearing robes" takes some gall.

But Bradley can accuse the majority of whatever she likes. After more than a decade in the wilderness, Wisconsin finally has a Supreme Court with a progressive majority—one with unquestioned democratic legitimacy. Bradley will likely be on the losing end of the most contentious cases for the next few years—and if she continues to antagonize Hagedorn, her fellow conservative, she might find her positions winning less and less support. And in 2026, when Bradley is next before voters, she'll have to deal with the consequences of her record.

To preserve gerrymandering, Wisconsin GOP threatens to impeach justice who critiqued gerrymandering

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Wisconsin is so absurdly gerrymandered, a roughly 50-50 split between the state’s Republican and Democratic voters—Donald Trump edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Joe Biden squeaked by Trump in 2020, and Badger Staters narrowly reelected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2022—has somehow produced gaudy Republican supermajorities in both the state Assembly and Senate. The party currently holds a 64-35 advantage in the Assembly and a 21-11 edge in the Senate.

Of course, if Wisconsin Republicans had their druthers, they’d draw little circles around every Chick-fil-A in the state and make those congressional districts. And previous state supreme courts might have let them get away with it.

But when liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz trounced her conservative opponent in the state Supreme Court election in April, it was a big win—not just for those who care about reestablishing their reproductive rights, but for anyone who genuinely cares about representative democracy.

In other words, fair legislative maps looked achievable for the first time in more than a decade. Which meant it was now past time for the GOP to squeal.

On Friday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hinted that impeachment could be on the table if Protasiewicz votes to disrupt the GOP’s plans for a permanent white minority rule over our country—or, worse, if Sen. Ron Johnson is ever forced to fill out his ballot next to a Black person. Why? Because she will have “prejudged” the case.

"If there's any semblance of honor on the state Supreme Court left, you cannot have a person who runs for the court prejudging a case and being open about it, and then acting on the case as if you're an impartial observer," Vos said during an interview with WSAU host Meg Ellefson when questioned about the durability of the Republicans’ bullshit maps. “You cannot have a judge who said, you know, the maps are rigged because she bought into the argument that that’s why we're winning elections, not the quality of our candidates, and then she sits on that trial acting like she's gonna listen and hear both sides fairly—that just can't happen.”

Okay, fine, but it’s kind of hard not to “prejudge” a gerrymandered map. Vos clearly has! Granted, he’s not a judge—and judges do need to rule on the particulars of individual cases without making snap, predetermined decisions, but in the storied history of easy calls, this one is right up there with the 1989 cancelation of “She’s the Sheriff.”

Anyone who looks at the issue and can’t see what’s going on has no business working at a Pep Boys, much less serving as a supreme court justice.

Consider this April story from The Atlantic, published shortly after Protasiewicz’s win flipped the state’s highest court to a 4-3 liberal majority:

After Democrats got wiped out in the 2010 midterms, 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 a famously closely divided state, but thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not. With that kind of job security, Republicans in Wisconsin could enact an agenda far to the right of the state’s actual electorate, attacking unions, abortion rights, and voting rights without having to worry that swing voters would throw the bums out. After all, they couldn’t. And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

Nice racket, huh? In other words, Wisconsin’s liberals have been held hostage for years by unscrupulous Republicans who couldn’t care less about representative democracy. And this was years before the party as a whole decided it had no use for such quaint throwbacks.

But that doesn’t mean Wisconsin Republicans are done being shameless partisans.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

In January, Protasiewicz called the state's legislative maps "rigged" in a public forum and in March, she told Capital Times reporters in a podcast interview she would "enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question."

"They do not reflect people in this state. I don't think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair," Protasiewicz, a former Milwaukee County judge, said in the January forum. "I can't tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong."

Vos suggested if Protasiewicz does not recuse from cases involving the maps, she would violate her oath of office, which might push lawmakers to consider impeaching her.

"I want to look and see, does she recuse herself on cases where she has prejudged? That to me is something that is at the oath of office and what she said she was going to do to uphold the Constitution. That to me is a serious offense."

As The Journal Sentinel points out, Republicans now have the power to hold impeachment trials after having attained a supermajority in the state Senate—largely thanks to gerrymandered maps. And if they do, they could theoretically sideline Protasiewicz in order to protect those same maps.

An impeachment would prevent Justice Protasiewicz from hearing cases until & unless she is acquitted by the Wisconsin Senate. If the Senate drags its feet in holding a trial, that might be enough to leave gerrymandered maps in place for 2024. https://t.co/ifDTHoi9j0 pic.twitter.com/tknTlKAnJj
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) August 12, 2023

As the above xweet from Brennan Center redistricting and voting counsel Michael Li explains, judges who’ve been impeached can’t even rule on cases until they’ve been acquitted. With Protasiewicz so sidelined if Republicans pull the trigger on impeachment, they could leverage a deadlocked 3-3 court to keep their maps (and minority rule) in place through 2024.

Meanwhile, Democrats in the Wisconsin Assembly are understandably calling bullshit.

"That type of reaction shows how threatened the Republican majority is by a challenge to their rigged maps,” Rep. Evan Goyke, a Milwaukee Democrat, told The Journal Sentinel. “It's really good evidence that the state is gerrymandered, that they'd be willing to go to such an unprecedented maneuver.”

Goyke also suggested that Protasiewicz would have to be dense, corrupt, or a Republican (three great tastes that taste great together) to not see how untenable the current maps are.

"I also think that Justice Protasiewicz is a live human being in Wisconsin and understands that we are living in this gerrymander," Goyke said. "I don't think that one comment invalidates her ability to serve."

Goyke further noted that Protasiewicz’s commanding 11-point victory in April is “a pretty clear mandate where the people stand.”

Sure, but since when do Republicans care where people stand? They’re typically more interested in forcing them to sit still and take their medicine, whether they want to or not.

But as the Daily Kos Elections team points out in a great thread worth a read, that approach is only going to continue to blow up in GOP faces.

So what would the WI GOP do then? Keep impeaching until there are just two hardcore conservatives left? As we saw in Ohio, voters don't much like it when elected officials try to abrogate their rights. Scorched-earth tactics risk a major backfire for the GOP
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) August 12, 2023

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Senate Republicans’ path to majority is riddled with landmines of their own making

Posted on June 25, 2023 (Updated June 25, 2023) by Kerry Eleveld

If the Republican Party was even remotely normal, Senate Republicans would be counting down the hours until Election Day 2024, when they would almost assuredly win the two seats they need to retake control of the upper chamber.

Instead, they are biting their tongues and ducking for cover as they face incoming hits from every corner of the Republican Party.

The latest debacle keeping Senate Republicans up at night is the House GOP’s push to impeach President Joe Biden over, well, they're not exactly sure what … but they may or may not bother to find out.

After House Republicans voted Thursday to refer an impeachment resolution over border security to the committees of jurisdiction, Senate Republicans started to review their life choices.

"I don't know what they're basing the president's impeachment on. We'll see what they do. I can't imagine going down that road," Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia told Axios.

Capito even added the most obvious yet damning observation: "This seems like an extremely partisan exercise."

Senate Minority Leader John Thune would prefer his caucus’s attention and energy be directed toward pretty much anything else. “I’d rather focus on the policy agenda, the vision for the future and go on and win elections," the South Dakotan—and Mitch McConnell’s #2—explained to Axios.

Sounds smart. But does anyone have any clue at all what the GOP "vision for the future" is— other than rounding up all of Donald Trump's perceived enemies, locking them up, and contemplating whether to throw away the key or worse?

The Senate Republican chairing the effort to retake the chamber, Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, also chimed in, saying he hadn't "seen evidence that would rise to an impeachable offense," before conceding that’s what trials are for.

Sure—assuming House Republicans bother to conduct an investigation. That little hiccup appears to have occurred to Sen. Thom Tillis of South Carolina.

"Impeachment is a serious process. It takes time. It takes evidence," he noted. Now, there's one to grow on.

As former Harry Reid aide Jim Manley tweeted about the House GOP's impeachment scheme: "As a so-called democratic strategist—thank you."

But House Republican plans for impeachment (not to mention a potential government shutdown, abortion ban push, or effort to yank aid to Ukraine) aren't the only things keeping Senate Republicans awake at night.

They're a tad uncomfortable with the fact that the party's current 2024 front-runner and possible nominee stole state secrets, refused to return them, and then obstructed justice during a federal probe of the matter.

Several weeks ago, On June 13, Minority Leader McConnell was asked during a press gaggle whether he would still support Trump as nominee if he were convicted. He dodged.

"I am just simply not going to comment on the candidates," McConnell responded. "I'm simply going to stay out of it." He has said anything on the matter since.

Finally, when looking toward 2024, so-called candidate quality is still a sticking point for Senate Republicans. Though they have had some wins on candidate recruitment to date, they have also suffered some missed opportunities. Further, many of their candidates—even the good ones—will be haunted by their extreme anti-abortion views on the campaign trail.

Voters across the battleground tilt heavily pro-choice and largely believe Republicans will try to ban abortion if they gain control of Washington/Congress. Driving these strong views is a fundamental belief that women should make their own decisions, not politicians.
— Senate Democrats (@dscc) June 23, 2023

Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, Senate Republicans top pick to challenge Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, announced earlier this month that he’ll be taking a pass on a run. The Badger State’s GOP primary promises to be a mess, but former Milwaukee County sheriff and conspiracy theory enthusiast David Clarke has looked dominant in polling.

In response to Gallagher's June 9 news, Clarke, who's eyeing a bid, tweeted of his rivals, "None of them energizes or excites the base voter like I do."

He's not wrong—and that is some very bad news for Senate Republicans hoping to put Baldwin's seat in play.

Republicans also have extreme hurdles in other top-tier target states, such as Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. As Daily Kos previously reported, even their best candidates hold downright radical positions on abortion:

Senate Republicans’ top choice in Montana, businessman Tim Sheehy, who has accused Democrats of being "bent on murdering our unborn children";
Another Senate GOP darling, Pennsylvania hedge fund CEO David McCormick, doesn't support exceptions for rape and incest, and only approves of "very rare" exceptions for the life of the mother;
In Ohio, MAGA diehard Bernie Moreno, who's earned the endorsement of freshman Sen. J.D. Vance, is "100% pro-life with no exceptions," according to HuffPost. During his failed Senate bid last year, Moreno tweeted, “Conservative Republicans should never back down from their belief that life begins at conception and that abortion is the murder of an innocent baby";
and then there’s West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who McConnell has convinced to run for the seat of Sen. Joe Manchin. He signed a near-total abortion ban into law last year.

Whether it's Trump, House Republicans, or abortion—the issue that turned the midterms upside down in 2022—Senate Republicans face an uphill battle to recruit and present candidates with broad appeal in a party that thrives on alienating a solid majority of the country.

Joining us on "The Downballot" this week is North Carolina Rep. Wiley Nickel, the first member of Congress to appear on the show! Nickel gives us the blow-by-blow of his unlikely victory that saw him flip an extremely competitive seat from red to blue last year, including how he adjusted when a new map gave him a very different district, and why highlighting the extremism of his MAGA-flavored opponent was key to his success. A true election nerd, Nickel tells us which precincts he was tracking on election night that let him know he was going to win—and which fellow House freshman is the one you want to rock out with at a concert.

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Wisconsin Republicans are hot to start impeaching Democrats. Here’s how we blow up those plans

Posted on January 11, 2023 (Updated January 12, 2023) by David Nir

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Power-drunk Wisconsin Republicans, relying on maps they rigged themselves, just secured another ill-gotten weapon in the November midterms—the ability to impeach and remove government officials without a single Democratic vote. And they intend to use it: Right after the election, the Republican speaker of the state Assembly warned that his party’s new two-thirds supermajority in the Senate means the GOP “can take out people who aren't doing their job,” adding that it’s “a new power that we did not have a week ago.”

The good news is, we can take it right back. A longtime Republican senator recently resigned from the legislature, prompting a special election in a challenging but winnable district in the Milwaukee suburbs. If Democrats can win that race on April 4, then poof—the GOP’s Senate supermajority vanishes, and with it, the threat to oust Democrats like Gov. Tony Evers simply for being Democrats.

That’s why Daily Kos is endorsing attorney Jodi Habush Sinykin in this critical race.

Can you donate $10 or even $20 now to help Democrats flip a key seat in Wisconsin and nuke the GOP’s impeachment menace?

Habush Sinykin is exactly the sort of progressive we need. She’s an environmental lawyer with deep roots in her community who helped enact the historic Great Lakes Compact to safeguard at-risk waters and worked to pass legislation to regulate cruel puppy mills. She will fight to lower healthcare costs, invest in education, and above all, protect abortion rights. Believe it or not, abortion is now illegal in Wisconsin thanks to a ban that dates all the way back to 1849—a time when slavery was still lawful in this country. Habush Sinykin will be both a voice and a vote against that ban.

Fortunately, Habush Sinykin has the field to herself, since she’s the only Democrat in the race. Republicans, however, have three candidates running, each worse than the last, and they are in for a messy, messy primary on Feb. 21.

There’s state Rep. Dan Knodl, who signed a letter to Mike Pence asking him not to certify the results of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Then there’s Van Mobley, president of the small village of Thiensville, who was the first elected official in the state to back Donald Trump and called efforts to halt the spread of COVID a “lie.” But the most special is state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a certifiable election conspiracy theorist who wanted fellow lawmakers to “recall” the state’s 10 Biden electors, has earned the endorsement of the top anti-abortion group in the state, and is so toxic that her fellow Republicans banned her from attending caucus meetings!

But whichever Republican emerges from this dogpile will still have a built-in advantage, because the GOP gerrymandered the 8th District to insulate itself from voters: While the previous version of this seat was almost evenly divided between support for Biden and Trump, the redrawn district would have backed Trump by a 52-47 margin. But Republicans are in a race against time, because this well-educated, affluent area has moved sharply away from the GOP during the Trump era and continues to do so. That alone gives us a fighting chance.

But Republicans know the stakes just as well as we do. They don’t want to relinquish their supermajority status because they want to be able to terrorize Democrats who might dare cross them. And while they fell just short in 2022, two years from now, they’ll try once more to seize a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, too, which would allow them to override any vetoes by Evers.

We can smash a hole in all of those plans by winning this special election in April, but Wisconsin Democrats need our help right away, because there’s going to be a torrent of dark money flooding into this race just as quickly as you can say “Koch brothers.”

Please send $10 or $20 to Jodi Habush Sinykin right now so that she can flip a key seat in the Wisconsin state Senate and erase the GOP’s ill-gotten supermajority!

Don’t let Mitch McConnell win. Don’t let him destroy democracy

Posted on October 15, 2022 (Updated October 24, 2022) by Joan McCarter

It’s hard to argue that there’s just one person responsible for the Republican Party having gone entirely off the rails of democracy. It’s been in process for decades, after all, arguably predating Richard Nixon’s resignation but definitely fueled by that in the past half-century. But if you want to find the person most responsible for using and abusing the levers of the systems the founders put in place to undermine democratic rule, look no further than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

His handiwork has reduced the Senate to the massive roadblock to progress that it is today. He was the first lawmaker to decide that something as once unimaginable as threatening to breach the debt ceiling could be used as a bargaining chip. He has made the filibuster business as usual for the Senate, forcing every single piece of regular legislation—however uncontroversial—to go through the arduous process of multiple procedural votes just to be considered on the floor. He refused to do one of the most sacred duties of the Senate—seating a U.S. Supreme Court justice—because he could.

The outgrowth of his brazen dismantling of norms is seen in what’s been happening in Wisconsin for the last several years, where a number of appointees of the former Republican governor, Scott Walker, are simply refusing to recognize Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and are refusing to step down, months after their terms have expired.

Vote Forward has an ambitious goal of sending 10 million letters in October to Democratic-leaning voters in the swing states. You can write these on your own time, in the privacy of your home. Click here to sign up or log into your Vote Forward account.

Mary Williams’ term on the Technical College System Board expired in May 2021 and Evers named her replacement. But the former Republican state representative refuses to leave. So do two other members appointed by Walker: Kelly Tourdot and Becky Levzow. Asked about it, Williams said, “All you have to do is see what the Supreme Court did.” When asked why she is squatting in the job when others have left, she answered, “Because everyone’s an individual. Now I’m going to hang up, and I don’t want you to call me again.”

She, and a number of other Republican appointees on her board and others, are taking the route of Frederick Prehn, who has remained on the state’s Natural Resources Board—at the urging of Walker—despite the fact that his replacement was named months ago. He’s sticking because the state Supreme Court’s conservative majority said he could. Sound familiar?

The court ruled that sitting members can stay on these boards until their successors have been approved by the state Senate. Which is controlled by Republicans. There are 164 Evers nominees who have not received Senate votes. Republicans, who assume they will hold the Senate, have been holding off on these 164 nominees on the assumption that they will keep the Senate and that Republican candidate for Gov. Tim Michel will win in November. At which point all of those nominations would be withdrawn.

It sounds very familiar, doesn’t it.

“There’s two different things going on here,” Miriam Seifter, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “One is the situation where individuals assert the power to stay in office after the term has expired. The other is the Senate refusing to confirm appointees. If either of those things happen in isolation or rarely, neither one is democracy-altering. If these happen systematically and across the board … you would start to see the constraints of gubernatorial power.”

And you see the erosion of democracy, where the will of the people, the voters, is ignored. “Gov. Evers appointed highly qualified, dedicated Wisconsinites for the (Technical College System) and DNR Boards, and Republicans’ continued efforts to prevent basic, fundamental functions of our democracy is radical partisanship at its most dangerous,” said Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback.

It’s the McConnell playbook in action, and a cautionary tale for 2022. There’s little reason to believe that Republicans in any state in which they gain majorities and take governors seats—and state supreme courts—won’t do the same. There’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t take the next step and do everything they could to make sure that Donald Trump was installed as president again in 2024.

For that matter, there’s little indication to believe McConnell would really fight that eventuality, for all the attacks he’s endured from Trump. When he had the chance to cut off Trump’s path back to the White House with an impeachment conviction, he voted no. He urged his conference to vote no. He would do it again.

This is it. This is the election to stop Wisconsin extremism from infecting more states; to stop McConnell from taking the nation to that level with a Senate majority; to stop the House from going to Republicans who would threaten everything.

That’s why Daily Kos has engaged both broadly and deeply this cycle, with candidate slates at every level. You can learn more about all those endorsements here, and determine if there’s a slate—or even an individual candidate—that speaks to you, your volunteer time, your dollars.

It doesn’t matter how much you give, it matters that you do, and that you engage and help us defeat the fascists.

If you’d like to donate to every single candidate and ballot measure organization Daily Kos has endorsed this year all at once, just click here.

On this week's episode of The Downballot we get medieval on the traditional media for its appalling display of ableism in the wake of John Fetterman's recent NBC interview; recap the absolutely wild goings-on in Los Angeles, where City Council President Nury Martinez just resigned after a racist tirade was caught on tape; dive into the unexpectedly close race for governor in Oklahoma; and highlight a brand-new database from Daily Kos Elections showing how media markets and congressional districts overlap.

Embedded Content

The Downballot: Why Wisconsin is so dang important, with Ben Wikler (transcript)

Posted on June 19, 2022 (Updated June 20, 2022) by The Downballot

No state regularly hosts as many hotly contested elections as Wisconsin, which is why we're talking to state Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler about all of this year's key races on this week's episode of The Downballot. He tells us about everything his organization does to ensure year-round investment in Democratic infrastructure; details the state of play in the battle to defeat Sen. Ron Johnson and re-elect Gov. Tony Evers; and previews a critical race for the state Supreme Court next year that could flip control from conservatives to progressives.

Embedded Content

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap several recent elections, including Sarah Palin's first-place finish in the special primary for Alaska's lone House seat, the defeat of a pro-impeachment Republican congressman in South Carolina, and a special election where the GOP picked up a Democratic-held House seat in heavily Latino south Texas.

Please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

David Beard:

Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, Contributing Editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David Nir:

And I'm David Nir, Political Director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. You can email us your thoughts at thedownballot@dailykos.com or find us on Twitter @DKElections.

David Beard:

And please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. But let's go ahead and get to today's episode. What are we going to be covering, Nir?

David Nir:

We have a bunch of elections to recap. There was a special election for a congressional seat in Texas. There were primaries in South Carolina that saw one pro-impeachment Republican go down to defeat and there was also an unusual Saturday special election in Alaska for the seat that had been held for decades by the late Republican Congressman Don Young so we'll be talking about all of that.

David Nir:

After we recap those weekly hits, we are going to be discussing Wisconsin with the chair of the State Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, who will tell us exactly what a state party like his does and the key races that they're focusing on this November, so please stick with us.

David Nir:

Primary season continues apace but we also had an election on Saturday. We'll get to that one in a minute, but Beard, why don't you kick us off with the top goings on from Tuesday night?

David Beard:

Sure. So we're going to start in Texas where there was a special election held to fill the remaining term for democratic representative Filemon Vela who resigned earlier this year to take a job at a lobbying firm. Conservative activists, Mayra Flores flipped this Rio Grande Valley-based district to the GOP. She won about 51% of the vote. There were four candidates on the ballot but just one major Republican and one major Democrat and then two very minor, one Democrat and one Republican who took a very small percentage of the vote each. And so, Flores won 51% of the vote, the major democratic candidate, former Cameron County commissioner, Dan Sanchez, won about 43% of the vote.

David Beard:

Now, there's a couple of mitigating factors here. Republicans spent over a million dollars on this race. They really invested. Democrats only began airing TV ads in the final week. They didn't spend very much money. This district is changing a significant amount. Biden won the current district which is still from the 2010 redistricting cycle by a 52-48 margin but Biden wins the new district that will go into effect this November by a 57-42 margin so it's getting noticeably more Democratic. And so, there wasn't a ton of investment in trying to hold this seat on the Democratic side.

David Beard:

That being said, that's definitely a shift in the margin from 52-48 Biden to, if you combine the Democrats and the Republicans, about 53% voted Republican and 47% voted Democrat so that's a noticeable shift. It's certainly in line with a more Republican-leaning year which is what we've been seeing with the polling and with other information that's been coming in. The other factor here that's certainly worth noting is that it was very, very low turnout so that can also be a factor in why there was somewhat of a shift. So you don't want to take this and just say, "Oh, we saw this shift. It'll translate all the way to November in every way," but it's certainly a signal worth acknowledging that it is certainly a sign of a Republican leaning environment right now.

David Nir:

The other thing to note is that had Flores not gotten a majority of the vote, the race would've gone to a runoff and Sanchez was actually quite angry at the democratic establishment and the DCCC in particular for coming in so late. It does seem that with a little bit more effort, Flores could have been held under the 50% mark and maybe Democrats would have lost in a second round but you'd certainly always rather have the chance to fight another day.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think the thinking of the Democrats is even if it's only going to be around for six months, it's still worth fighting for... Flores has only won 51% of the vote. You would think that a real investment here had the Democratic Party done that from the start, when the Republicans started investing, there was a good chance she could have been held under that and it would've gone to a runoff. And then, who knows? You never know with 100% certainty how an election's going to turn out.

David Nir:

So we'll switch gears to a couple of primaries in South Carolina that have been framed as Trump's revenge and he did, in fact, exact revenge against a Republican Congressman in the 7th district, Tom Rice, who was one of the ten who voted for impeachment. Rice got completely obliterated by State Rep, Russell Fry, who beat him 51-25. What was even more remarkable about this is there were five Republicans total challenging Rice so for Fry to get a majority of the vote was pretty unexpected. Even Fry claimed that his own polling showed the race going to a runoff.

David Nir:

Really though, this whole outcome feels pretty predictable. The 7th District which is in the Pee Dee region in the state's northeastern corner was actually Trump's best district in the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary and the seat really barely changed at all in redistricting. What I think matters most here is what this says for the remaining pro-impeachment House Republicans who still have primaries yet to come. Of the ten, four decided to retire. Rice is the first to actually lose and there is still one, David Valadao, on California whose primary hasn't been resolved yet. He probably will survive and then four more after that.

David Nir:

I think the two who are probably going to be at most risk right now are Peter Meijer in Michigan's 3rd Congressional District. And of course, Liz Cheney, where we've seen multiple polls now showing her getting completely obliterated. Rice, kind of an enigma. He was always a very low-key, extremely conservative guy, but he just felt that, Jan 6th, really, he had had enough. In remarks a few weeks ago before the primary, he even referred to Trump as a dictator and he seemed completely dispirited about the direction of the Republican party. He said that Trump just wants the entire GOP to be yes men and his diagnosis is exactly right, of course. Really, there's absolutely nothing to feel about this outcome except being deeply depressed at the state of the GOP going even further toward cult status.

David Beard:

I think what we can see, particularly as it looks like, as you mentioned, Cheney and Meijer are probably in very tough shape given this election result. That the only real protection for a Republican running after having voted to impeach Trump is to be in a state like California or Washington state where they do a top two primary so that they can outpace that person with other votes, potentially Democratic and independent votes, and don't have to face them in a Republican electorate. That's where the three, you mentioned Valadao and there's two in Washington state, who have a good shot to move onto the general election and honestly, at this point, I would be surprised if any of the other ones did.

David Nir:

The other South Carolina race that was really closely watched last night, I think, reinforces this as well. This is the 1st District where representative Nancy Mace beat former State Representative, Katie Arrington, 53-45 so she won without a runoff. Trump also despised Mason. He endorsed Arrington. Trump was pissed at Mace because right after Jan. 6, she made a few comments that were critical of him. But unlike Tom Rice who really stuck to his guns the whole way through, she very, very quickly backed off. She did not vote for impeachment and a number of press accounts refer to her as a Trump critic; that's complete bullshit.

David Nir:

A few months ago, Nancy Mace did one of the most humiliating things we have seen in an era when Republican politicians regularly humiliate themselves. The day after Trump endorsed Arrington, Mace went up to New York City, 800 miles away from her district, and filmed a video, it looked like it was filmed on a cellphone, of her in front of Trump Tower pledging her loyalty to Donald Trump. It was just super, super cringey, it was totally gross, and it totally worked for her. She really spent much of the race trying to prove her Trump-y bona fides. She also laid some effective attacks on Arrington who was responsible for this seat flipping to the Democrats in 2018. Mace picked it up for the Republicans again in 2020.

David Nir:

But really, the only lesson here is maybe you can get back in the graces of enough Trump-y voters, even if you can't win Trump back himself, simply by licking his boots. Man, if anything, not that Donald Trump is clever enough to see it this way, but winning back a one-time mild critic is almost more powerful because it just shows your absolute dominance. He was never going to get Rice back but now he's brought Mace back to heel, he can obviously do it with anyone else who even has dared utter any negative comments about him in recent years. So again, I think a truly dismaying outcome.

David Beard:

Yeah. That reminds me of the Ohio Senate Primary actually, where Trump ended up endorsing Vance and the talking point going around was that Trump actually likes when formerly Trump-critical Republicans come crawling back and go over the top to prove themselves loyal to Trump like Mace has done. So while his candidate didn't win, I don't think he'll be too upset about the outcome given how Mace has acted.

David Beard:

Our last election that we're going to cover in the Weekly Hits is the election that took place on Saturday. It was the special election for Alaska's at-large congressional seat that's taking place due to representative Don Young passing away earlier this year.

Alaska has a different electoral system. All of the candidates were in the ballot in this first round and the top four candidates will advance to a second round on August 16th. That ballot will use ranked choice voting to determine the winner which means that anybody who votes can rank the four candidates, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then the fourth place candidate from those results will get eliminated and if you had voted for that candidate, first, the candidate that you voted for second will then get your vote.

The same thing would happen with the third place candidate after those votes were reallocated. And then you would only have two candidates remaining. And the person then with the majority of those two candidates would be the person elected. Ballots are still being counted, but the AP has declared three of the four candidates who are going to advance to the second round, the first being former governor Sarah Palin, who has a clear lead so far with about 30% of the vote.

David Beard:

Of course, Palin is a Republican, as is the so far second-place candidate, businessman Nick Begich, who has about 19% of the vote. And then independent Al Gross, who is also the former 2020 Democratic nominee for Senate, but is running now as an Independent; he's also been called to advance. He has about 13% of the vote so far. And then, the fourth slot hasn't been called yet, but former Democratic state representative Mary Peltola is currently in that spot and will likely advance as well, unless late-breaking ballots are radically different than what's been counted so far.

David Beard:

Palin's strong first-round showing, getting over 30% of the vote, makes it likely that she'll be one of the last two candidates standing when this ranked-choice voting takes place. So, the big question is who's going to make it into that other slot where the fourth place candidate and then the third place candidate are eliminated?

David Beard:

If Begich advances, he's probably favored to consolidate the anti-Palin vote, as he's a fellow Republican but would probably collect the overwhelming number of independent and Democratic votes. But if either Al Gross or Peltola advance, then Palin would probably be the favorite as the only Republican of the two candidates when the ranked-choice voting takes place. But that's not certain. I don't want to say that one of the other two candidates couldn't beat Palin in that last two candidates portion, but we'll have to wait and see. I think Palin would be the favorite in that circumstance.

David Nir:

Palin was always a polarizing figure, but she has Donald Trump's endorsement, which makes it much more likely that Begich would pick up those Independents and Democrats, as you were suggesting, if it is those two facing off against each other at the very end of the instant runoff tabulations. One other thing we should note is that the second round, which you said is taking place on August 16th, that is also the day of the state's regular primary. And there is, once again, going to be a huge ballot of candidates seeking this position for a full term.

Usually, when you have these simultaneous elections, you see the same sets of candidates advance. But because things are so unusual, this is the first time any state anywhere has ever used this top-four system, we could wind up with a different group of four candidates who advance to the November general election, which again, will also be decided by an instant runoff. So, if for no other reason, just watching this unique electoral system unfold, it's going to be worth watching both of these races, the special and the regular election.

David Beard:

And incumbency in Alaska is so important, as we've seen. So, it'll be interesting to see, in that primary vote, they won't know who the incumbent is. So similar to this one, it'll be a free-for-all. As we saw, so many candidates ran in this first round.

David Nir:

Well, that wraps up our weekly hits. We are going to be talking, after the break, with the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, Ben Wikler, about all of the fascinating races that his state has in store for us this year. So, please stay with us after the break.

Every year, it seems that Wisconsin tops the list of states with incredibly important and incredibly competitive elections. That was certainly true in 2018, in 2020. And it's going to be true again this November, in 2022.

We have joining us today, on The Downballot, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, Ben Wikler, to tell us everything that is going on in his state this year. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Ben Wikler:

Thanks so much Nir. Thanks so much Beard. It's great to be with the Davids.

David Nir:

Ben, you haven't exactly had what might be called a typical path to becoming chair of your state party. I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how it is you came to run the Wisconsin Dems.

Ben Wikler:

Sure. In the short-term, Wisconsin has a elected state party chair. You're elected by conventions to our state party convention. That happened with me in June of 2019. But if you go back in time, I grew up in Madison. I actually live in the house that I grew up in. I bought it from my mom who now lives four blocks away. And my wife, Beth, and I have three young kids. So, we have lots of helpful grandparent time, which is great.

Ben Wikler:

I got involved in politics a lot as a kid. And my godmother, a woman named Ada Deer, ran for Congress when I was 11 and became the first American Indian woman to win a congressional primary. So, knocking on doors for her and stuffing envelopes, putting up yard signs was kind of my entree into volunteering for campaigns.

I got to volunteer for a then state Representative who ran for Congress, named Tammy Baldwin, who's now well-known as our fantastic U.S. Senator. Worked on the governor's race. I also got very involved in activism and in comedy writing because The Onion was based in Madison. And so, my friends and I were obsessed with it. And we wrote for first, an underground student newspaper in middle school, another one in high school. And then eventually, we kept sending every issue to The Onion HQ. And eventually they wrote back and invited us to come in.

So, my friend, Peter Koechley and I, who went on to help launch Upworthy, started writing Onion headlines when we were seniors in high school. And that path led to, in college, I got very involved in activism and interned for Russ Feingold then, as a college student. I met my wife putting up posters for a protest together and fell in love with her.

And then, my senior year in college, I met a comedian who was increasingly involved in politics, named Al Franken. And my background with The Onion and doing political stuff, led him to hire me to work with him on the book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. And I worked at Air America Radio as one of the producers on his radio show. And that was kind of my entree to the national progressive movement.

That's where I first met Markos Moulitsas and people involved in Daily Kos and tons of folks. There was a Harvard professor that we would book on the show to talk about bankruptcy and the way that tax laws worked, named Elizabeth Warren. There were all these fascinating people who came through and were on the show.

When Al Franken moved to Minnesota, I moved to Ohio and worked for Sherrod Brown for Senate race and then worked for different advocacy and organizing organizations for a bunch of years until I was at MoveOn as the DC director in 2013 through, I guess, '18. And was involved, first in trying to stop Trump from getting power, and then in trying to organize the huge pushback to stop the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the gutting of Medicaid. I got to work with disability rights activists and so many people who were mobilizing all across the country.

During all this time, I had dreamed of eventually raising my family in Wisconsin. And my wife had heard me singing Wisconsin's praises from our first date on. In 2018, after our third child arrived, we decided to move back. And I volunteered a whole bunch for the Evers campaign and for Baldwin's reelection campaign at that point. And then, when we had actually landed in Wisconsin, the then state party chair decided not to run for a third term. So, I threw my hat in the ring and wound up crisscrossing the state, going to county party meetings, talking to all these people; learning everything I could about all the things we needed to do to win and was elected that June. And it has been a nonstop rollercoaster ever since, for the last three years. I was reelected in 2021.

David Nir:

Let's talk a little bit about what that rollercoaster ride has been like. I'm sure that some of our listeners are probably pretty plugged into their own state Democratic parties. But I'll bet that many folks aren't necessarily all that familiar with what their state parties do. And of course, the goal of any party organization is to get their candidates elected. But what exactly does the Wisconsin Democratic party do to make that happen?

Ben Wikler:

The biggest part of our budget and the crown jewel, the central thing that we do, on a year-round basis, is organize in every corner of the state. Our state party unusually uses the Obama campaign model, where our organizers actually build teams of volunteers that run door-to-door canvasing and phone banking operations in their own communities. And when you do that on a continuous basis, as we've done now since my predecessor, who launched these neighborhood teams in the spring of 2017, and we've built and built and built them; we now have hundreds across the state. When you do that continuously, you actually build momentum over time. So, every dollar you spend on organizing goes further, because you can have one organizer who's working with multiple teams to coach and support them and make sure they have the data they need. But you don't have to have a staff member at every canvas launch location.

Ben Wikler:

You can have teams running door-to-door canvases from their living rooms and from coffee shops around the state. So, that is one huge part. But it's now so much more than that as well.

We have a communications team that is doing everything we can to make sure folks know how terrible Ron Johnson is and how terrible the other Republicans running for governor and Congress and state legislature are. We have a voter protection operation that works, now, on a year-round basis. It didn't used to be year-round. But something we've really focused on over these last few years that works to make sure that local clerks aren't rolling back voting rights, that we're recruiting and supporting poll workers, poll observers; lawyers who are able to help voters resolve issues.

We run a voter protection hotline that any of our listeners who happen to be in Wisconsin can call. It's 608-DEM-3232. We have a data team that helps make sure we're figuring out where the voters we need to mobilize are and who we need to persuade.

Ben Wikler:

We have a political team that includes the staff that just make sure the party operates, in terms of supporting our county parties and congressional district parties, in youth caucuses; our state administrative committee, which is my boss. It's our statewide board. And organizes our state party convention. Every state party does one of these every year. Ours is coming up later this month, the 25th and the 26th of June in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It's going to be amazing.

Ben Wikler:

There's a coalitions team, which is also a year-round team that specializes in working with building the coalitions partnerships with Black and Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander; Wisconsinites with tribal nations, sovereign nations across Wisconsin; with rural Wisconsinites, with LGBTQ Wisconsinites, to make sure that our big tent party includes and lifts up everybody.

Ben Wikler:

We have a candidate services team that, this spring, worked with hundreds of local candidates running for offices like school board and city council to make sure that they were able to run digital ads, to be able to send mailings to their constituents and to connect with our field organizers to make sure that we were knocking on doors and supporting folks running for those offices.

They'll be back at it this fall with state legislative races and other races. And all of this is supported by our finance and HR and operations teams that do all the kind of back-end work that makes an organization go. So there's a whole bunch of people, but the big idea here is candidates should have to be great at being candidates, but they shouldn't also have to be great at figuring out how to stand up an organizing program or doing things that really shouldn't just be starting when the general election begins. There were days in the past in Wisconsin, where if someone wanted to run for Senate, they would have to find a statewide organizing director and fill in all the levels of that organizing program.

Sometimes in just a few months at the end. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's team hired their first staff in Wisconsin that August and had no time at all to try to figure out who should be talking to whom. The party can take care of all that. If you have a well funded well run organization, it's like a permanent piece of campaign infrastructure. And then the candidates can just focus on things that only a candidate can do. All of our candidates across Wisconsin now with the democratic party trust and work with our coordinated campaign. So that when we knock on doors, we talk about everyone running up and down the ballot. And that means that people who might not run for office otherwise can do so. It's almost like a form of public financing where people know that they won't need to raise the money for those pieces of the work because the party can take care of that. And that's allowed us to welcome just an extraordinary group of folks running for office holding office.

Ben Wikler:

Now, it's one reason why we have these contested primaries for a bunch of the statewide offices in November, because folks know that they don't need to do every piece. They just need to focus in on the being a candidate part of being a candidate.

David Beard:

Yeah. I've often heard it described as running a campaign as like building a small business, except you do it in the course of six to nine months, maybe a year. And you build it with the entire idea of going to election day and then sort of all that throwing away that small business that you spend all this time creating. But of course, a state party like yours can do so much of the infrastructure work that makes that so much more feasible for so many more people.

Ben Wikler:

That's exactly right. And it's so, I mean, from a business perspective, it is so dumb to do all this work and all this research and all this hiring, and then lay everybody off. Like it just doesn't make any sense.

David Beard:

Amen.

Ben Wikler:

By having organizers on the ground year, over year, over year, you it's like a flywheel. It's like it keeps on spinning faster and faster. So we had more volunteer shifts this spring than we had in the spring of 2021 and more in 2021 than we had in 2020 when we had a much bigger staff because we have kept these neighborhood teams going. And so the kind of the impact of supporting a state party actually grows each time because you get all these things established and you don't have to start from scratch every time there's a new race on the horizon.

David Beard:

So let's dive into the upcoming Wisconsin elections this November, which has two extremely important races at the top of the ticket. You've already mentioned governor Evers and Senator Johnson. Johnson is one of the worst senators in the country. He regularly makes odious statements and claims. A lot of people outside of Wisconsin, I'm sure have heard about him and heard not good things about him. But tell us how that race is shaping up and the race against him on the Democratic side.

Ben Wikler:

Ron Johnson is so, so appallingly extraordinarily bad. He is... It's not just that he says that COVID can be cured with mouthwash or says that the January 6th insurrectionists where patriots, who love their country and love law enforcement, which is something he actually said. He said he would've been scared if it had been Black Lives Matter protestors, but he wasn't scared with the protestors that were actually there. It's not just all that stuff. It's that he's profoundly self-serving. His claim to fame as a Senator is that he insisted on an extra tax break on top of Trump's giant tax scam that personally benefited him and his biggest donor massively. It's one of the most regressive tax cuts ever passed through the United States Congress that he insisted on putting in, and that he's been billing taxpayers to fly him back to Congress from his vacation home in Florida.

Ben Wikler:

So we've been making this case against him. And so many independent and grassroots organizations have done the same thing. His approval rating is now 36%, which is stunning in a year that's supposed to be tough for Democrats and good for Republicans. The Political Report called him the most vulnerable incumbent from either party in the Senate in 2022. And meanwhile, on the democratic side, there's a contested primary. There's a bunch of candidates who've made the ballot, but we won't know our nominee until August 9th. And so this is a perfect kind of case in point for why having a strong party matters, because we have to build the whole general election apparatus before August 9th. It's like building a spaceship right on the launchpad. And then once we have the nominee, they jump into the cockpit and they hit ignition.

We do not want to do the ‘building the plane as you fly’ metaphor that people often use because that is not sound aviation safety practice. You want to actually have the thing built before there's a pilot. So that's the work that we're doing. But I think we really have a shot because he's just so repellent to so many voters. And it's not just that people don't want to vote for him, it's that the chance to vote against him will cause more people to vote.

He's a negative voter turnout machine for our side and we're going to do everything we can to make sure folks know just how bad he is and that they have the power to oust him, that it is worth getting up off the couch and going in or better yet casting an absentee ballot. So we know you voted in advance. Those things can make the difference, not just to defeat him. But also we hope to expand the democratic majority in the Senate and give us a chance to actually pass into law so many of the things Democrats are fighting for.

David Beard:

And we've seen negative partisanship be a real motivating factor. Most prominently at the presidential level, of course. But when you've got a Senator like Johnson, who's so prominent and has so many negative feelings rightfully created among so many Wisconsin citizens. Like that's a motivating factor for them, for sure.

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. And I talked to folks, I mean, I will say some of our fundraising success this year has come because people want to make sure that Ron Johnson does not win and certainly there's volunteer shifts. It reminds me a lot of the campaign against Scott Walker in 2018 where people saw that he was vulnerable, saw that he was terrible, tons of candidates ran. And in that election, everyone came together around the nominee and we were able to prevail. I think, we're looking for a similar path in the Senate race and I think we have a very, very good chance of ending Ron Johnson's political career this November.

David Nir:

Can you tell us a little bit more about this spaceship that you're building on the launchpad for the eventual Democratic nominee for the Senate race?

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. So it's all the pieces of the party that I spoke about; the digital, the data, the organizing, the voter protection, the communications, all these different elements. Specifically, in some cases with staff just focused on Ron Johnson and the Senate race. And then with each of the Senate campaigns, we want to make sure that they know that we're doing all these different pieces and understand what they anticipate their needs will be.

So whoever the nominee is, and I should mention our state party because of our state party constitution, we are bound and committed to remaining neutral in the primary. So we're not putting our thumb on the scale, but all the candidates have told us that once we have a nominee, they will work with the infrastructure that we've put in place. As opposed to doing what has often happened in different states around the country, which is you get a Senator nominee and they decide they want to reshuffle all the staff and reshape how the program works and all this kind of stuff.

Ben Wikler:

This is the same strategy we used for the presidential in 2020. We built a presidential scale campaign through the state party. We kept briefing all the candidates in the primary about it. And then eventually we had a nominee and the nominee just adopted our operation wholesale and added their in-state staff to do the things that the nominee needed. But the organizing whole structure, all these different pieces were held and carried forward. And that meant that we were the relationships we built, the trust we'd built, all that kind of stuff was actually preserved and accelerated as opposed to being broken down and then attempted to... There was no Humpty Dumpty situation with a fall and then a reassembly.

David Nir:

So in the race for governor, you almost have the inverse situation where we know who the democratic nominee is going to be. Of course, that's going to be governor Evers, but Republicans are in the midst of a really nasty primary that I don't think has gone, maybe exactly as at least some folks might have expected. So can you fill us in on who the major players are there and what you see happening and the final outcome being there?

Ben Wikler:

I will say that we went to the Republican state party convention a few weeks ago and had a mobile billboard with an image, an animation of a dumpster fire and held the press conference in front of the dumpster fire mobile billboard. Because that is what the Republican gubernatorial primary is. This is a group of extremist candidates that keep on leapfrogging each other into the most radical fringes of the right wing fever swamps.

Rebecca Kleefisch was the first to announce. She was Scott Walker's Lieutenant governor. If you go to radicalrebecca.com, you can find out more about her. She is someone who just keeps like kind of lurching and grabbing to the right. I'll just give one example. Wisconsin has an 1849 ban on abortion. This is pre-Civil War law. The only exception it says in the statute, if two doctors agree that an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, that's the only condition where it could be allowed.

Rebecca Kleefisch wants to remove that exception from that law. It's so far out of step with where our values and the vast majority of Wisconsinites are. She's also wants to completely scrap our bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission. She said that there should be an elected official in charge so they would be one throat to choke. That is a direct quote, one throat to choke in charge of the elections. And she was pushed on this by election officials who said, don't use these metaphors when you're talking about election administrators. And she said, oh, I use that phrase all the time. That was her big defense. It's alarming, but apparently radical Rebecca Kleefisch isn't extreme right enough for Donald Trump because Donald Trump has endorsed a different candidate, Tim Michels. Who jumped into the race very late and has been scrambling to get to the furthest right position in this primary that he can possibly find.

He, this week, came out against marriage equality, which is one of those arguments that you thought was over. He supports going back to the 19th century with the 1849 abortion ban in Wisconsin. He joins Rebecca Kleefisch and wanting to totally scrap our bipartisan Wisconsin's elections commission. He's talked about 2020 being rigged. He's one of these kind of Doug Mastriano ultra-hard right candidates who the more voters find out about what he actually thinks about things, the less support that he has.

There's two others in the race as well. There's a guy named Timothy Ramthun who wants to retroactively decertify the 2020 election, which just has no basis in the constitution or law, but that doesn't stop him. Tim Ramthun has a bill that would allow any election where the margin of victories is less than the number of absentee ballots cast in the race to be nullified. That bill so far has not moved through the state legislature. But I have now come to believe that nothing's impossible with these Republicans. And then the guy named Kevin Nicholson, who actually used to be the president of the College Democrats.

But now is the kind of pet project of Dick Uihlein, who is the biggest funder of the Stop The Steal rally and is right there with Rebecca Mercer in the kind of ultra hard right authoritarian billionaire category.

So that is the Republican slate of candidates for Governor. We won't know which one is the nominee until August 9th, but we can already tell that all of them are so far out on the right that we have a real shot at defeating them with a candidate as common, sensical and pragmatic and focused on doing the right thing as our democratic Governor Tony Evers. So Tony Evers won in 2018 by 1.1 percentage points, which I call a Wisconsin landslide. We’re the only state where four of the last six presidential races come down the less than one percentage point.

Tony Evers ran on a platform of protecting healthcare, supporting our schools and fixing the damn roads, which is a pretty salty language there. He has fixed the roads. He's paved enough roads to drive to Denver and back. He has restored funding to our schools, which are now back in the top 10 in the country. He's protected healthcare and gotten shots into arms. He's also kept his campaign promise to cut taxes from the middle class. He signed into law of 15% income tax cut and he's invested stimulus funds in small businesses. We've had 4,200 small businesses open storefronts and expand operations on Main Streets across our state.

So we have record low unemployment right now, and we have a state budget surplus. He's demonstrated that the Democratic kind of basic idea of investing from the middle out to grow the economy in a way that works for people can succeed in Wisconsin and that has made him someone that people basically trust. The last public poll, 40% of people disagreed with his statement, he cares about people like me. 54% of people agreed.

Most Wisconsinites know that he's on their side. It's such a clear contrast. Someone who just wakes up wanting to help people and do what's right as opposed to this group of Republicans who are supplicating for Trump's endorsement for the far right fringe of their party, and especially trying to rig the rules and potentially overturn our democracy. That's a contrast that works well for us. In a year that I recognize it's going to be tough nationally, I think we have a very good shot at winning two races that the Cook Political Report calls a tossup, both the Senate and the Governor's race.

David Nir:

For those of us who've watched Wisconsin from the outside, we've seen Governor Evers stand as a bulwark against some absolutely batshit legislation that Republicans have passed in the legislature. Maybe tell us about a few of the examples that Evers has prevented from becoming law.

Ben Wikler:

I appreciate that question. He called himself a goalie. He didn't realize that would be such an important part of his job when he was first running. In 2020, I should mention, Governor Evers put his campaign on hold and just focused on supporting state legislative candidates through a project called Save The Veto, that was a partnership with the state party, and we managed to stop Republicans from getting super majorities in both chambers.

If 3,500 votes had gone the other way, they would have those super majorities now. So it was down to the wire, but because he in veto bills and the state legislature sustains those vetoes, he was able to veto a bill they passed this spring that would allow people to bring loaded guns onto school property in their cars. That is not law because of his veto pen.

Ben Wikler:

He's vetoed 14 different voter suppression and election sabotage bills. He has vetoed a string of anti-reproductive rights bills, and Republicans are not only saying they would try to pass all these bills if they get a trifecta in the state, they have a lot more coming. The kinds of really hideous voter suppression bills that became law in Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Florida. Those would absolutely be law in Wisconsin if it wasn't for having a Governor who believes in democracy.

David Beard:

So you mentioned the upholding of the vetoes, which was allowed to happen because Democrats prevented the Republicans from getting a two thirds majority in the state legislature in 2020. Of course, Wisconsin has one of the worst Republican gerrymanders in the country. That's going to continue into the new decade. What are your goals as from the point of view of the state party for the state legislative elections that are coming in November? And is there a candidate or two you'd like to highlight for those races?

Ben Wikler:

Absolutely. Republicans have managed to re-gerrymander the maps, at least for now, with some help I should mention from the U.S. Supreme Court, which unlike in other states, decided to reach down and strike down our state legislative maps for reasons that will puzzle constitutional scholars for decades. So we have really, really tough maps this cycle.

Ben Wikler:

Republicans are explicitly trying to get super majorities in both chambers yet again, and we are explicitly determinedly working to stop them. We have great democratic leaders in both chambers that we're working closely with, Greta Neubauer in the Assembly, Janet Bewley in the State Senate. We have strong candidates across the state. Republicans are targeting folks like Katrina Shankland in central Wisconsin and Steve Doyle in western Wisconsin, really across the board in our state.

Ben Wikler:

Any place there's a Democrat, Republicans want to take them out. In those districts, we're going to absolutely support our candidates, and we will be organizing everywhere because we believe in the reverse coattails effect that having candidates on the ballot and supporting those candidates turns out voters who can affect the top of the ticket as well. That the essential thing is to make sure that they don't get the two-thirds majorities, and to win the governorship.

Ben Wikler:

Then next year, just to squeeze this in, in April of 2023, we have a state Supreme Court race. There will not be a lot happening across the country in election days that spring, but that race will be for the majority in Wisconsin state Supreme Court. If we can sustain the Governor's veto and if we have a non-hyper right wing majority in our state Supreme court, that sets us up to have a secure and fair and real legitimate election in 2024 when Wisconsin will probably be the tipping point state yet again. And so that is the kind of three hurdles that we have to jump through in order to make sure that the attempt that Republicans attempted in 2020 doesn't carry through in 2024.

David Nir:

It is almost a year off, but I would love to talk a little bit more about that state Supreme Court race because at Daily Kos, we have been obsessed with these sorts of races for many years, and only recently really I think has the broader progressive movement finally begun understood the importance of these races.

From my perspective, of course, I'd rather not be voting for judges at all, but this is the system that we have to live with, and the court right now is a four-three, usually conservative majority. We could flip that because of this Republican seat that's coming up. So can you tell us a little bit about the candidates who are running and how the whole timing of that election works because the time of year is even a little bit unusual?

Ben Wikler:

Sure. Six months after November 8th, 2022, it'll be April, early April 2023, and Wisconsin will have a statewide election, that will follow a February primary. There are already two kind of more progressive independent candidates who have announced their candidacy. On the right, the current justice is Pat Roggensack and she is retiring. She will be 81 when the election takes place, so it's an open seat. And the Republican rumored to be most likely to run is Dan Kelly, who's the candidate we defeated in 2020.

Dan Kelly is a hyperpartisan Republican lawyer who Donald Trump endorsed in 2020 in a big rally, and then kept talking about during his COVID briefings from the White House, which is arguably a Hatch Act violation right there. But Trump was all in for him because he thought that Dan Kelly would cast the deciding vote in our state Supreme Court to overturn the election results if he lost. As it was, we had one more vote against Trump than there were votes for Trump, and Trump was not able to overturn the election results in our state.

Dan Kelly is talking publicly about trying again and making sure that guy does not get in our state Supreme Court is just absolutely critical to people who want to live in a democracy nationally. There shouldn't be so much that rests on Wisconsin state Supreme Court decisions for the future of democracy in the entire United States, but this is where we are. I hope folks will circle in their calendar April of 2023, and we're going to need all the help we can get to mobilize and shoot up, turnout in an election that historically the kind of odd numbered year spring elections have not been a giant national and statewide focus.

David Beard:

So how can our Wisconsinite listeners get in touch with the Democratic party in their state and get more involved?

Ben Wikler:

Wherever you might be, you can support Democrats and the Democratic party of Wisconsin in fighting for victory for Governor Evers in defeating Ron Johnson, and I think Dems up and down the ballot, including defeating Derrick van Orden, who's an insurrectionist and is currently on probation for trying to bring a gun on a plane. He's running for Congress in the 3rd congressional district, which is an open seat. We need help across the board and you can get involved. You can become a monthly donor. That is the single, my favorite thing you can do.

If you go to wisdems.org/monthly, you can sign up to give a few bucks a month, that helps us to hire and know that we'll be able to keep our staff on month over month, year over year, and that in turn allows us to do the kind of deep, long term organizing building neighborhood teams that I've been talking about that helps us win, especially in these tough elections like the spring state Supreme Court race next year. So wisdems.org/monthly is great. Go to wisdems.org/convention to watch our state party convention, wherever you might be, or register and come to join us in lacrosse on June 25th to 26th.

And finally, I'll give the link wisdems.org/volunteer. You can join our virtual phone banks. You can join our volunteer operation to turn out every possible democratic voter. Races here are so close, so often. I was just talking to someone whose county board majority is in place because of a five-vote margin. That kind of thing is not uncommon across our state. And so helping turn out votes can have a huge impact, not just on the lives of Wisconsinites, but in the lives of everyone affected by who has the majority in the U.S. Senate or who the U.S. President is, or who is affected by the U.S. House majority, which is everybody on earth. So get involved wisdems.org/monthly, /donate, /volunteer and /convention.

David Nir:

We've been talking with Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party about all of the intensely competitive races coming up this year and in fact, next year as well in his state. Ben, thank you so much for joining us on The Downballot today.

Ben Wikler:

It has been my great pleasure. Thanks so much, Nir. Thanks so much, Beard.

David Beard:

That's all from us this week. Thanks to Ben Wikler for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcast. You can reach us by email at thedownballot@dailycoast.com. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor, Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.

Highlights from The Downballot: Ben Wikler on how Democrats can win big in Wisconsin

Posted on June 17, 2022 by Dorothy He

This week on The Downballot, hosts David Nir and David Beard recapped recent elections, including a special election for a congressional seat in Texas and primaries in South Carolina that saw one pro-impeachment Republican go down in defeat. The pair also discussed an unusual Saturday special election in Alaska for the seat that had been held for decades by the late Republican Rep. Don Young.

Nir and Beard welcomed the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, as this week’s guest. Wikler shared more about what a state party like his does and the key races they're focusing on this November.

You can listen below or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!

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Beard kicked off the program with the top headlines from Tuesday night.

Texas held a special election to fill the remaining term for Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela, who resigned earlier this year to take a job with a lobbying firm. Conservative activist Mayra Flores flipped this Rio Grande Valley-based district to the GOP, winning about 51% of the vote. There were four candidates on the ballot, but just one major Republican and one major Democrat. Flores won 51% of the vote, and the major Democratic candidate, former Cameron County commissioner Dan Sanchez won about 43% of the vote.

Beard noted that there wasn't a ton of investment in trying to hold this seat on the Democratic side and that Republicans noticed an opportunity and spent heavily on the race:

Republicans spent over a million dollars on this race. They really invested. Democrats only began airing TV ads in the final week. They didn't spend very much money. This district is changing a significant amount. Biden won the current district, which is still from the 2010 redistricting cycle, by a 52-48 margin, but Biden wins the new district that will go into effect this November by a 57-42 margin, so it's getting noticeably more Democratic.

“That being said, that's definitely a shift in the margin from 52-48 Biden to—if you combine the Democrats and the Republicans—about 53% voted Republican and 47% voted Democrat, so that's a noticeable shift. It's certainly in line with a more Republican-leaning year, which is what we've been seeing with the polling and with other information that's been coming in,” Beard added. “The other factor here that's certainly worth noting is that it was very, very low turnout, so that can also be a factor in why there was somewhat of a shift. So you don't want to take this and just say, ‘Oh, we saw this shift. It'll translate all the way to November in every way,’ but it's certainly a signal worth acknowledging that it is certainly a sign of a Republican-leaning environment right now.”

The hosts then recapped primaries in South Carolina, which some have framed as “Trump's revenge.” Trump did, in fact, exact revenge against a Republican congressman in the 7th district, Tom Rice, who was one of the ten GOP House members who voted for impeachment. Rice was soundly defeated by state Rep. Russell Fry, who beat him 51-25. “What was even more remarkable about this is there were five Republicans total challenging race so for Fry to get a majority of the vote was pretty unexpected. Even Fry claimed that his own polling showed the race going to a runoff,” Nir said.

The other South Carolina race that was really closely watched this week was in the 1st District, where Rep. Nancy Mace beat former state Rep. Katie Arrington 53-45, thus avoiding a runoff. Trump endorsed Arrington, as he was furious at a few of Mace’s critical comments of him after Jan. 6, even though she very quickly backed off.

On Saturday, Alaska held a special election for Alaska's at-large congressional seat, which has been vacant since GOP Rep. Don Young passed away earlier this year. Alaska has a fairly distinct electoral system: all of the candidates were on the ballot in this first round, and the top four candidates will advance to a second round on Aug. 16. That ballot will use ranked-choice voting to determine the winner. Ballots are still being counted, but the AP has declared three of the four candidates who will advance to the second round, the first being former Gov. Sarah Palin, who has a clear lead so far with about 30% of the vote.

Beard summarized the outcome so far:

Of course, Palin is a Republican, as is the so far second-place candidate, businessman Nick Begich, who has about 19% of the vote. And then independent Al Gross, who is also the former 2020 Democratic nominee for Senate but is running now as an Independent; he's also been called to advance. He has about 13% of the vote so far. And then, the fourth slot hasn't been called yet, but former Democratic state Rep. Mary Peltola is currently in that spot and will likely advance as well, unless late-breaking ballots are radically different than what's been counted so far.

Palin's strong first-round showing, getting over 30% of the vote, makes it likely that she will be one of the last two candidates standing when this ranked-choice voting takes place. The big question, Beard points out, is: Who is going to make it into that other slot where the fourth-place candidate and then the third-place candidate are eliminated?

While Palin has always been a polarizing figure, she has Donald Trump's endorsement, which makes it much more likely that Begich would pick up Independents and Democrats, if it is those two facing off against each other at the very end of the instant runoff tabulations.

At this point, Wikler joined the hosts to discuss the crucial work of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

“Let's talk a little bit about what that rollercoaster ride has been like. I'm sure that some of our listeners are probably pretty plugged into their own state Democratic parties. But I'll bet that many folks aren't necessarily all that familiar with what their state parties do. And of course, the goal of any party organization is to get its candidates elected. But what exactly does the Wisconsin Democratic Party do to make that happen?” Nir asked.

The biggest part of the organization’s budget and its crown jewel, Wikler asserts, is its organization model, which allows it to reach voters in every corner of the state:

Our state party unusually uses the Obama campaign model, where our organizers actually build teams of volunteers that run door-to-door canvassing and phone banking operations in their own communities. And when you do that on a continuous basis, as we've done now since my predecessor, who launched these neighborhood teams in the spring of 2017, and we've built and built and built them; we now have hundreds across the state. When you do that continuously, you actually build momentum over time. So, every dollar you spend on organizing goes further, because you can have one organizer who's working with multiple teams to coach and support them and make sure they have the data they need.

A robust voter protection operation that is run on a year-round basis is now a mainstay of the organization’s work, as well. Wikler highlighted how the party has increasingly focused on voting rights over these last few years to make sure that local clerks aren't rolling back voting rights. The state Democratic Party also recruits and supports poll workers, poll observers, and lawyers who are able to help voters resolve issues. A voter protection hotline is also available for anyone in Wisconsin to call at 608-DEM-3232.

Last, but not least, the party’s data team helps make sure they’re figuring out where the voters they need to mobilize are and who they need to persuade.

Next, the trio delved into Wikler and his team’s plan to defeat Republican Sen. Ron Johnson this fall. As Wikler put it, “Ron Johnson is so, so appallingly extraordinarily bad”:

It’s not just that he says that COVID can be cured with mouthwash or says that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were patriots who love their country and love law enforcement—which is something he actually said. He said he would've been scared if it had been Black Lives Matter protestors, but he wasn't scared with the protestors that were actually there. It's not just all that stuff. It's that he's profoundly self-serving. His claim to fame as a senator is that he insisted on an extra tax break on top of Trump's giant tax scam that personally benefited him and his biggest donor massively. It's one of the most regressive tax cuts ever passed through the United States Congress that he insisted on putting in, and that he's been billing taxpayers to fly him back to Congress from his vacation home in Florida.

So we've been making this case against him, and so many independent and grassroots organizations have done the same thing. His approval rating is now 36%, which is stunning in a year that's supposed to be tough for Democrats and good for Republicans. The Political Report called him the most vulnerable incumbent from either party in the Senate in 2022. And meanwhile, on the Democratic side, there's a contested primary. There's a bunch of candidates who've made the ballot, but we won't know our nominee until Aug. 9. And so this is a perfect kind of case in point for why having a strong party matters, because we have to build the whole general election apparatus before Aug. 9. It's like building a spaceship right on the launchpad. And then once we have the nominee, they jump into the cockpit and they hit ignition.

“Can you tell us a little bit more about this spaceship that you're building on the launchpad for the eventual Democratic nominee for the Senate race?” Nir asked.

Wikler discussed the intersection of the digital, the data, the organizing, the voter protection, the communications—all the different elements. He also mentioned that, due to state party rules, the Wisconsin Democratic Party is bound and committed to remaining neutral in the primary. “So we're not putting our thumb on the scale, but all the candidates have told us that once we have a nominee, they will work with the infrastructure that we've put in place,” he added. “As opposed to doing what has often happened in different states around the country, which is: you get a Senate nominee, and they decide they want to reshuffle all the staff and reshape how the program works and all this kind of stuff.”

As far as goals from the point of view of the state party for the state legislative elections that are coming in November, and candidates to highlight for those races, Wikler had the following to say:

Republicans have managed to re-gerrymander the maps, at least for now, with some help, I should mention, from the U.S. Supreme Court, which unlike in other states, decided to reach down and strike down our state legislative maps for reasons that will puzzle constitutional scholars for decades. So we have really, really tough maps this cycle.

Republicans are explicitly trying to get supermajorities in both chambers yet again, and we are explicitly determinedly working to stop them. We have great Democratic leaders in both chambers that we're working closely with: Greta Neubauer in the Assembly, Janet Bewley in the state Senate. We have strong candidates across the state. ...

Then next year, just to squeeze this in, in April of 2023, we have a state Supreme Court race. There will not be a lot happening across the country in elections that spring, but that race will be for the majority in Wisconsin state Supreme Court. If we can sustain the governor's veto and if we have a non-hyper right wing majority in our state Supreme court, that sets us up to have a secure and fair and legitimate election in 2024, when Wisconsin will probably be the tipping point state yet again.

Lastly, Beard asked Wikler how listeners could help: “So how can our Wisconsinite listeners get in touch with the Democratic Party in their state and get more involved?”

Wikler replied:

Wherever you might be, you can support Democrats and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in fighting for victory for Gov. Evers and defeating Ron Johnson. I think Dems up and down the ballot, including defeating Derek van Orden, who's an insurrectionist currently on probation for trying to bring a gun on a plane. He's running for Congress in the third congressional district, which is an open seat. We need help across the board, and you can get involved. You can become a monthly donor. That is the single, my favorite thing you can do.

If you go to wisdems.org/monthly, you can sign up to give a few bucks a month; that helps us to hire and know that we'll be able to keep our staff on month over month, year over year, and that in turn allows us to do the kind of deep, long term organizing, building neighborhood teams … that help us win, especially in these tough elections like the spring state Supreme Court race next year. And finally, I'll give the link wisdems.org/volunteer. You can join our virtual phone banks. You can join our volunteer operation to turn out every possible Democratic voter. Races here are so close, so often.

The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter: @DKElections.