Wisconsin Warning

“These two wins means Democrats have officially won a majority of the Wisconsin recall elections!”

- Line from a Democratic Fundraiser email, dated August 16, 2011 hyping the results of the Wisconsin State Senate Recall elections.

“Close doesn’t count in elections — just ask Al Gore or Norm Coleman.

- Nate Silver – August 10, 2011, Fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

We lost pure and simple.

While the Democrats did win a majority of the recall elections, they only flipped two of the three seats they needed to take the Wisconsin State Senate back from the Republicans. These results are a warning for the President. They show Obama can’t win re-election simply by not being crazy.

Over the years I have worked in all parts of Wisconsin. My experience is Wisconsinites are honest, hard working people, with a strong sense of community and fair play. I wasn’t surprised at their outrage over Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals to strip the public employees union of collective bargaining rights.

After weeks of protests in Madison against the Governor’s proposal, Wisconsin seemed to be at the start of its own “Arab Spring”. The protestors stayed at it for weeks. The media was there in force, and it looked like momentum was finally on the side of the little guys as they stood up to powerful out of state interests bent on breaking the unions.

Initially, I was optimistic the Democrats would succeed in taking back the State Senate, but the first signs of trouble came early.

After the Wisconsin legislature passed Walker’s anti-union plan, the State held an election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Republican candidate, Supreme Court Justice David Prosser a conservative jurist, was being challenged for re-election by Democrat JoAnne Kloppenburg. Justice Prosser would be the deciding vote if Walker’s collective bargaining law came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. As a result what would normally have been a sleepy low turn-out judicial election became a major event.

Justice Prosser won re-election by 7,000 votes in a close race marred by election officials who misplaced thousands of ballots in the initial count.

However, if Wisconsin voters were as outraged as they seemed, Justice Prosser should have been easily defeated. If you can’t win a judicial election when the whole state is angry and in the streets protesting in favor of your position, how do you expect to win recall elections in six months?

You can’t.

One of the two Republicans who lost, Randy Hooper, (R-Dist. 18), originally won his seat by less than 200 votes. When protestors went to his house in Fond du Lac, he wife said he wasn’t home. Instead she told them they could find him in Madison shacked up with his 20-somethng year old mistress. To make matters worse for Hooper, it came out he had arranged a state job with a hefty raise for his girlfriend. Winning that seat should have been a “gimmie”. But the Democrats won it by only 2 percentage points.

The only strong showing the Democrats had was when they recalled Dan Kapanke (R- Dist. 32), by 10% of the vote. The Democrat, Jennifer Shilling, drew most of her support from the city of La Crosse, which over the past several cycles has been trending Democratic and is the home of a University of Wisconsin Campus.

In the remaining Districts where Republicans won, they won by margins at or near the margins they won with in 2010, and by which Gov. Walker had carried their Districts when he was elected.

Granted the Democrats set themselves a tall order. The targeted Republicans were all from Districts that were solidly Republican. One District hadn’t been represented by a Democrat since Grover Cleveland was President.

The Democrat’s defeat in Wisconsin was also a warning sign for President Obama.

The Democrat’s loss shows Obama can’t assume that people will be so angry at the Republicans or so afraid of Perry, Bachmann or any other crazy in the race that they will flock to him if he simply looks reasonable.

People are too afraid for that work.

They have been terrified since the 2008 economic collapse. They want a leader who will stand up to the forces that got them in this mess, and who has a plan for getting them out. That is why they are attracted to the Tea Party movement. Tea Party candidates appear to have nothing directly to do with creating the current crisis and appear to have a plan for steering the country safely through the storm.

To win in 2012, Obama must convince voters he has clear plans for the country’s future, and he will defend those plans to the end against the Republican Tea Party bullies.

Right now they don’t see that in Obama. He can’t win if all he says is “ I’m not as crazy as the other guy.”