At the outset of the twenty-first century, Wisconsin was known for a certain social steadiness. Chilly and saturated with lakes and small towns, it mostly escaped the entropic pressures of exurban sprawl. Its self-identity was not as caught up in industrialization as that of some other Midwestern states, so it was spared some of the psychic pain when manufacturing jobs went overseas. But after the election of the Republican Governor Scott Walker, in 2010, the year of the Tea Party, Wisconsin’s politics grew far more vivid, and bitter. A few weeks into his administration, Walker moved to take away the rights of most public employees to bargain collectively—the notorious Act 10—provoking weeks of enormous rallies at the state capitol and a statewide recall election, which Walker survived. After that, the partisanship only escalated—Walker oversaw a redistricting effort so aggressively gerrymandered that it is now before the United States Supreme Court, a voter-identification law that is said to have disenfranchised two hundred thousand people, and a campaign-finance regime so lax that the current Republican primary for U.S. Senate is widely seen as a proxy war between two billionaire donors. Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, told me, “What Wisconsin gave the nation was the model where you could take a very tiny electoral margin and act as if you had won an overwhelming victory, and the other side had no say at all.” Dale Schultz, a Republican who was formerly a leader in the state senate, told me that the early days of the Walker administration “created a malaise that hangs in the state to this day.”
By the 2016 Presidential election—in which Wisconsin’s electoral votes were won, in an upset, by Donald Trump—it was as if whatever gene had made Wisconsin steady had been extracted and replaced by its opposite. Of the two hundred and six counties in the country that voted twice for Obama and then for Trump, twenty-three were in Wisconsin. In 2012, Crawford County, in southwestern Wisconsin, went for Obama by nineteen points. Four years later, it went for Trump by six. Juneau County went for Obama by seven points, then for Trump by twenty-six. Trempealeau and Lafayette Counties, in separate parts of the state, voted for Obama by about fifteen points and Trump by about ten. Democrats after the 2016 election tended to lament Hillary Clinton’s travel schedule, which did not include a single stop in Wisconsin during the general election, but these county swings suggested an uncertainty and variability that a campaign stop in Oshkosh, no matter how well orchestrated, was unlikely to touch.
The Walker era began in 2010, an extraordinarily good year for Republicans, and it endured under Obama, whose political bent and character both kept conservatives’ blood pressure high. Walker is running for a third term this year, in a political environment that is the inverse of 2010’s. In May, Paul Ryan, one of Walker’s chief political allies—who, as Speaker of the House, has done more than anyone to channel the spirit of 2010 into a more or less organized politics—announced he was retiring, at only forty-eight years old. When I called conservatives in Madison recently, I heard a general trepidation. “The energy on the Democratic side, especially among women, that’s real,” one senior adviser to a statewide Republican campaign told me. “There are Republicans who think that Walker will save them, that they can play the same tune again, but they don’t realize how jammed up they are.” Others have more existential concerns. “The Tea Party energy is more or less gone,” a longtime conservative insider in Madison told me. In January, a Democrat won a state senate election in a Trump district; in April, another Democrat won a statewide election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court by twelve points. The conservative insider told me that Ryan’s retirement was a sign that the jig was up. “These political movements usually come and go in decade-long cycles,” he said.
Still, political people in Wisconsin seem to have some difficulty imagining what might replace this era. The most persuasive theory for why Wisconsin’s politics slipped into chaos comes from the University of Wisconsin political scientist Kathy Cramer, who has stressed a burgeoning “rural consciousness,” in which people in the state’s small towns believed their resources were being taken away and redistributed to the poor and the connected—inner cities, public employees. Walker, Cramer argues, understood and weaponized this sensitivity, so that even minor budgetary questions could be subjected to a tribal accounting—of who is getting things, our people or theirs. When I called around to Walker’s opponents in the state, they seemed to be probing, delicately and tentatively, trying to figure out whether this intense partisan identity could be dislodged in some voters they hoped to persuade to turn against Walker, or whether it was not worth it to try.
In the years before Walker’s ascendance, Dale Schultz was the Republican Party’s leader in the Wisconsin state senate. Schultz retired from politics three years ago—when I reached him, he was in his home town of Richland Center, in southwestern Wisconsin, helping a friend paint a house for rent on Airbnb—and I called him because I was trying to understand the sped-up pace of elections in the state. Already, three months before the primaries and six before the general election, the airwaves in the state are full of partisan invective. “Elections in Wisconsin now are over in June,” Schultz said; it was a function, in his view, of the way campaign-finance laws and norms had changed in the Walker era. Schultz said that ordinary state-senate races now regularly receive the same level of campaign contributions as races for governor did at the beginning of his political career. “All that money comes in early, and it all goes to negative advertising about your opponent, and so by the end of June the election’s over.” Even in state-senate races, where only fifteen thousand total votes might be cast, Schultz said, it has become common for three-quarters of the spending to come from independent groups. The effect has been to turn a politician’s attention to the early competition for outside money and big donors’ favor. “Now you don’t go around your district until after Labor Day, and that’s for show,” Schultz said.
Schultz’s sense of abandonment was broad. He told me that, under Walker, the state’s Republican Party had (in its embrace of vote-suppressing voter-identification measures, in its comfort with deficits and third-party campaign spending, in its passage of budgets that eroded institutions in rural parts of the state, in its unembarrassed partisanship) lost any claim to being either Republican or conservative. “What you have is a bunch of nationalist know-nothing anarchists,” he said.
What seemed to bother Schultz the most was the regularity with which the Wisconsin and national Republican Party were now breaking norms—he belongs to the wing of the resistance that emphasizes the affront to civics. (He has become a very public critic of aggressive Republican redistricting and voter-identification laws he supported when in office.) As Schultz talked about his tenure in the state senate—during which a relatively bipartisan body had undergone, in his account, something like a total partisan breakdown—it seemed to me that what he was actually describing was the collapse of the position of the politician. “There’s no money in the middle,” he said. A feature of Wisconsin politics in the Walker era has been the ascent in prominence of two talk-radio personalities, Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes, and Schultz told me, “Politicians would be whining about how terrible it was and yet no one wanted to stand up to them and become a target.” What he was describing was the way in which people who had spent their lives seeking power suddenly discover their own relative powerlessness.
For a while, Schultz had stood up to the talk-radio hosts, insofar as he was a reliable target of their ire, but eventually it became apparent that he was not the future of his party, and he retired. It was very difficult for Schultz to imagine how the Republican Party itself could repair the fissures in civic life that it had created: those who objected to the drift of the Party lost credibility with its voters. In a sense, this has been the pattern in Washington, too, where the first year of the Trump era ended not with Republican congressmen defying the President—as it sometimes seemed they might during the campaign, when so few of them supported him—but with many of them simply heading for the exits. “It’s not going to be wound back,” Schultz said. “The party in power has to be defeated before it understands the need for change.” He also understood that this was not his role, exactly. That was for the Democrats.
Wisconsin’s tenth State-Senate district is in the far western part of the state, just across the St. Croix River from Minnesota—Winnesota, it sometimes gets called. Trump won the district by seventeen points. In the primary after Walker picked the sitting state senator to serve in his cabinet last fall, the local Democrats elected Patty Schachtner, who had for years been a death investigator for St. Croix County before being selected as medical examiner, to run for the seat. The special election was scheduled for January. Schachtner, who is now fifty-eight, had been on the school board but had never run for more prominent office, and she told me that she figured “for the nine weeks of this election I can talk about something that is at the forefront of our community—addiction, mental health, suicide—and I can make it a primary issue that we don’t have enough services in our part of the state.” She did not talk much about Walker during her campaign, or about Trump. She just delineated one way in which her community was in crisis. St. Croix County “looks great” by employment measures, Schachtner told me, but the surface data neglect a vast methamphetamine problem that has led to swelling numbers of children in foster care. In her time as a death investigator, she had developed a feel for the pathological version of life in St. Croix County, and the ways in which poorly treated mental illness could overwhelm a family. “You can’t walk around and say one in four people is struggling with mental health and not understand the hugeness of that,” Schachtner told me. Budget cuts had played a role in shuttering a mental-health clinic in Cumberland, not too far from the Tenth Senate District, in 2013. Now “if you are struggling with a mental-health crisis in our part of the state, you are handcuffed and transported four and a half to five hours away.”
State-senate races in Wisconsin are a little bit like federal elections and a little bit like student-council campaigns. The Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, paid for radio ads and mailers supporting Schachtner’s opponent, the Republican state assemblyman Adam Jarchow, as did a conservative group from Virginia, the Republican State Leadership Committee. Meanwhile, a liberal group, the Greater Wisconsin Committee, spent thirty thousand dollars on pro-Schachtner ads. “There was only about a month between the primaries and the election, so people were getting four or five mailers a day,” Schachtner said. She recalled one in particular, intended to depict her tenure as medical examiner as profligate. “They put my head on a voluptuous body in a low-cut white shirt with the button being pulled,” Schachtner said. “I’m fifty-eight.” She was also well known in the Tenth Senate District, having lived there all her life. She recalled a voter who had said her eleven-year-old son had come upon the mailer and said, “That isn’t Patty. Those aren’t her boobs.” Schachtner won, earning fifty-five per cent of the vote. In Madison, Walker dispensed with the spin. The governor tweeted that the result “is a wake up call for Republicans in 2018.”
The exact terrain of the midterm elections in Wisconsin has still not settled, in part because the primaries aren’t until August and in part because the United States Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the gerrymandering case it heard in October; its ruling could throw the districts of the state legislature (where Republicans hold a very slight advantage in the Senate and a nearly two-to-one advantage in the Assembly) into chaos. Five of the state’s eight seats in Congress are held by Republicans, and early attention has focussed on the First Congressional District, where a charismatic ironworker and union official named Randy Bryce raised more than $2.7 million last year to mount a long-shot campaign against Paul Ryan. With Ryan’s retirement, Bryce suddenly has a much better chance at the district. Democrats have fainter, but real, ambitions to take both the Seventh Congressional District (which sprawls across northern Wisconsin and whose seat is currently held by Congressman Sean Duffy, a Trump ally) and the Sixth (which includes the far suburbs of Milwaukee and is held by a lower-key conservative named Glenn Grothman). But the central race is for governor, where there are a dozen Democratic challengers—half of whom are viewed as legitimate contenders—vying for the nomination. Walker’s approval ratings have held relatively steady as he seeks a third term, with a little less than half of people in the state saying that he is doing a good job.
Late on Saturday afternoon, I spoke with Tony Evers, the state school superintendent and the Democrat who is most commonly called the front-runner in the gubernatorial primary and who, as we spoke, was driving back from campaign events in northwestern Wisconsin, calling political donors on the way. Evers, a lifelong educator (and “euchre enthusiast,” according to his Twitter bio), had been a central figure in the Act 10 fights, but he said that he did not expect the present election to re-litigate them—for most people in Wisconsin, he believed, that was in the past. He said he meant to raise a more basic objection to Walker’s regime—that its budget cuts had allowed the state’s institutions to deteriorate, that the Republican government had not taken care of the rural voters who were its most reliable supporters.
“We don’t have Internet in a lot of places in the state. In rural areas, they are taking asphalt off the roads because they can’t afford to fix them,” Evers said. In Wisconsin, “there’s a crisis. There’s many—some of them are interconnected.” Walker’s budget cuts had, over time, stripped almost a billion dollars in state funding for public education (his latest budget proposes to partly make up the deficit), and there had been a wave of local referendums across Wisconsin to raise town property taxes to make up for the shortfall from the state. “Half of the people that voted to increase their taxes voted for Trump,” Evers asserted.
The resistance taking shape to Walker and to Trump has two modes, civic and partisan, which, though they often overlap, are nevertheless distinct. The main innovation of the Walker era has been in its partisan extremity, and yet this aspect of his administration looks to be on the ballot this year only indirectly. The final judgment on the Walker era may turn not on the ways in which it has changed the tenor of politics but on the more quotidian matter of the ways it has underfunded the gravel appropriation for Wisconsin’s rural roads. And yet the Democratic opportunity is obvious: this situation allows them to ask voters to judge the Walker years without demanding that they admit to having made a mistake. Driving back from the northwest, in between calls to donors, Evers mentioned some political road signs he’d seen near Wausau that attacked Walker for pothole-ridden roads. “They’re calling them Scott-holes,” the liberal said, with some evident pleasure. He was imagining the most basic of political arguments—that the other guys held power, and there was still so much that was wrong.
