Why the Democrats Never Learn

Judge Brian Hagedorn (R-WI)

One of my great worries since Donald Trump has become president is the collective amnesia many Democrats will have when, eventually, he stops being the president.  Trump has been such a viscerally, terribly bad president that it's hard to assume that Americans will immediately forget that he was, but I've been looking for signs that it might be sooner than we think, and last night we got perhaps the most damning one in Wisconsin, where conservative Brian Hagedorn leads progressive Lisa Neubauer in the race for the open (currently progressive-held) Supreme Court seat.

The race is, admittedly, not yet called, and I ate a little bit of crow last year by bemoaning certain races that ended up being won in the days following the election (particularly Arizona's Senate race), but regardless of whether or not Neubauer wins or loses (I suspect she's going to lose, considering 4500 votes is going to be hard to make up in an off-off-year election), the damage last night was done simply by the race being so close to begin with.  Lest we forget, just a few months ago (literally-it was in November & December), the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos tried to do one of the most undemocratic things that has happened in a while in American politics.  When Gov. Scott Walker and AG Brad Schimel lost reelection in the state, Vos voted on a bill to curtail the powers of the two offices, lessening the power of incoming-Gov. Tony Evers and incoming-AG Josh Kaul.  This was a gross abuse of power, the kind of things you see in dictatorships when things don't go the leader's way.  After all, the people chose to give Evers and Kaul the power that had been given to Walker & Schimel, but despite the people doing this, Vos decided to stop the people's will through a "technically" legal abuse of the lame duck session that had never been done before.  Democrats were aghast, crying foul and saying they would remember Vos's horrible abuse of power the next election.

The problem, as you can see, is that they didn't.  Wisconsin doesn't have partisan judicial contests, but anyone who paid even 30 seconds of attention to the race knew the drill here.  Neubauer was clearly the Democrat, Hagedorn was clearly the Republican.  Hagedorn, after all, had supported a legal organization that would criminalize gay sex and supports sterilizing transgender people-the lines were pretty well-drawn here.  And the stakes were incredibly high.  Thanks to a surprise win by Rebecca Dallet last year, Wisconsin is (sadly, now likely was) one seat away from gaining a progressive majority, something that would have helped Evers in a few years when redistricting came up, as there is certain to be a standoff between Evers and the GOP legislature, and likely the Supreme Court will pick the map for the state, potentially breaking up Vos's tight gerrymander.

Yet just a few months after Vos's incredible abuse of power, one that was on the front pages of CNN's website and tweeted about by the likes of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats had collective amnesia.  Armed with the briefest of covers in the form of Evers and Nancy Pelosi, stopping them from total Republican control, they got lazy and didn't get out for Neubauer.  Based on preliminary estimates of the votes, Neubauer's support collapsed due to low turnout in Milwaukee, costing her the election.  The most liberal portion of the state had every power to stick it to the Republicans who defamed and lambasted them months earlier (Vos literally complained about Milwaukee & Madison's inclusion in the election, and that if "it weren't for Madison and Milwaukee...we'd have a clear majority"), and yet they didn't take it.  This happened repeatedly during the presidency of Barack Obama, where the Democrats forgot to vote in 2010, 2014, and (most heinously of all) 2016, and as a "never miss an election" voter, I watched with head-banging-against-a-wall frustration when they complained about climate change, gun control, and student loan relief never getting done even though Obama was president, with me internally screaming "if you don't vote in a midterm, you don't get any of those things, and quite frankly you don't deserve them."  Last night, Wisconsin voters proved that even after a huge abuse of power, they're happy to let history repeat itself.

Because there's no undo switch here.  Neubauer's loss means that Vos will have cover in gerrymandering-there aren't enough Supreme Court elections between now and the redistricting process to swing the court again-they'll have to wait until 2023 to have another opportunity to get to four seats.  It's also a wakeup call that Donald Trump could very easily win Wisconsin next year, and with it the White House; anyone who looks at this result and is comforted needs their head examined.  It's a sign that the Democrats who have been talking about "being the change the country needs" in Iowa sure didn't see the clear writing on the wall in Wisconsin-did a single one of these candidates campaign literally across the border into the Badger State?  Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden...Bueller, Bueller, Bueller?  Any one of these candidates who didn't go to Milwaukee or Madison in the past week has blood on their hands.  Perhaps most damning of all, it's a sign that Donald Trump may be a key figure in American politics, but his legacy may not be that the Republican Party has entered new territory, making a figure like him impossible to elect in the future...it might just be that literally nothing can stop the back-and-forth pendulum swings of political power in the United States, no matter what one party is willing to do to keep their power.