I’ve had the Midwest on my mind lately, on account of the post-election political fights afoot in Michigan and Wisconsin. What’s happening there is riveting, but it’s a fair enough question to ask why non-residents should care. After all, isn’t there that old saying, what happens in Lansing, stays in Lansing?
Well, actually, there is no such saying, and I will take that as an opening to argue that what is happening in Lansing and Madison is in fact well worth paying attention to, whether you live in Dubuque, Denver, or the Dalles (shout out to Oregon!). In both Michigan and Wisconsin, Democratic candidates won the governorship — a particularly welcome outcome in the latter state, as it entailed the defeat of the execrable Scott Walker. The response of the GOP-controlled legislatures in both states, however, in conjunction with their outgoing Republican governors, has been to advocate bills that limit the new governors’ power (now passed in Wisconsin, though still pending in Michigan). Additionally, in Michigan, the governor has just signed a law that defies voter initiatives on minimum wage increases and paid sick leave.
In isolation, changing the rules when a candidate from the opposing party wins the governorship would be unacceptably anti-democratic. But the parlous effects go far beyond the basic affront of negating the will of the voters in a single election cycle, which would be bad enough as an instance of what the more pollyanish among us might refer to as “bad loser syndrome.” Rather, as Zack Beauchamp argues at Vox, it amounts to a rejection of the premise of democracy itself as the way that we settle political conflict: when one side wins, the other side allows it to rule. As Beauchamp describes it,
The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy.
Beauchamp’s summary resonates not simply because it accurately describes what has just happened in Michigan and Wisconsin, but because the acts he describes come after a great number of similar moves by the GOP both in those states and elsewhere. After all, Republican restrictions on a Democratic governor’s power strongly echo similar maneuvers two years ago in North Carolina. More than this, these moves are happening after the GOP had already gerrymandered the living bejesus out of both states, in an attempt to attain a permanent lock. The 2018 election results tell the sordid tale: in Michigan, Republicans retained the State House with a 58 to 52 majority, even though voters overall were in favor of Democratic candidates by 52% to 48%. In Wisconsin, the effects of gerrymandering were even more egregious - there, the GOP holds the State Assembly by a 63 to 36 margin, even though voters preferred Democrats 54% to 44%.
It’s necessary, then, to see what is happening in these states in context: as the escalation of a move against democracy that began to take clear shape in the re-districting implemented in both states, and indeed in many GOP-controlled states, following the 2010 census. Just as Beauchamp rightly zeroes in on the belief by GOP legislators in those states that political power matters more than the handover of government to the winners of an election, Jamelle Bouie makes a complementary point: that GOP legislators simply don’t see Democratic voters as legitimate. Citing the remarkable statement by Wisconsin’s state Assembly speaker that “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Bouie concludes:
The idea that you could remove the state’s major population centers and still have an acceptably democratic result is a reasoning that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Democrats are poised to undo gains made under Walker’s administration, but that Democrats themselves are illegitimate because of who they represent. [Speaker] Vos isn’t saying that Republicans should do better in Madison and Milwaukee, he’s saying that the state’s major cities shouldn’t count. And if they do count, says Fitzgerald, they don’t count the same way [. . .] They are the wrong voters, and the Democrats they elect have no right to roll back a Republican administration backed by the right ones.
This observation is shocking, but I think it is also spot on, and helps get to the root of how we’ve arrived at this point, where one of our two major political parties has accelerated its embrace of an anti-democratic politics. Racism is key to this issue of legitimacy — it is not too far of a stretch to say that there is a mindset held by some in the GOP that black voters are not real Americans, exhibit A being the preposterous birther campaign against Barack Obama. And there is a way that this racism slops over to white Americans as well; as Bouie puts it, some Republicans view certain white voters as enablers of what they perceive to be an unwelcome defense of African-Americans, which in turn serves to undercut the political legitimacy of those white voters as well.
The latest ramp-up of the GOP’s assault on democracy in Michigan and Wisconsin deserves national attention because it represents the leading edge of the GOP’s anti-democratic animus. It was not enough to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering to secure a majority; now that Democrats have won elections for statewide governorships that can’t be gerrymandered, the Republican response is to undercut the gubernatorial power.
But the need for national attention doesn’t end there: because, as David Leonhardt describes, the Republican effort in Wisconsin is being abetted by major corporations like Walgreens who back Republicans even as the party attempts to stifle democratic competition. Walgreens has taken to exclusively backing the GOP in Wisconsin, apparently because the GOP has pushed through tax breaks for that company and others that, incidentally, have cost municipalities millions of dollars, and have led to rising taxes on Wisconsin in order to compensate for the resulting budget shortfalls. But in doing so, Walgreens is also helping bankroll a movement to undercut democracy in an American state; the company is essentially giving its support to anti-democratic measures as the way to ensure a GOP majority that keeps tax advantages flowing to the company. This is not business as usual; this is an unsettling and un-American fusion of corporate power with right-wing politics in the name of stymying democracy.
To recognize the role of corporate backers in funding state-level gerrymandering and the hobbling of Democratic governors is to recognize the scale of the threat our country faces, and to be in a better position to fashion remedies, whether it be outrage that drives voters to the polls and into activism, or efforts to boycott companies that have crossed the line into supporting backers of a one-party state.
It provides some grounds for optimism that Democratic activists in Michigan and Wisconsin appear fired up in opposition to these latest moves to deny Democrats the ability to exercise power. One perspective might hold that the GOP has backed itself into a disreputable corner with its maneuvers to hobble democracy, and can no longer rely on voters not paying attention to traditionally abstruse issues like gerrymandering and voter suppression. As I’ve written before, the Democrats have no choice but to embrace the mantle of democracy, both as a matter of basic morality and as a strategic move to make the GOP pay as high a price as possible for its antagonism to our democratic project. Both as a disturbing example of where the GOP would take the country, and for the sake of supporting voters in those states, it seems to the Democrats’ advantage to nationalize what’s happening in the two states.
Focusing on the state-level machinations of anti-democratic forces is also crucial because it makes more concrete issues of democracy and voter rights that otherwise might feel abstract and abstruse. In some ways, it is even more of an affront that a political sphere that should be even more within the control of voters, where their activism and votes should have the most impact, is where the GOP has decided it can really kick the shit out of majority rule. For my own part, I know how viscerally I would react if the Oregon legislature were gerrymandered so that Democrats couldn’t win a majority of seats, not matter how much of the popular vote they won. That would feel personal, in a way that hearing of the travails of Michigan and Wisconsin voters does not. At the same time, I think it’s important that we do collectively grasp what’s happening to the citizens of Michigan and Wisconsin, both as a matter of democratic solidarity and because they could easily be us.