The Wisconsin recall: myths and talking points
Saturday, June 16, 2012 at 05:00AM Yesterday I looked at Bruce Murphy’s article about the Wisconsin recall, and how Murphy thought Democrats and unions brought defeat on themselves. There is one point he made that fits in with a purely political analysis, which is what I’m focusing on today. He writes: “Had Tom Barrett — or any Democrat — offered an alternative, some approach that would eliminate the abuse of public benefits without crushing unions, while protecting the many public workers who are not overpaid, this could have carried the day against Walker.”
This is actually really off base. Barrett has a famously equivocal relationship with unions, and was definitely not their first choice. Given how central unions were to initiating the recall, it seems crazy to have nominated someone who has clashed with them in the past. Wouldn’t a solidly pro-union candidate have been a better choice - someone who could have amplified the issues of the previous year and forcefully made the case for the right to collective bargaining?
Political analysis elsewhere seems off as well. One talking point is that Walker was able to use his vast war chest to rehabilitate his image in the months before the election. Maybe, however, his low poll numbers were almost bound to improve.
Simply put, once the union-busting law was signed he didn’t have anything close to that controversial going on. At that point regression to the mean took over. We actually have a useful parallel in Ohio. John Kasich’s poll numbers have gone up ten points since the hottest part of the SB5/Issue 2 controversy last year. His approval rating is still very low, but it’s nothing like it was when he was actively antagonizing a large part of the citizenry.
Yet Kasich hasn’t been running ads or otherwise making himself visible to Ohioans; he’s just stopped pissing them off. That’s enough for a pretty substantial rebound in approval. There’s no reason to think the same wouldn’t have happened with Walker even without a single TV ad. I don’t think it’s quite right to say he bought his way out of his hole.
I think people may be overreacting a bit to the role that money played in this race, and in the role it plays nationally. Or at least, the ability of money to shape public opinion in the absence of an effective countervailing force. People might by default be receptive to what they see on TV, but are much more powerfully influenced by the actual people around them and by their lived experience. That is yet another reason for the left to devote its energies to building mass movements instead of buying mass media.
We can’t compete in the money race. We are outgunned. We might be able to mitigate its worst effects with some of our own money, but trying to go toe to toe at that level is a fool’s errand. Our advantage is in the ability to appeal to people’s real lives, and to build up our numbers by grassroots organizing. We’ll never be able to outspend them, so we should focus on outworking them. (Caveat: my understanding is that the Tea Party folks did a good job of GOTV – including finding Walker voters in left-leaning areas like Dane County.)
Of course, doing that would require a less vertical hierarchy. It would require making room for other groups to be empowered and for more local control to flourish. In other words, finding ways to partner with the mass movement instead of trying to co-opt it - and finding a way to get all those thousands of people who stood out in the cold involved in a way that resonates with them.
ERRATA
One of the driving factors of the recall effort was the success in Ohio of the No On Issue 2 movement. The resounding success of that vote was a real jolt of adrenaline for Wisconsin activists, and they charged ahead with their petition gathering. If I recall correctly, the state Democratic party was ambivalent, and the national party actively discouraged it. That might explain the reluctance of the party apparatus to give its unstinting support to the effort.
Ohio and Wisconsin both ended up with a little over 900,000 verified signatures for their efforts. Ohio ended up with over 2 million votes against Issue 2 (also Cf.); Wisconsin just over 1.1 million for the recall. Ohio has more voters, so there was a higher ceiling. Assuming everyone who signed a recall petition voted for the recall, Wisconsin activists did an astonishing job of reaching out during the petition drive. Just imagine if that energy had been properly harnessed.
Reader Comments (12)
What you're doing here -- cumulatively -- is crucial if we're going to understand how a social/political movement is to succeed in the contemporary context. Any anti-authoritarian movement is up against huge odds in contemporary America. Most Americans seem to have come to accept the authoritarian turn in our society -- to a far greater extent than they recognize or understand.
The simple fact that large numbers of people in both Ohio and Wisconsin got out there, called the politicians out and didn't fade away, is a really good sign. We all think (when we get involved in something like that) that our efforts should be rewarded sooner and, of course, they never are. It takes years. The peace movement has been around for decades and decades and all it has succeeded in doing is provoke the defense industry and its political puppets into using ever more insidious ways to write scripts for, produce, and direct their wars. They have, as you might say, simply learned how to stop pissing us off...
Thanks much, PW. I think it will be interesting to see how efforts like SB 5 and the recall play out. For as inspiring as the Issue 2 movement was last year, the infrastructure was largely a top-down effort. The anti-fracking effort is much more horizontal. People are developing their own contact lists, reaching out to the community in lots of small groups, and generally doing their own organizing instead of receiving it from on high.
I think the recall and SB 5 opened up a lot of people to new possibilities, and maybe built up a certain amount of social capital that is now being used in a more grassroots way. That's especially important in the absence of any kind of real institutional support (a key difference between Ohio and Wisconsin).
Efforts like this, Keystone Pipeline last year and Occupy all point to citizens building parallel structures to present a challenge from outside the system. It's a pretty big deal.
What occurs to me reading your comment is the key difference between Ohio and Wisconsin, not to blunt Wisconsin's victory for the recall movement -- which succeeded in drawing national attention to Walker, to ALEC, to the Kochs,etc., even if it didn't take the governor out. But it also stubbed its toe by, from the beginning, cheerfully imitating old 1960's movements. Nothing wrong with those earlier efforts (I was part of 'em, after all!!) except that they are dated and they are subject to some contemporary (and effective) ridicule from the right. Ohio,on the other hand, appeared to be and I think was much more genuinely "grass roots" -- and also masterfully organized. It had a harder, more mature edge to it. What makes me nervous about Occupy is it may be more like Wisconsin than Ohio. If we're talking about a winning strategy, to this outsider Ohio seemed to nail it. You did indeed build "social capital."
To quote myself (from The Sideshow): "the statistic that was most alarming was how many members of union households who were not themselves members of unions voted for Walker. That means wives voting against husbands, sons against mothers, brothers against sisters. One cannot put that down to a failure at the senior levels."
It's things like this that make me pessimistic that the lurch toward crazy can be stopped before it takes the nation (and perhaps the world) over the cliff. But, thanks, Wisconsin for trying.
Charles, I absolutely put it down to a failure at senior levels, because the strategy conceived there was to run a conventional political campaign. That meant a re-run of the election just held, and made it easy for Walker supporters to characterize it as trying to usurp the democratic process.
Rick Perlstein (via) has a nice piece looking at the high level decision making that created that dynamic.
I find it hard to see it as anything but a failure at senior levels. The campaign was run in a way that gave those relatives of union members no reason to vote to support them.
Dan, I don't think we can exclude the really pernicious role of the media in all of this. Ultimately, I admit, I blame people for choosing their information sources badly (or allowing themselves to be pressured into doing so).
Just to make things worse, Dana Milbank has a snot sandwich for an editorial at WaPo today about Occupy.
Dan, I already read Perlstein and other critics who want to blame the failure on the leadership. I will readily concede that the people who are supposed to be leaders are not leading. Many are opportunistic careerists whose future salary depends on being perceived as important.
But that does not absolve the grassroots. They failed to stop Prosser, they failed to win the necessary three Senate elections, they failed to nominate Kathleen Falk, and they failed to put aside legitimate grievances against Barrett for the greater good.
Walker is a small-time grifter, but he is under the control of outright fascists, a term I do not use lightly. Barrett, for all his faults, is not. This was a key battle to turn back those who want to end not just the New Deal, but the American Republic. If the Wisconsin Dems had reached just 100,000 grassroots contributors willing to put up $100 for the recall, they would have outspent Walker.
There's a myth on the left that if we just turn out to protest, change will somehow occur, and another myth that we need a charismatic leader, a King or a Roosevelt.
It's not that easy. Change happens when (a) authority is weakened, often by the costs of war or financial crisis, (b) the public is aware of the true causes of the problem, (c) people are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for change, and (d) some of those willing to make sacrifices are charismatic leaders who help to focus the movement.
One of the typical ways in which the energy necessary for change is wasted is by turning it into infighting. The regular Dems, for the most part, are not bad people. They may be shallow, short-sighted, and selfish. But they are not the real enemy.
Eyes: prize, my friend.
Charles, I understand your point, but the problem as I see it is that Democratic party leaders haven't been responsive to public sentiment. There was an enormous amount of energy around the attack on collective bargaining, and because of that the party should have heavily emphasized it in the recall.
Grassroots organizers don't have their hands on the levers of party machinery, so it's always going to be an uphill battle to unseat the party favorite. Falk's loss in the primary is only partially a function of activists not being sufficiently organized, it's also a function of the party leadership weighing in for Barrett.
This is the same Barrett who's had serious run-ins with unions in the past. The message his nomination sent to activists was that their concerns were once again going to be sidelined in favor of business as usual. I don't see that as much of a prize.
I agree that infighting ultimately helps conservatives, but the party could have mitigated that by taking the concerns of activists to heart. In this case, once Barrett won the nomination he could have done some serious bridge building with that constituency. That would have brought them on board, and maybe changed the outcome. There was certainly no reason to think a repeat of the election 18 months ago would have produced a different result. One definition of insanity etc.
To quote myself (from The Sideshow): "the statistic that was most alarming was how many members of union households who were not themselves members of unions voted for Walker. That means wives voting against husbands, sons against mothers, brothers against sisters. One cannot put that down to a failure at the senior levels." ...Charles
I don't think the Democratic leadership has caught onto a turn of events they are responsible for: many Democrats deliberately vote against what they see as the Democratic Party establishment's interests. They don't like the party. (Kerry's flacidity in '04 ... well, I'm just guessing...) They have no love for Republicans, of course, and their politics seem to lean left. But they are looking for ways to send a signal to the national Democratic party that they are furious. I wonder if the pro-Walker vote hasn't been another red-flag warning that the party will ignore?
Here in Texas, that kind of thinking may also be a response to a godawful state party that backstops any kind of change. I know Austinites who have been working for years to clear the old lumber out and who may eventually succeed. But in the meantime... it appears to me that Republican strategists know a lot more about Democrats than Democrats know about themselves.
PW says, "I wonder if the pro-Walker vote hasn't been another red-flag warning that the party will ignore?"
They're not ignoring it, PW: they're taking the more obvious lesson that the public doesn't support unions, at least, not enough to win an election. If grassroots voters think that they can communicate with professional politicians by voting against their own interests, they are sadly mistaken.
Look: politicians are careerists. They want to win elections. That means they are selling a package that has to appeal to 50% +1. So, they choose the key hot button issues and assemble the package they think will sell. Fear of loss of Medicare. Anger about abortion. And so on.
And they have another agenda that is just as important, namely the money agenda. Politicians represent commercial interests, and have ever since the nation's beginning. The Jeffersonians represented agrarian interests, while the Federalists represented industrial and financial interests. As the importance of farmers faded, the heirs to the Jeffersonians (Democrats) picked up export interests such as autos, while the Federalist heirs (Republicans) retained finance and extractive industries like oil.
So, just to talk to professional politicians, you have to engage their interest, namely their career. If you start winning elections without them, or forcing certain among them out of office, you have their attention. But losing elections? Not so much.
Dan says, "once Barrett won the nomination he could have done some serious bridge building with that constituency. That would have brought them on board, and maybe changed the outcome."
On that we agree, Dan. Barrett did not run a good campaign. He only had a month and was running against a tidal wave of negative ads, so it would have been hard to win in any case, but he did not take it on as a crusade, and his lack of energy showed.
But I do hope people will think about what it takes to succeed in politics, especially at the state level. It's actually very, very difficult to get even 47% of the vote. The biggest and most expensive barrier is name recognition. Without that, no one has a chance. That's one reason why developing an alternative media is so critical. Until people stop trusting what they hear on the airwaves and start trusting what they get from genuinely reliable grassroots sources, it will be very difficult to break the monopoly that money has on politics.
Charles -- I see what you're saying about the Dem party. Don't entirely agree or disagree. We'll have to watch over time to see whether they have a useful reaction to the Walker win. But I do think many are overlooking one of those ways in which language has been used destructively by the Republican party. When have the Dems ever reacted effectively to language distortion by their opposition and the degradation of our political life that it causes?
For a start, those who support "collective bargaining" might want to separate it from "supporting unions." They are, you might say, distinct from one another in the same way as are "political speech" and "money." One is a noble feature of our democracy, the other more along the lines of a necessary evil.