Wisconsin State Senate Special Election: Wisconsin’s First Barometer Readings for the 2018 Elections

There are clear, notable signs that a storm is approaching. If you’re not looking for the storm you may not notice them at all, but they’re there all the same. The air pressure will begin to change, temperature will rise or fall, and the wind begins to change. Even if you’re not very scientifically inclined, the signs of an approaching storm are evident.

On Tuesday, January 16, special elections will be held to fill Wisconsin State Senate seat for District 10. The outgoing state senator, Sheila Harsdorf (R), has resigned her seat to join Governor Scott Walker’s cabinet as Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP). While this may seem like a local affair confined to the Wisconsin 10^th Senate District, the results of tomorrow’s election will contribute to the results from elections in 2017, a body of work that helps us understand how Americans are reacting to the largest Republican control of federal, state, and local government and policy enactment since the 1920s. The results Tuesday night will be the first reading of political conditions in the Wisconsin State Legislature since the 2016 elections, and will likely be a sign of the approach 2018 Midterm Elections.

Tuesday will be Wisconsin’s first official barometer reading to anticipate Wisconsin’s response Scott Walker’s campaign for a third term as governor and to the Republican’s first term running Washington, D.C.

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2017 Elections Review: Scheduled and Special

Throughout 2017 we have watched polls and federal, state, and local elections to determine how the American public is reacting to the Republicans’ control of the White House and Congress. So far, Democrats have faired well, taking back the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion, retaining the Virginia Governor’s Mansion, and retaking 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, reducing the Republican majority to 51-49. Most notably, Democrat Doug Jones beat the embattled Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama U.S. Senate special election, a huge Democratic victory in a ruby-red, Bible Belt state.

Notable still are the elections that haven’t flipped a seat from Republican to Democrat, but have shown signs of shifting political winds. Nationally, races for the U.S. House resulted in Republican victories by narrowing margins. A U.S. House special election in Kansas resulted in a 6-point victory where the outgoing representative won by 31 points in 2016. Elections to fill the at-large Montana U.S. House seat for Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke resulted in a 5-point margin of victory for Republican Greg Gianforte, who notoriously punched a reporter the night before the election. In 2016, Zinke won by 16 points while Trump won Montana by 20 points.

At the state and local level a number of races have resulted in Republican margins of victory cut by 10-30 points. In the Iowa State Senate District 3 special election, Republicans maintained control of the seat by a 10-point margin in a senate district that Trump won by 41 points: a 31-point swing in deep-red northwest Iowa.

Notably, the winner of this special election is a state representative from within the district, creating an additional Iowa State House special election slated for Tuesday, January 16, in the vacated Iowa State House District 6. It’s also worth noting that while Trump carried House District 6 by 31 points, Democrats carried the district by a slight margin in the Iowa State Senate District 3 special election. The Iowa GOP has responded by pouring over $115,000 into the race.

While each election is different, in need of individual review within the scope of local interests and issues, a trend has developed nonetheless. Federal, state, and local districts controlled by Republicans, ranging from tossup to ruby-red offices, are showing signs of change. The sky is darkening and a strong, cold wind blows from the north.

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Wisconsin State Senate District 10 Special Election

Which brings us back to northwest Wisconsin. Wisconsin State Senate District 10 runs from the City of Menomonie along Interstate-94 to River Falls. It stretches north, running 90 miles along the Minnesota border. The district is a unique blend of rural, agricultural land along with sprawling suburbs of the Twin Cities just across the border. The district has continued to grown more conservative over previous years, with 2016 resulting in Harsdorf winning the senate seat by 26 points and Trump winning in the district by 17 points.

Winnowed down from a field of six, there are three candidates who will compete in Tuesday’s special election.

Republican State Representative Adam Jarchow represents Wisconsin State Assembly District 28, which covers the northern third of the senate district. While in the Wisconsin State Assembly he is known for aggressively advocating for private property rights as opposed to public land, environmental regulation, and local zoning. Jarchow was one of a handful of Republicans to vote against the state budget, placing him on the far right of the Wisconsin Republican Party.

Jarchow has focused his campaign around a rosy picture of economic development on the heels of property tax cuts and regulatory reforms pushed by Republicans since taking over the Wisconsin State Legislature and governor’s mansion in 2010. During a public forum in New Richmond, Jarchow noted, “Every single employer out there is looking to hire. We’re in an environment where wages are growing, where businesses are growing, where businesses are moving across the river [from Minnesota] to take advantage of some of the wonderful changes we’ve had in Wisconsin.”

Democrat Patty Schachtner is the St. Croix County medical examiner. The Somerset native has experience serving in various roles in local government to bolster her credentials. Schachtner’s campaign has painted her as a pro-Second Amendment Democrat who is a bear-hunting public servant. At the same public forum in New Richmond, Schachtner criticized lawmakers, particularly the Wisconsin GOP, for focusing on wealthy business owners rather than blue-collar workers.

Schachtner believes the Assembly and Senate need to focus more legislative action and funds focusing on local economies and education. With the vast majority of private sector job growth happening in five of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, this is a message that resonates with working class folks outside of Madison. Schachtner noted during the forum that, “Forty-one percent of the people in New Richmond live in an income-restricted environment, which means they’re struggling. They’re working but they’re struggling. Those are the people I’m working for.”

The third candidate contending for Senate District 10 is Libertarian Brian Corriea, who has labeled his campaign as a free pass for voters who are fed up with both major parties. Corriea embodies most of the values that you’d anticipate from a Libertarian from the rural Midwest, supporting further tightening state budgets, opening up public land, cutting environmental regulations, and overall reducing the role of government.

Campaign Fundraising

As the special election campaign entered its last week, campaign finance numbers for the major party candidates demonstrated how seriously both parties are taking this election. As of the end of December 2017, Republican Adam Jarchow has raised nearly $271,000, of which he has spent more than $225,000. Democrat Patty Schachtner is not far behind, raising over $196,000, of which she’s spent $133,000. Libertarian Corriea has not been required to file any campaign finance information as he’s raised less than $2,000.

These numbers are incredible for any state senate special election, let along a Wisconsin State Senate special election that contains Twin Cities suburbs and rural, northern Wisconsin agriculture country. The campaign finance situation is even more interesting in District 10 as its largely covered by the Twin Cities media market, making television advertising cost-prohibitive for Wisconsin candidates. Campaign strategists in both parties note that the key to reaching voters is by direct mail, social media, and door-to-door canvassing.

Wisconsin Democrats Response to 2016

The results of the special election in Wisconsin State Senate District 10 won’t flip control of the Wisconsin Senate, currently run by Republicans 18-13 in the 33-seat chamber. However, it will demonstrate how well a Democratic candidate performs outside of Madison and Milwaukee.

If Wisconsin Democrats want to hold committee gavels and sit in the Senate Majority Leaders office again, they have to start winning back rural, working-class voters. If Democrat Patty Schachtner is able to close the gap or even win this special election, the political weather reading support the Democratic Party’s chances of winning Wisconsin State Senate District 10, propelling them towards the 2018 elections for rural State Senate and Assembly seats as well as the Governor’s Mansion in Madison. Tuesday’s special election will be Wisconsin’s first barometer reading, we’ll soon see if conditions predict that a storm may be moving through Wisconsin in 2018.

3 Things to Remember on MLK Day

Arguably the most revered American to never be president, Martin Luther King Jr. left behind a grand legacy of civil rights and non-violent protest.  However, on this Martin Luther King Day Jr. Day, there a few things we need to keep in mind.

1) In 1999, a Gallup poll of Americans found that Dr. King was the second most admired person of the century. A different Gallup poll in 1966 found that 63% of Americans held a negative view of King.

Today, 57% of Americans hold a negative view of Black Lives Matter, according to a Harvard-Harris poll.

Dissent is dissent, and dissent is unpopular, no matter what method is used. America whitewashed Dr. King’s methods and props up his non-violent protest as the gold standard of expressing disagreement. Simultaneously, 58% of white Americans disapprove of the NFL anthem protests, according to CNN. It’s easy to criticize protesters for picking the wrong time, platform, or cause, but using Dr. King as a minimum standard of acceptable protest is disingenuous and evasive.

2) Dr. King’s dream has not been fully realized yet. A new study found that by 2053, the median wealth of black Americans will be $0. And in the next three years, white American households will own 86 times more wealth than black American households.

Source: Edward N Wolff, Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962-2013. Figures are in 2013 dollars and exclude durable goods (via The Guardian)

With such a head start on generational wealth, white Americans carry a much higher chance of achieving the American Dream (or what’s left of it) than their black counterparts. From a Demos article in 2014,  a white high school dropout accumulates more wealth on average than a black college graduate.

Source: Demos

Add in the facts that black Americans on average have higher infant mortality rates, more college debt, and are more likely to be downwardly mobile to a lower income quintile than white Americans, and it is clear that the systemic disadvantages and hurdles black Americans face today would not be a part of Dr. King’s dream.

3) Dr. King turned his focus toward anti-poverty causes before his assassination. In December 1967, he announced the formation of the Poor People’s Campaign in order to try to sway Washington to further the War on Poverty and to expand the social safety net for all Americans. In his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, Dr. King urged America to revolutionize our antipoverty programs, and he advocated for a universal basic income:

Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppress initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attack one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.

While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or similar rates of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I’m now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

I recently listened to a five-part podcast series from On The Media named “Busted” that covered and exposed poverty myths, including the damning “welfare queen” idea that still carries weight today.  America’s draconian welfare system focuses too heavily on forcing poor people to work and it provides a pittance of the help that is needed to truly lift people out of poverty.  Americans fundamentally fail to understand the reality of our racist history in welfare, as the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, passed by Bill Clinton, ended welfare as we knew it and, with almost surgical precision, targeted black single mothers to get them off the welfare rolls.  That reform block granted welfare funds to states, imposed a lifetime limit on how long someone can receive welfare (the first and only country to impose such time limits), and it failed to tie the block grants to inflation, so the amount remains the same today. America’s welfare system is designed to score political points for bootstraps-believing politicians, and in exchange we continue to sacrifice the well-being of millions of Americans mired in poverty.

In order to truly achieve Dr. King’s dream, we as a society need to acknowledge the humanity of those in poverty, and redesign our social policies to more generously help and trust those going through a tough time.

Trump and the CNN Effect: Perverse Incentives in Media

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” – Les Moonves, CBS Chairman

The Trump campaign and subsequent administration reinvigorated the media industry.  Throughout the divisive 2016 election cycle and during the first year of the Trump presidency, the sheer amount of newsworthy content has dwarfed the content generated during previous administrations. Trump’s unabashed willingness to break political norms and his confrontational rhetoric grabbed the attention of the media and never let go.

I would argue that Trump is the most recognizable name in the world right now, thanks to the media’s appetite for Trump coverage.  The media essentially gifted Trump’s campaign millions of dollars of airtime by covering his campaign rallies in their entirety on cable news, and he perverted the term “fake news” to mean any media source that criticizes him (instead of the original use to mean literal fake news created by Russians in an attempt to subvert American democracy). The primacy of Trump news has spurred an even larger drive to tribal partisanship, but it also has amplified political participation and has made it more difficult to be apathetic toward politics.

But more news means higher profits for media sources, just as Mr. Moonves from CBS remarked. These news networks self-define as guardians of truth, but in reality their business model profits off of crises, controversy, and inflamed tension, which lead to more viewers and clicks. Counterintuitively, being labeled as “fake news” by Trump or his followers allows the media organization to grovel for donations through a veiled appeal to their consumers’ fears about the possible death of truth. This is not to say that the work of traditionally leftist media organizations is inherently disingenuous at the moment—I believe the New York Times, Washington Post, ProPublica, and some parts of the cable networks are doing a vital job in investigative journalism and in analyzing what news actually matters, but the profit incentive undoubtedly exists to work in a time like this where such journalism is necessary. The 24 news cycle is less profitable during a time of peace, predictability, and stability. But how did we get here? Why is our media system so obsessed with Trump content?

There is a political science theory by Steven Livingston of George Washington University named the CNN Effect that I believe can help explain how we have gotten to where we are today. In general, the theory posits that 24 hour news networks like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC tend to pick up and report on stories once they reach a crisis point. These networks rarely report on the events leading up to the crisis or the aftermath of the crisis, thus only showing viewers the crisis itself.  Most commonly, this theory is applied to foreign policy and natural disasters; for example, the major media networks did not cover the situation regarding the Rohingya in Myanmar until the genocide and crisis began last fall. Or, consider the recent impact Hurricanes Harvey and Maria had on Houston and Puerto Rico. These areas were in the news for a few weeks as the hurricanes hit, but they have fallen out of the news, even as countless Puerto Ricans continue to go without power. These news networks jump from crisis to crisis to generate clicks and views and to maximize the political relevance of their content. The CNN Effect often impacts policy-makers by highlighting humanitarian issues around the world, which can drum up support for interventions to help the affected people.

But I believe the CNN Effect played a role in the Trump-centric media landscape we have today. Before Trump arrived the 24 hour news cycle struggled to fill every hour with meaningful news stories—like I said before, stability and predictability are unprofitable. But with Trump’s campaign came salacious tweets, offensive comments, and personal attacks, which could be transformed into hours-long, crisis-like debates between pundits on both sides, each volleying their talking points back and forth until the next story rolled in. Cable news got their wish—enough content to fill 24 hours each day, but at what cost? In this media environment, the announcement of a DoD program that investigated UFOs hardly registered a response from the public. And the actual, sitting President of the United States tweeted about the size of his nuclear button among many other egregious topics that would be damning to any other politician. Last week’s Trump news is replaced by this week’s news, and these networks rarely come back to the previous stories to discuss the aftermath.  The rise of Trump must be attributed to at least some extent to the media’s opportunism and profit-seeking behavior in the run-up to the 2016 election, and thus any real crises that emerge from the Trump presidency must also be owned to some extent by the media.

So how could we change our media system to combat profiteering incentives for unstable politics and perpetual crises? One option could be to change the U.S. media landscape to closer mimic the UK’s, where a state-owned media corporation, the BBC, acts as the main news source for most citizens. While other media organizations exist and reach citizens, e.g. Sky, ITV, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others, the BBC is and always will be the main source of news in the UK. The U.S. does have PBS, but it is nowhere near as funded or popular as the BBC is in the UK. I hesitate to imagine what may happen to a state-sponsored news organization in the U.S., however. The BBC has created its own norms and institutions that protect it from being partisan, and yet it still gets accused of liberal bias. If PBS was the BBC of the U.S. it could be shaped by the party in charge at will, which may only make things worse.

Another option to reform our media system could be to get the Associate Press to agree to stricter requirements for objectivity and clearer labeling of opinion journalism, which too often masquerades as news on Fox News and MSNBC in particular. We also need to celebrate journalism that focuses on good news, like how crime rates continue to fall each year. The CNN Effect leads to hyper-coverage of every mass shooting and every gruesome crime committed, which deceives citizens into believing that crime rates are getting worse. Media sources must be incentivized to deliver contextualized news that represents reality.

A last option to change our media for the better would be to focus on media analysis during school. When I was in fifth grade, I remembering have a class in a computer lab where I was told to read an article and then talk about whether or not I believed it was truthful. My article was about pop tart blowtorches; my friend’s article covered jackalopes. I believed these things existed until my teacher told us these were all fake—that lesson has stuck with me, as it was the clearest example of the necessity of skepticism in media consumption.  Similarly, a teacher in California showed his students how to identify fake news, and now they question every assumption and book they read. We need to incorporate critical analysis of the news and of media more generally into our curriculum. In our tribal media environments where we get our news from sources who think like we do, the importance of skepticism cannot be understated. By practicing skepticism, our bubbles would be a little less rigidly defined.

America’s media system begged for an administration like Trump’s. Their 24 hour news cycles were not satiated in the past, and suddenly they have an endless supply of content and crises to dissect and debate, putting the CNN Effect in full swing.  The testier the time, the better their profits are, but the incentives do not have to be aligned this way.   By encouraging stricter accountability to objectivity and contextualized news, along with better education that warns against trusting everything you read, we can redefine a healthier media system.