Go Wisconsin! The Coming Presidential Primary Showdown

Unlike Minnesota, Wisconsin matters in presidential politics and we shall see that again this Tuesday

.  In so many ways the primary there is significant, portending the direction that four presidential campaigns will take and whether the Dump Trump movement or the momentum of the Sanders’ campaign will continue.

In presidential general elections since 1976 Minnesota has reliably voted Democratic in every presidential election and it probably will again do so in 2016.  Were this a seriously contested state that the Democrats had to defend then it is going to be a bad year for them and their presidential candidate.  Wisconsin though is a presidential swing-state, although a weak one. Democratic Presidential candidates have consistently one it since 1988 but the margins of victory are often close and Republicans have campaigned hard to flip it.  Come this fall the presidential nominees will be there but not in Minnesota.

But Wisconsin matters too in a different way.  This coming Tuesday the Wisconsin presidential primary will matter for both parties.  Consider first for the Republicans.

Dump Trump
Critical to the Dump Trump movement is beating Trump in Wisconsin.  The establishment Republicans have pulled out all the stops to support Cruz in the hope of preventing Trump from winning.  Why is Wisconsin so critical?  Right now if Trump continues on his current path of winning delegates he will either have enough to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention or be close.  If he has enough delegates in the first round to win the nomination then it is over–he is the GOP nominee.  If he falls short of a majority in the first round of voting then under most state laws or party rules, the delegates pledged to him can vote for whomever they want in the second and subsequent rounds.  At this point it is a brokered or contested convention and anyone can get the nomination.

The strategy behind the Dump Trump is to halt his delegate winning and Wisconsin looks like a good place to start.  Right now we know that mathematically only Trump can win enough delegates for a first round victory; it is impossible for Cruz or Kasich to do so.  Supporting Cruz in Wisconsin is something that establishment Republicans are doing not because they like him but because they dislike Trump more.    While the Dump Trump movement by establishment Republicans has so far failed they are hoping now they can succeed and eventually derail him from winning the nomination.

Whether this strategy will work is yet to be seen.  If it does, the convention will be a fight that parties normally do not want shown.  They want conventions to be four day infomercials for them.  They do not want to show off infighting.  But more importantly this year, a brokered convention will be ugly.  It will be the party establishment telling the voters in the primaries and caucuses that they got it wrong and that the candidate with the most delegates is not the one who should be the nominee.  In addition, if they stop Trump, who is the nominee?  I doubt Cruz, and Kasich is a long-shot.  Who will the party support and where will the Trump voters go?  Where will Trump go?  I doubt away quietly.

Sanders’ Surge
Clinton built up a huge lead with Super Tuesday and the Mini-Tuesday on March 15.  But since then Sanders has done very well, winning almost all of the states since then.  Some argue that Clinton’s best states were in the south and they are now behind her and that the path is there for Sanders to win the nomination.  Mathematically, he can.  If he can win approximately 58% of the remaining delegates he wins the nomination on the first round.  In the last six contests he has won by an average of about 58% and in northern states his winning margin is about 56%.  Right now Clinton has 1,266 pledged (non-super) delegates, Sanders has 1038. Yes Sanders is 228 delegates behind.  He has been closing for a couple of weeks while Clinton has been again assuming she is inevitable and turning her attention to Trump and not sealing the deal for her nomination first.

Polls at one time had Clinton with a 20%+ plus lead in Wisconsin.  Now polls suggest Sanders is leading.  This follows a pattern similar to other states that Sanders has won.  Wisconsin was supposed to be part of Clinton’s northern firewall.  It does not look that certain for her now and some rumors are that she is conceding the state to defend New York in a couple of weeks.

Sanders’ supports have many reasons to feel confident about Wisconsin.  Yet a word of caution–under Scott Walker and the Republicans the state enacted a very tough voter ID law.  It will be curious to see what impact that law has on students and Millennial voters.  The irony here will  be that if Clinton’s holds on in Wisconsin it might be courtesy of restrictive Republican voting laws.  Some also speculate that in a close contest Clinton may have the edge with super delegates.  Thus, Clinton could win not necessarily by winning the most delegates, states, or voters (although more Democrats have voted for her than Sanders so far) but through super delegates and restricted voting laws (keep in mind that Clinton wins in states too with closed as opposed to open primaries).

Mainstream pundits still dismiss Sanders.  They should not.  He can still mathematically win and in the last two weeks he has out-polled Clinton and won more delegates.  He is forcing her to defend  New York and that is something that many thought unthinkable.  Yet NY could be won by Sanders.  Clinton will not do well upstate NY and NYC has lots of very liberal voters–both Millennial and not–who might go for him.  Polls are tightening there.  A Wisconsin victory on Tuesday creates more momentum for Sanders and narrows the delegate gap more.  Never assume inevitable.

Caucus v Primary

Finally Wisconsin matters because it is holding a primary as opposed to a caucus.  In 2008 the turnout in the Wisconsin primary was 36.5%; in 2012 it was 30.9%.  Compare to Minnesota where  caucus turnout was 7.2% in 2008 and approximately 2.5%   This year again about 7-8%  of the voters caucused on March 1. Which system matters more to more people?

What if we gave an election and nobody came?

Well, literally not nobody came, instead, as Woody Allen once said, 90% of life is just showing up and that is what the Republicans did on Tuesday when they routed to a major sweep across the country.
    First, consider nationally, only 33.3% of the voters showed up.  This compares to 41% in 2010, and it is by far the lowest turnout going back to the early 1980s.  Two-thirds of Americans stayed home, including young voters and people of color.  These are core Democrat voters critical to Obama’s coalition yet they had better things to do than vote.  Even in Minnesota, a state priding itself on the highest voter turnout in the nation, only 50.2% of the voters showed up, down from 55% in 2010, and 60% in 2006.  Despite all the money and resources spent by the national Democrats and the DFL on GOTV, their base did not turnout.  One might speculate what would have happened if they did.  Perhaps the national GOP blowout would not have occurred and many of the close races would have tipped the other way.  Perhaps the Minnesota House of Representatives would not have flipped with the loss of 11 DFL seats.  Who knows, the results might have been different.
    It would be too easy to blame the low turnout on restrictive voting laws.  Maybe in some states that was an issue, but it does not explain places like Minnesota.  Moreover, there were some states such as Wisconsin which actually had higher turnout than four years ago.  No, the laws were not the sources of voter discontent.  What was?
    The first was that there was no constructive defining narrative in 2014.  Republicans ran against Obama and Democrats away from him.  Republicans told us what they would not do Democrats failed to explain what they did and why they deserve two more years.  This was a repeated on the dueling non-narratives of 2010.  Republicans had enough of a message to get their base out, Democrats did not.  Democrats had a failure of nerve, a failure to articulate why they had made the lives of many people better.  They can point to many successes, but too they failed.  Obama really has failed on many scores. 
    Yes Republicans did scuttle many of his efforts, but the President never pushed far and bold enough.  Too small a stimulus, too meek health care reform, waiting too late to tackle the environment, money in politics, or serious education reform.  He gives a good speech but the reforms he pushed were never grand enough to make the types of differences that needed to be made.  We all hoped Obama would be a transformative president, he turned out barely to be a transactional one.  Thus, in part the reason why Democrats stayed home was a combination of disillusionment, disappointment, and simply a failure of the president move the country in a direction far enough for people to see a major difference in their life now or in the future.
    Going forward, what does all this mean? The election results did little to change national politics.  For the last two if not four years power has been gridlocked in Washington, and that is certainly not going to change with the new Congress.  Obama was already a lame duck before the election and he was  destined to lose influence no matter what the results.  Tuesday’s returns simply accelerate the shrinkage of his presidency.  The last four years have been marked by repeated but failed efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, inaction on immigration and global warming, short term stopgap budget issues, and stalemates on minimum wage and a host of other issues.  Don’t expect to see that change in the next two years.  New congressional majorities do not necessarily mean that the House and Senate will act more responsibly and that its leadership and Obama will reach agreement by necessity.  What needs to be understood is that there is a basic philosophical difference over the role of government here, with little electoral incentive to compromise.  This is the core to understanding  the 2014 elections.
    The Pew Research Center has argued correctly that what has emerged in American politics is a two tract election cycle.  We have a presidential election cycle marked by turnouts in the mid 50s where women, the young, and people of color turn out, or at least vote in percentages greater than in midterm elections.  These are presidential election years that favor Democrats, in theory.  But the midterm elections produce significantly lower turnouts, with older, whiter, and more male electorates.  In each of these election cycles a different mixture of congressional, state, and local seats are up for election too.  The result is that different electorates create contrasting majorities and results.  Effectively we have dual majorities rule in the United States, each checking one another. With right now the midterm majorities driving American politics.
    Democrats are now looking to 2016 as their salvation when anticipated turnout is up to save them.  Don’t count on pure demographics to bail them out.  One still needs a good narrative and message, an argument to give people a reason to vote.  Obama’s lasting legacy may be one I saw in a New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago when one person turned to another and said “I think Obama has the potential to get a whole new generation disillusioned.”  It is this disillusionment that is the reason why we gave an election this past Tuesday and no one came.