Grass Roots Organization, Messaging, Views on News, wispundits • April 2nd, 2008

Oh, what a night

by Chris Lato

For a spring election, which typically doesn’t do much to excite the voting population, this one had a whole lot of twists and turns.

One thing’s for sure: Gov. Jim Doyle can’t be happy about the results. Consider:

1. Doyle’s hand-picked Supreme Court justice, Louis Butler, loses in a squeaker to Michael Gableman – the first time a challenger has picked off a sitting justice in more than four decades. More on this race in a bit, but suffice it to say for now that Gableman’s win was in no small part a repudiation of the current high court’s left-leaning makeup and resulting decisions since Butler ascended to the high court.

2. Incumbent County Executive Scott Walker sails to victory against state Sen. Lena Taylor. Taylor has said she never spoke with Gov. Doyle about running for County Exec, but it’s hard to buy the notion that the governor never took more than a passing interest in knocking off Walker, an all-but-certain GOP candidate for governor in 2010. Walker is now positioned to make that run with the lessons of his ’06 bid to build on and the momentum from Tuesday’s decisive win to propel him forward.

3. Voters got out their pitchforks and torches and took down the governor’s ‘Frankenstein veto’ power by an overwhelming margin (as some of us predicted). There was strong bipartisan support for this constitutional amendment in the Legislature, due in part to what were viewed as abuses of the veto authority by the Doyle administration.

There were other big decisions, too. In Milwaukee, Ald. Michael McGee Junior’s constituents finally realized that having their representative locked in a jail cell is not exactly serving their interests well. McGee was defeated, in a bit of a surprise to some, to Milele Coggs, a member of a locally-known and politically-connected family. It feels a bit like the end of an era for the McGees, and the current Alderman hasn’t even gone to trial yet.

And there were others – victories for a couple I played a very very small role in helping, and some others across the region that were pleasing to see.

Anyway, back to the Gableman-Butler race, a truly stunning outcome. No doubt the self-appointed good-government types will bemoan the gutter politics, the tacky half-truths of the ads, etc. that duped gullible voters into marking the ballot for Gableman. So is the headline that negative ads work? Well, sure they do, sometimes, and that’s why they are used. However, it also depends on your definition of negative – I’ve never understood why criticizing someone’s record is ‘negative,’ if you’re making a fact-based argument.

But the ads are not the only reason why Gableman won. (By the way, Tom Still has an excellent analysis here of the role of independent ads here – making a point I have made before, that these ads get people talking and engage voters in low-turnout races, so they can’t be all bad.) That will be hard for the good-government types to accept – that perhaps, in this particular case, the better candidate won (admittedly, by a narrow margin) because voters simply felt the need to make a change.

Butler was rejected by Wisconsin voters before, when he lost to Diane Sykes in 2000. Since then, Gov. Doyle appointed Butler to the high court – but what has changed regarding voters’ perceptions of Butler since then? Is he really a better candidate now, or was he only hoping to enjoy the power of incumbency?

Also, since Butler’s appointment, resulting rulings have left Wisconsin’s business community steaming. A Gableman win is a definite victory for those who believe the Supreme Court had been doing its darnedest to hurt Wisconsin’s economy with its decisions on medical malpractice caps, lead paint, etc.

In addition, it is not just ads that win races. Knowing some of the players on the Gableman team, the ground game almost certainly played a role. Don’t forget, Gableman faced an uphill battle here - even those who support him generally weren’t predicting he would actually win.

So what makes the difference, when the two sides are pounding each other with hundreds of relentlessly negative ads? The ground game – having organized volunteer support out there to hand out lit, make phone calls, and get out the vote. It ain’t the sexiest part of a campaign, and it happens under the radar, but it is essential. And in a tight race like this one, it may have made all the difference.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under Grass Roots Organization, Messaging, Views on News, wispundits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.