Deprive the Establishment of Excuses
Every Democrat in Wisconsin is rallying around the prospect of winning a trifecta this year: If David Crowley wins the governorship and Democrats pick up two seats in the State Senate and five in the Assembly, then Wisconsin will have a united Democratic government. A trifecta.
The promise of this trifecta is huge. Over the last eight years, Tony Evers’ Democratic Party has used Republican control of the legislature as an excuse to pass Republican budgets full of tax breaks and incentives for wealthy elites, and austerity cuts and increased sales and property taxes for the rest of us. If Democrats win the trifecta this year, it could fundamentally change Wisconsin politics, long term.
A unified Democratic government could reverse Act 10, raise the minimum wage to $20 or more, tax the ultra wealthy, protect reproductive freedom, fully fund public education, pause data center construction and regulate it heavily, protect public land, improve transportation, support real public safety, close prisons, institute ranked choice and final five voting, secure universal childcare, win universal paid leave, make gains toward universal single payer healthcare, and win many many more socialist policies that 311,740 voters fell in love with during Francesca Hong’s primary run.
Trifecta so big it’s scary
Of course, the people who have been funding Tony Evers, David Crowley, and many other Democrats’ campaigns do not want most of those policy wins. They’ll have to pay more taxes and higher wages. The social status and economic gap between them and the rest of us will shrink. They’ll have a harder time recruiting workers into shitty jobs if more of us can get our basic needs met without such drudgery. This puts the centrists in an awkward position. If Democrats win the trifecta, what excuse do they have for failing to deliver for the people who voted for them? If they do deliver, what are they going to tell their wealthy donors?
Establishment Democrats love excuses. Last time Wisconsin had a Democratic trifecta, they managed to waste it, leading to a Republican sweep and the maps that locked us in for over a decade of minority rule and other hyper-corporate fascist Republican fuckery. On abortion rights, Democrats blame a few conservatives like Bob Ziegelbauer, who was eventually pushed out of the party over his belief in forcing people to carry unwanted pregnancies to birth. On minimum wage, they blamed the recession. On other issues, they had other scapegoats and excuses. The budget was seen as a divisive and costly failure, but party leaders argued they could improve on it next cycle. Voters didn’t give them another cycle.
This time we know better. The rank and file cannot accept excuses. We know how the establishment operates. They have always had a couple conservative scapegoats to blame for serving the elites rather than the people. Under Obama, it was Joe Lieberman. Under Biden, it was Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema. Those two got enough national media coverage to become household names during Biden’s administration. The scapegoat trick has blown up. We aren’t going to buy it anymore.
Meanwhile, New York’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is showing that it is not impossible to deliver on election promises. Socialist voters are not going to let a trifecta languish in a Manchin-esque miasma. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is fucking up hard. He has squeezed every drop of American blood he can out of the right-populist lie and fed it directly to his family and friends in the pedophile elite. Very few people are deeply brainwashed enough to see Trump’s Republican Party as an anti-elite option anymore. Thanks to Hong’s near victory, Wisconsin now knows that the true alternative exists in democratic socialism. If the establishment does not deliver, democratic socialists will target, primary, and defeat obstructors in 2028 and 2030.
If Democrats win the trifecta and continue serving their donors rather than the people, they’re fucked. That’s why I’m afraid that some people in party leadership don’t mean what they say about fighting for the trifecta. They don’t fully want to win. You can see it in Crowley’s lackluster campaign and declining approval. You can see it in the low quality of candidates ADCC and SSDC backed in the primaries. The corporate establishment desperately needs some kind of credible excuse for inaction. They have to lose at least one piece of the trifecta so that the donors they work for can continue to call the shots while the rest of us get fed a stream of bullshit and excuses.
Don’t let them have this excuse
Many of us on the left were disappointed by the primary results. David Crowley and Tony Evers not only defeated Francesca Hong, the establishment in the ADCC and SSDC spent millions defeating popular candidates. It sucks. Sharing a party with these people feels awful. That's part of why I haven’t written anything here since August 18. Sharing a party with ziofascist genocide deniers often feels even worse. The Democratic Party is not a fun or happy place for us to be right now, but it is the place we need to be.
Until we win election reform, this is politics in Wisconsin. Our dumb elections are locked in as a two-party race thanks to our lack of ranked-choice voting or proportional representation. It’s not reflective of reality, it’s not democracy, and it desperately needs to be reformed if not entirely replaced, but until then, this dumb shit is what we have.
Under this reality, punishing David Crowley and the establishment by withholding your vote is not a punishment at all. It will give them the excuse they need to continue serving donors and neglecting voters. It will let them deliver nothing while fear mongering and raising money on beating Tom Tiffany in 2030 or the Republican legislature in 2028. Lesser evil bullshit doesn’t work after we actually defeat the evil.
We are stuck here, and being here sucks, but in Wisconsin the time between a primary and a general election is just early August to early November every two years. That leaves us with 21 other months to be fighting for what we truly need and believe.
So, let’s spend these three months securing that trifecta and then pay attention to what happens after. The socialist policy platform existed before Hong’s campaign and is still very much available. Bills reflecting all of Hong’s positions will be introduced, and I promise you, they will be more likely to pass if the centrist establishment can’t hide behind having lost the trifecta.
