WISDEMS Membership Crisis
At this weekend’s convention, members of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin will decide if the party will move in a new direction, or not. We’ve already covered the basic dynamics of this race (Remiker is the establishment candidate, Garcia is for change, Zepecki lies somewhere in between). We want to put out an update because earlier this week an intrepid party member started circulating some interesting research he’d done on membership numbers across the state.
Frank Ingram of Brown County Democrats compiled the number of members in each county and compared it to the number of people who voted Democrat in the last election. These numbers paint a pretty bleak picture. Overall, only 0.99% of Wisconsin’s Democratic voters chose to join the party they were voting for. Some counties did much better. Others, far worse. The counties with the highest number of Democrat voters were at the bottom of the list (Dane came 7th to last with 0.53%, and Milwaukee 2nd to last with only 0.35%).
Additionally, the ratio of delegates to members is fairly low, it’s determined by combining 0.1% of Democratic vote totals with 6.6% of county membership. Despite that, we are going to have many vacant delegate seats up at the convention this weekend. That means there are fewer than 6% of members plus 0.1% of voters who are enthusiastic and active enough to bother attending and casting a vote in party affairs. Pathetic.
Why does this matter?
Ingram has his own commentary on the data he compiled, mostly calling for more investment in recruitment and support for county parties. He seems to assume the problem is practical: well-intentioned party leaders just failed to support and build up party ranks. We’re more skeptical. The solutions he suggests would be obvious to anyone in leadership who wanted to boost membership, which suggests they don’t, or they’ve tried and they can’t. Both are likely true.
Too many people in the Democratic Party are playing office politics. For them, the party is a popularity contest. It’s all about networking, ring-kissing, influence trading, ego fluffing, and making rich friends who you use your office to do favors for. A large, active, robust membership on the grassroots level is not just irrelevant to those priorities, the two are in direct opposition. Attempting to join online reveals the priorities of party leadership. There is no form to sign up, and nowhere to voice interest. In order to join your county Democratic party you just donate $25 dollars. That’s the whole process. It’s poorly communicated, and makes membership in a political party feel less like joining a coalition with whom to organize, and more like a subscription to a really lousy Patreon.
The other problem is that huge numbers of people only vote Democrat as the least bad option, not because they actually want the mealy-mouthed, corporate-speak, Republican-lite, nonsense Democrats have been offering since the 90s. Getting those people to join and actively participate in the party is going to take a lot more than better outreach materials that Ingram suggests, or the mythological messaging fix pundits focus on. It is going to require changing priorities, and that means changing leadership.
The WISDEM chair is responsible for membership and administrative tasks. They aren’t supposed to make political decisions, such as endorsing one of two Democrats running against each other in a primary, but they do make decisions about where to invest the party’s time and resources. Every two years, all the State Assembly seats are in play, as well as half of the State Senate seats, all eight Congressional seats, and usually one of the two US Senate seats. There are always multiple races occurring at once, and the chair has a lot of sway about which ones get how much of the party’s limited resources.
Currently, the chair and his staff largely follow the state party’s political leader, Tony Evers. That means prioritizing bipartisanship and moderation. WISDEMS finance reports reflect these priorities: cautious, conservative candidates get more support than exciting, base-mobilizing, membership-boosting firebrands. The state chair is also supposed to uphold and support the party platform, which is determined directly by party membership, and is in many ways more populist and left leaning than party leadership. Remember, leadership has to balance member priorities with the priorities of wealthy elites who make up their donor class. Remiker doesn’t talk about the platform. He, like most centrists, prefers to vaguely talk around what he thinks the people in front of him most want to hear. William Garcia, by contrast, has a whole podcast where his positions are clearly stated. When asked about controversial parts of the party platform, he speaks in unequivocal support.
Current Leadership is Failing
Wisconsin keeps having massively expensive, desperately contentious nail biter elections where even if the Democrat wins, nothing much changes. Current leadership, from Tony Evers, to Ben Wikler, to Devin Remiker are so keen on centrism and compromise, so beholden to their rich donors, that their victories don’t cause a substantial shift away from decades of Republican austerity policies. Both parties currently serve the same masters, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Democratic voters and party members need to assert themselves against the donor class and their priorities. We need to demonstrate our dissatisfaction with the status quo politicians and their cautious, fascist-appeasing strategies. Overall, we need to deter Tony Evers from running for another term. He is Wisconsin’s Joe Biden, and if we let him, he will hold the party in a death grip of centrism and stagnation. That death grip is already squeezing the life out of our party. Less than 1% of Democratic voters are becoming members, and a fraction of those members are active in the party.
To be clear, William Garcia is not trying to deter Tony Evers from running again, but he is running on building up party membership. Electing Garcia will shift power away from Evers’ donors and supporters, who let his cautious centrism limit our imaginations and shape our party. This is just one of many steps we need to take to build a populist left party in Wisconsin, a party that will counter and defeat fascism. If left populism sounds scary to you, if you like money-hoarding for the wealthy and austerity for the rest of us, then pick the status quo. His name is Devin Remiker. If you want change, to build a fighting Democratic Party starting on the back-end, then vote for, or support William Garcia.
