Fears Over Fate of Democracy Leave Many Voters
Frustrated and Resigned
As democracy frays around them, Republicans and
Democrats see different culprits and different risks.
Jonathan
Weisman
By Jonathan
Weisman
Oct. 23,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/us/politics/voting-democracy-wisconsin-senate.html
LA CROSSE,
Wis. — Allyse Barba, a 34-year-old in the insurance industry, watched excitedly
upstairs at Thrunie’s Classic Cocktails as Mandela Barnes, the youthful
Democrat running for the Senate, tore through his stump speech just 19 days
before the election.
Then Ms.
Barba reflected on the politics of her state: the divide between the blue dot
of downtown La Crosse and the surrounding red reaches of western Wisconsin,
where she said she could not have a civil conversation; the Republican favored
to win the seat in her congressional district, who was at the Capitol riot on
Jan. 6, 2021; and a Legislature so gerrymandered that her Democratic Party does
not stand a chance.
“It is
disheartening to live in a state where nothing happens,” she said glumly. “Voting
isn’t making a difference right now.”
Seventy-one
percent of all voters believe that democracy is at risk, according to a recent
New York Times/Siena College poll, but only 7 percent identified that as the
most important problem facing the country. Americans face more immediate
concerns: the worst inflation in 40 years, the loss of federal abortion rights
after 50 years and a perception that crime is surging, if not in their
communities then in cities nearby.
But another
factor is dampening people’s motivation to save America’s representative system
of government: Some have already lost faith in its ability to represent them.
Wisconsin
would seem like a state where concerns over democracy feel pressing —
especially in this western swath of the state. The House of Representatives
committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack uncovered text messages indicating
that Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican seeking re-election, wanted to
hand-deliver a slate of fake Wisconsin electors to Vice President Mike Pence
that day to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the state.
Derrick Van
Orden, the fiercely pro-Trump Republican running to succeed Representative Ron
Kind, a moderate Democrat who has represented much of western and central
Wisconsin since 1997, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
And
Wisconsin, perhaps more than any other state, is suffering through the erosion
of democratic ideals already. Though virtually every elected statewide officer
here is a Democrat, extreme gerrymandering of state legislative maps has given
Republicans near supermajorities in the State Senate and House. At best,
Democrats enter the state elections in November hoping to perpetuate the
stalemate by re-electing their governor, Tony Evers, said Michael Hallquist, a
Democratic alderman in Brookfield, outside Milwaukee.
But that
democratic erosion may have sent many of Wisconsin’s citizens on a downward
spiral of feeling powerless, apathetic and disconnected as one-party control
becomes entrenched.
“It is
daunting to convince fellow Democrats their votes matter,” said Tammy Wood, a
party organizer who tried to fire up the crowd at Thrunie’s with a rousing
“Welcome, Democrats, defenders of democracy!”
“That is
the purpose of the gerrymander — to make us fall into that feeling of defeat,”
she added. “But we can’t let that happen.”
Of course,
just what is threatening democracy depends on who you talk to. Many Republicans
are just as frustrated, convinced that the threat stems from liberal teachers,
professors or media personalities who they fear are indoctrinating their
children; undocumented immigrants given a path to citizenship; or Democrats
widening access to voting so much that they are inviting fraud.
Michelle
Ekstrom, 48, a moderate in Waukesha, typified Republicans who fear the
electoral system has already been compromised.
“I feel
that it’s definitely crooked,” she said. “I always think to myself, What is the
purpose if I go vote? Someone crooked somewhere along the way is just going to
put more votes in somewhere else than the real people’s votes. I think it’s
definitely tilted heavily on the Democratic side.”
Mindy
Pedersen, who runs a protective packaging business in Eleva, south of Eau
Claire, believes democracy is being threatened by a dwindling self-reliance
among Americans, saying they seem instead to be gravitating to their own kind —
women, Black people, L.G.B.T.Q. people — to press their grievances. She
described a meeting of a network of female business owners where she was asked
to describe how the group had helped her company thrive. She replied that her
gender had nothing to do with her success; she has been ostracized ever since,
she said.
“Do we want
equality or do we want to crush our opposition, which is men?” Ms. Pedersen
asked. “If I put out a sign that said, ‘White heterosexual women matter, and by
the way, I love Jesus,’ oh, could you imagine the reaction?”
Indeed, ask
voters exactly what is threatening democracy and the answers are as varied as
the individuals who formulate them.
Peter
Flucke, 61, a retired police officer from Ashwaubenon, outside Green Bay, sees
a failure of governments to protect their citizens and a breakdown of the rule
of law as representing the unraveling of democratic control. Where does Mr.
Flucke, now a bicycle and pedestrian safety consultant, see that happening? Not
in the grainy images of lawlessness seen in countless attack ads against
Democrats, but in rising death tolls in Wisconsin’s crosswalks and bike lanes.
Mr. Flucke,
an independent, said he would probably vote for Mr. Barnes and Mr. Evers,
though not because of all this democracy talk. In the end, he said, he is most
worried about his two daughters losing their right to choose an abortion.
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Caleb
Hummel, 25, an engineer in Waukesha, also sees a threat to democracy, though it
is by no means top of mind: socialism. His opposition to abortion is driving
his vote for Republicans, but “there’s something to” this democracy-in-peril
talk, he said. “The far left is demonstrating somewhat socialist policies.”
Some voters
are following with alarm the threats to democracy that spun out of Donald J.
Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Katheryn Dose, 74, a retired
nurse in La Crosse, cited at length reports of Senator Johnson’s offer to
deliver the slate of fake electors for Mr. Trump. She said it was “frightening”
that her congressman next year could be Mr. Van Orden. And she looked beyond
her own state to candidates like Kari Lake, a Republican running for governor
in Arizona, who claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.
“For me, I
really worry about people like that being elected and running this country,”
Ms. Dose said. “Election deniers with the power to deny the next election? That
is a huge concern.”
But voters
like Ms. Dose appear vastly outnumbered by those who express concern for the
fate of democracy, yet say they are willing to vote for candidates who reject
the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Ms.
Pedersen’s husband, David, a conservative who runs the packaging company with
her, scoffed at all the fuss over Jan. 6.
“In
reality, do you think those people were really going to overthrow the
government? Really?” he asked, taking offense at even being asked whether Jan.
6 was a threat to democracy. “Was Trump ever really going to not leave office?
You know he would.”
Mr. Barnes,
Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor, clearly senses that the issue is not his
ticket to the Senate. As he spoke to supporters, he did make the case that Mr.
Johnson was a threat — “He personally attacked our democracy” — but only after
criticizing Mr. Johnson’s support for a tax break for the wealthy, his efforts
to overturn the Affordable Care Act, his opposition to Medicare negotiating
prescription drug prices, his embrace of Wisconsin’s newly relevant 1849
abortion ban and much more.
If Mr.
Barnes had to choose the top two issues driving voters to the polls, he said
later, he would pick inflation and abortion.
Barry
Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said some
of the apathy toward democracy’s fate stemmed from the structure of the
American political system. Other countries have multiparty democracies where
citizens have political options more narrowly tied to their interests — like
“green” parties for environmentalists, religious parties or socialists. Ruling
coalitions of multiple parties offer more citizens a stake in the government
and something to root for.
“Our
two-party system is all or nothing,” Mr. Burden said. “Either your party wins
the White House or loses it, wins Congress or loses it. It makes feelings more
intense, positively or negatively.”
And in
states like Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, where gerrymandering
has ensured that the electorate’s partisan composition need bear little
resemblance to that of its Legislature or congressional delegation, those
feelings are entrenched. Only 2 percent of bills sponsored by Democrats in the
Wisconsin State Legislature last session got a hearing, much less a vote.
“In many
ways, it does feel like there is not a lot of hope,” Mr. Hallquist, the
alderman, said.
Brad Pfaff,
the candidate trying to keep western Wisconsin in the Democratic column, knows
he has “more work to do” to convince voters that his opponent, Mr. Van Orden, a
telegenic, retired Navy SEAL, disqualified himself from serving in Congress on
Jan. 6.
Mr. Van
Orden’s campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Mr. Van
Orden wrote in an op-ed in The La Crosse Tribune that he had traveled to
Washington “to stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”
“When it
became clear that a protest had become a mob, I left the area, as to remain
there could be construed as tacitly approving this unlawful conduct,” Mr. Van
Orden said.
His base is
not asking for an apology. “Why wasn’t the same shadow cast on the people
burning down buildings and attacking the police the summer before?” Ms.
Pedersen asked. “Why were those thugs not painted the same way as the Trump
thugs?”
Democrats
are not giving Mr. Van Orden a pass.
“The idea
that Wisconsin would allow someone who was part of the Jan. 6 insurrection to
go to Congress, the idea that we could even contemplate that, is deeply
troubling,” Tammy Baldwin, the state’s Democratic senator, told party
volunteers in Eau Claire before sending them off to canvass.
But Mr.
Pfaff sees it as a distinct possibility, if not a probability.
Nationally,
the Times/Siena poll found, 71 percent of Republicans said they would be
comfortable voting for a candidate who thought the 2020 election had been
stolen, as did 37 percent of independent voters and a notable 12 percent of
Democrats.
Mr. Pfaff,
whose family has farmed in La Crosse County for seven generations and who
served in the state and federal departments of agriculture, said he did not so
much argue that Mr. Van Orden’s presence at the Capitol disqualified him.
Instead, Mr. Pfaff said, it was “a window into his soul,” revealing “who he is
as an individual” — too partisan for a district that, in the last 42 years, has
been represented by a moderate and openly gay Republican, Steve Gunderson, and
then by a centrist Democrat, Mr. Kind.
But the
district has changed. The consolidation of family farms into corporate
operations has dislocated families from land they had worked for generations,
turning them into employees of big agribusiness. Local manufacturing has been
buffeted by globalization.
“That has
had a real impact on the people of this district,” Mr. Pfaff said. “They do
feel that we’ve been left behind.”
In the long
rural stretches, hills and coulees between the hipster hangouts and union halls
of La Crosse and Eau Claire, Van Orden and Johnson campaign signs jostle with
faded Trump-Pence placards. Mr. Pfaff, who noted that Democratic super PACs
were not coming to his aid, said it would be pointless in any case for
outsiders to ask local voters to reject Mr. Van Orden as a threat to the
political order.
“We’re
patriotic Americans, we know the difference between right and wrong, and what
happened in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 was wrong,” he said. “But the thing is,
if somebody from the outside, you know, somebody from the East Coast or West
Coast, starts talking about something like that, that’s not how people want it.
They’re not going to hear that.”
Dan Simmons
contributed reporting.
Jonathan
Weisman is a congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and
author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book
“(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His
career in journalism stretches back 30 years. @jonathanweisman
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