At first glance, the victory looks monumental. Wisconsin is bluer than it’s been since 1964, with the biggest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater. The media declared that the Democrats haven’t controlled the state’s Assembly, Senate and governor’s office since 1986. That’s true, but it understates the party’s domination. The state’s two U.S. senators are also Democrats, as are five of its eight congressional representatives and the lieutenant governor, state treasurer and secretary of state.
Back in 1986, things looked a little better for the GOP: One of Wisconsin’s two U.S. senators was a Republican, Bob Kasten. The U.S. House seat now held by Democrat Steve Kagen was held by Republican Toby Roth, and Democrat Ron Kind’s congressional district was held by Republican Steve Gunderson. You’d have to go back to the mid-1970s to find perhaps the only period of comparable Democratic dominance in Wisconsin history, and that ended with the election of Republican Lee Sherman Dreyfus as governor in 1978.
This election had other bad signs for the GOP. The state’s pro-business lobbying group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, retreated in reaction to criticism of its ads for recent state Supreme Court races. In October, WMC president Jim Haney admitted to the Wisconsin State Journal that he was worried about being perceived as “sleaze carriers” and said the organization might have to “reposition ourselves a bit.”
While the group spent money on ads supporting Republican candidates in five Assembly districts, the ads were straight policy messages, and four of the five candidates backed by WMC lost. Meanwhile, the state teachers union, or WEAC, which generally operates as the countervailing force to the WMC, spent some $2.1 million to elect five Democrats to the Assembly, including one district (the 47th) targeted by the WMC. The winner in that one was the Republican Keith Ripp.
But WEAC’s spending helped Democrats defeat two incumbents: Kristen Dexter beat Terry Moulton (68th District) and Ted Zigmunt ousted Frank Lasee. The latter was a particularly notable victory: Lasee was a colorful grandstander who had seemed quite popular with constituents. And Zigmunt made his opposition to school spending caps – something the state teachers union hates – a key issue.
Yet, if Wisconsin’s Republican legislators were overwhelmed by a “tremendous wave of change,” as Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) put it, you could argue they didn’t do all that badly. Despite big Democratic voting margins in 2006 and 2008, the party has only an 18-15 margin in the senate and 52-46 in the Assembly (with one independent). Democrats were only able to flip five Assembly seats in this big Democratic year. One good election could bring either house back under GOP control.
A key race for the Republicans was the contest between incumbent Alberta Darling and Democratic challenger and Assembly veteran Sheldon Wasserman. In a district that normally leans Republican but probably leaned Democrat in this election, Darling upset pundits (including yours truly) who predicted her loss. Talk radio was particularly helpful to Darling, who sent out robocalls with an audio of Mark Belling calling Wasserman a liar for saying he wouldn’t support any tax increases. (Could a robocall get any more annoying than to feature the ever-abrasive voice of Belling?). Darling ran a smart, aggressive race. The reports of her death, it seems, were greatly exaggerated.
But even though the Republicans are within striking distance in both legislative houses, a little margin can sometimes be a lot. The previous margins they built in each house were done with a very canny Republican, former Gov. Tommy Thompson, at the top, using every maneuver possible to win legislative seats. GOP legislators won’t have that added leverage so long as Democrat Jim Doyle is still governor. That makes the task a lot tougher.
Crying Wolf Over the State Pension
Last week’s front-page, top-of-the-fold Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story on the state pension system was incomplete and misleading. The story’s first graph told readers that the system will have to reduce monthly payments to retirees for the first time in its 26-year history. Oh, those poor retirees.
But what the story left out is that all state retirees get a “defined” level of benefits, which guarantees a set monthly payment regardless of the performance of the stock market. That’s pretty generous to begin with, but the state’s unique system also funnels additional dividends to retirees from the proceeds of the pension fund’s investments. As aJS story from 2003 co-authored by yours truly reported, retirees in this group averaged a 6.2 percent annual increase in their pension from 1983 through 1999, during a period when inflation averaged 3.3 percent.
About 79 percent of retirees have chosen to get these dividends from the more conservative “Core” fund, whose returns are smoothed over five years. They may see less return on their dividends over the short term because of the market meltdown, but long-term their payments will continue to outpace inflation.
That leaves 21 percent of retirees who chose the riskier “Variable” fund for their dividends. As the stock market boomed, these retirees raked it in; now that the market has plummeted, their payments will drop – but not below the defined benefit based on their years of service that they are guaranteed.
In short, the market meltdown is merely a hiccup for a system that is more generous (and better run) than most states and that will never fail to provide retirees the defined level of benefits they’ve been guaranteed.
So why the top-of-the-fold treatment? Are the JS editors trying to make us feel sorry for government pensioners? I doubt it. The story is likely the result of a reporter, Cary Spivak, overdramatizing his story, and his editors, in need of a front-page headline story, failing to scrutinize what he wrote. The result misleads readers.
The Buzz
Back in August, when I predicted an easy victory for Barack Obama in Wisconsin, I got some heat from readers, but no one was more confident about the Republican cause than Wisconsin Conservative Digest Publisher Bob Dohnal. Dohnal offered to bet me $1,000 that Obama would lose. Bob, you should thank your lucky stars I’m a chicken and wouldn’t do it.
-Ah, the brave new world of the Internet. The oft-lamented days of dueling and inaccurate polls may be over. Sites like pollster.com, realclearpolitics.com and perhaps the ultimate, fivethirtyeight.com, all use different approaches to compile and average polls results, and all were quite close on the popular vote, electoral totals and state-by-state choices for president.
-Yes, Milwaukee County passed the advisory referendum in favor of a 1 percent increase in the sales tax, but every suburb voted against it. Where will that leave all the county supervisors representing suburban areas? They may end up switching sides on the sales tax they favored, or else provide the perfect issue for some future challenger.
-What’s with this idea that baby boomers have passed into history and will have only Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to count as presidents? The notion was promoted in a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd and by op-ed writer Ron Fournier in the Sunday Journal Sentinel. The baby boom birth years are 1946 through 1964. Obama was born in 1961. As for the idea no baby boomer will serve beyond Obama, if the future candidate is as old as John McCain, he or she could be running as late as 2036.
-By far the most Republican counties in Wisconsin were the suburban ones ringing Milwaukee: Washington County (64 percent Republican), Waukesha (60 percent) and Ozaukee (60 percent). Just 31 percent of Milwaukee County voters went for McCain. Small wonder it’s such a divided and contentious metro area.
-Wisconsin had lots of connections to the Obama campaign, as Bill Christofferson notes
And will Marquette Buzz-saw its opponents? The Sports Nut waxes rhapsodic about Coach Williams.
