Populist Left’s big test in US
Janesville used to be a good place to eke out a middle-class existence.
The city of 60,000 or so sits about an hour’s drive south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, two hours drive from Chicago.
For years it had everything you could want in a small city: nice houses, a strong community, and thousands of highly-paid jobs, thanks to the giant General Motors factory on the riverbank.
Then 2008 happened.
As recounted in the remarkable book by Amy Goldstein about the town, things fell apart.
First the factory closed, as the company declared bankruptcy.
But it wasn’t just that factory: the plant was the centre of an interlocking economy.
Soon the factories that provided parts to that factory were closing too and, with such a cut in incomes across the city, belts were tightened everywhere.
Laid-off workers dutifully went off to train for new jobs but when they got out of school, the jobs they were training for weren’t there.
Child homelessness, suicides, and drug abuse all went up.
Now, 10 years on from the crash, the unemployment rate is way down on its 15.2 per cent peak, below the national average at 2.8 per cent.
But the jobs aren’t the US$25 an hour positions with union pension they used to be – now, $15 an hour is considered an OK wage, even for those who were making far more just a decade ago.
And the city’s representative in Congress that whole time?
One of the most powerful and famous Republicans of the modern era – Paul Ryan, vice-presidential nominee for Mitt Romney, revered policy architect for the Right of the party, and Speaker of the House, meaning he is second-in-line for the presidency.
But while his hometown was happy for the national fame, it didn’t seem to bring anything tangible to the town – then again, neither did Barack Obama.
In the 2016 election Ryan won the wider district but lost his hometown.
That set iron worker Randy Bryce off on a quest to replace Ryan as the representative for Wisconsin’s first House district. Bryce, who has a string of failed candidacies and a few convictions to his name, sprang into the national spotlight with a viral advertisement as just the kind of Democrat the party needed: a workingclass battler with the bona fides to talk to the white working class who switched to Trump and broke the ‘‘firewall’’ the Democrats had built up across the midwest.
He also took on policy positions favoured by the Left of the party, most notably Medicare-for-all – a promise to get the US to the kind of single-payer healthcare system most other industrialised democracies enjoy.
This brought in a lot of money for the man now nicknamed ‘‘Ironstache’’ and he won his primary.
But the easy ride ended there. First, his biggest foil was removed: Ryan announced he would be stepping down at the end of the term to spend more time with his family, hand-picking an aide named Bryan Steil to replace him.
Steil holds basically the exact same positions as Ryan, and even looks uncannily like him (people describe him as a ‘‘clone’’) but doesn’t come with some of the baggage Ryan had built up.
And the campaign itself has had its share of challenges.
Bryce’s own brother, James, starred in an attack advertisement, describing him as anti-cop, with a tweet where he described (some) police as ‘‘terrorists’’ as evidence. (This is only the second-most devastating attack ad starring a candidate’s siblings this cycle, amazingly enough.)
During the primary, Bryce’s bad record of paying child support was brought up.
And now the polls are showing Steil with a slight edge, although not an insurmountable one.
On the mostly empty main street of Janesville, I talked to a man who wanted to vote for Bryce but couldn’t.
Tim Whitrock, 38, had lived in Janesville his entire life, watching the huge change from the middle-class town of his early life to the for sale signs all over the city now.
‘‘There were more opportunities for people here, with GM being here and all the factories that went along with GM,’’ Whitrock said.
‘‘I think the culture in Janesville is changing – from GM closing, to how it’s hard to find work.
‘‘There’s a lot of people with nothing and that’s why there’s a big drug problem across this city.’’
That drug problem is the reason Whitrock can’t vote – he’s on probation for a heroin-related charge.
He spoke to me on a quick vape-break from his job hunt, having left prison just weeks ago.
And as for Bryce? Whitrock liked him but not his chances. ‘‘He should win but he probably won’t. ‘‘He’s a man’s man.’’
Carmen Vitello and Maggie Bromley, who were looking after the Democrat’s office in Janesville, weren’t that much more confident, noting that it would all be down to the turnout and that partisan redrawing of the district had made it far harder for Democrats to win.
The party has wider goals in the state, however, holding on to its Senator Tammy Baldwin and knocking off the unionbusting Scott Walker, who has now won three elections as governor.
The chances in both of those races are much better.
‘‘It’s really going to depend on the turnout.
‘‘Because from what we hear from Bryce’s campaign manager – Democrats and Republicans are almost evenly divided.
‘‘So if there’s a really good Democratic turnout, it’s possible,’’ Vitello said. Bryce’s campaign is a test for the party. Can it win with grandiose and expensive policies like Medicare-for-all in a state that isn’t already a liberal stronghold? Or is the path of senators like Claire McCaskill, who paints herself as a Centrist problem solver, the way to win purple states? That question won’t be definitely answered this election – it never really can be – but whoever runs for president in 2020 is going to learn a lot about the state of the country from this election, and the others like it.
As in many local races across the country, Trump is part of the ambient noise of the race, but not necessarily its focus. Bryce has said he will work with Trump on an infrastructure plan to bring good jobs to Wisconsin.
His beef is much more with the traditional austerity-obsessed wing of the Republican Party than the insurgent populists. And Steil is running a very Wisconsin-focused race, with a promise to basically keep the good times for businesses in the state going, leading to more ‘‘job creation’’.
He’s also running against the idea of the Government taking over healthcare but is now promising to keep Obamacare protections for people with pre-existing conditions, a point now conceded by Republicans across the US.
Steil was a white-toothed picture of confidence on a factory visit in Oak Creek, speaking to a crowd mostly made up of the workers at that factory with a stump speech he could have used anywhere.
‘‘You put the policies in place in Madison and Washington that encourages investment right here in our own communities, what we’ve seen is the unemployment going down below 3 per cent. What we are starting to see is the beginning of wage increases,’’ Steil said.
‘‘I’m going to go to Washington, continue these pro-growth, pro-economic policies, and really focus on the skills gap to make sure that individuals coming out of high schools and technical schools can get a high-wage job right here in Wisconsin.’’
Trump had tweeted just an hour beforehand, criticising Steil’s old boss Ryan, who had disagreed with the president over whether the constitutional right to birthright citizenship could be ended by executive order.
But Steil was not keen to criticise the president, or really address the question of birthright citizenship, repeating an answer about securing the border being the first step to immigration reform.
Eventually he implied an agreement with Ryan, noting the ‘‘plain text’’ of the Constitution, which does guarantee citizenship to everyone born here.
If he is to take up Ryan’s place as the guardian of the institutional Republican Party, the party that has to live on after Trump, he will need to do a bit better than that.