Craig Gilbert: Events in Kenosha are another shock to the 2020 political climate.
Police shooting, militia shooting are ‘Rorschach test’
Exploding in the middle of the Republican National Convention, in a season of unrest, amid a struggle over race and policing, and in a state at the epicenter of the presidential race, the terrible upheaval in Kenosha is making itself felt far beyond Wisconsin.
It's leaving its mark on the national landscape, another shock to the election climate, with effects too soon to predict.
On CNN, commentators called it a “Rorschach test for the entire country,” with host Don Lemon summing up the political debate by saying, “You've got coronavirus and you have Kenosha.”
Two more shooting deaths late Tuesday injected a new and explosive element into the debate over protests and policing — armed citizens actively clashing with protesters. The incident fanned immediate and mutual outrage and finger-pointing, even as the details were filtering in.
A chorus of Republicans assailed Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, accusing him of doing too little to quell the violence in Kenosha in the aftermath of the police shooting Sunday of a Black man, Jacob Blake.
“I can't fathom how Gov. Evers is literally allowing Kenosha to burn because he doesn't want to offend the hard-left protestors,” GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said on Twitter, castigating the governor for initially rejecting a federal offer of more National Guard troops and joining other Republicans in blaming Evers himself for the latest deaths.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party called that “sickening.”
Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes pointed to a gun-toting militia, saying on DemocracyNow!, “People treat that like it's some kind of normal activity that people are walking around with assault rifles … something like this, where people are standing up, demanding racial justice in this country, is a perfect opportunity for them to strike, and that is what you saw in the video.”
After an arrest Wednesday in the shooting, Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan said, “We can't allow white nationalist vigilantes to take over our streets as armed militias.”
Even before the latest fatalities, Kenosha entered the discourse of the Republican Convention, with its opening prayer Tuesday a call for “healing and comfort to Jacob Blake and his family” and “protection over those who put their lives in harm's way to bring safety and security to our streets.”
In her convention speech Tuesday night, first lady Melania Trump urged people to “come together in a civil manner” and “stop the violence and looting being done in the name of justice, and never make assumptions based on the color of a person's skin.”
In a striking sign of the breadth of the fallout, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play the fifth game of their NBA playoff series against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday afternoon in protest over what happened in Kenosha, leading the league to postpone two other Wednesday playoff games.
The presidential candidates weighed in on Kenosha, along with partisans in the race.
“Once again, a Black man — Jacob
Blake — was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick. Is this the country we want to be?” said Democrat Joe Biden, who defended peaceful protest but said “burning down communities is not protest, it's needless violence . ... That's wrong.”
President Donald Trump said on Twitter: “We will NOT stand for looting, arson, violence, and lawlessness on American streets.”
A Senate Republican from Missouri, Josh Hawley, tweeted, “Waiting for Joe Biden and the Democrats to fully and unequivocally condemn the rioting and murder in Kenosha. More and more the Marxist ‘social revolution' Left appears to be in control of the Democratic Party”
Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York said on Twitter:
“An unarmed black man is shot in the back seven times by a white police officer. Armed vigilantes then apparently kill two anti-police brutality protestors in Kenosha last evening. Crickets from Trump and his sycophants. When will they condemn this lawless violence? Phonies.”
Crisis in state vital to presidential race
The crisis in Kenosha is occurring in a state that could not be more vital to both sides in the Biden-Trump race, raising the political temperature that much more.
It's taking place in both a purple state and purple county, meaning local and state officials are well represented on both sides of the aisle, ensuring clashing messages about how to respond.
The political actors and authorities include a Republican president, a Democratic governor, a Republican Legislature, a Democratic city, a divided county, a U.S. senator from each party and a Republican member of Congress.
Wisconsin's First Congressional District, once represented by former House Speaker and GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and currently by Republican Bryan Steil, is one of the few GOP House seats nationally that contains multiple Democratic cities (Kenosha, Racine, Janesville).
The swing county of Kenosha, which voted twice for Republican Scott Walker for governor and twice against him, was carried by Trump by three-tenths of a percentage point in 2016.
The political reaction outside Kenosha came with inevitable questions about the impact on an ultra-polarized presidential contest, along with anxiety among Democrats in particular that violent unrest might help Trump politically.
Will the turmoil add to a sense of chaos around the Trump presidency — typically a bad thing for an incumbent? Or will it reinforce Trump's “law and order” message that was on display before and during this week's GOP convention, with the president vowing to “save our cities and our suburbs from the future of crime and chaos” and convention speakers accusing Democrats of “encouraging anarchy on our streets.”
In an interview before the Tuesday night shootings, Wisconsin Republican strategist Bill McCoshen said, “I think the issue matrix, starting with law and order, is driving up (Trump's) numbers in the suburbs . ... There is a case to be made that suburban voters are keenly focused on these law and order issues and what's going on in Kenosha is only going to accelerate that.”
Wisconsin pollster Paul Maslin, a Democrat, said this:
“If the frame of this election is the chaos of Trump's administration and its response to COVID and its response for the economy, Biden's in good shape,” he said.
“When the frame of the election starts to move — still chaos, still an America profoundly upset with itself — but when the frame starts to move away from that, even under the cloud of the horrific actions of the police, into more (about) ‘social unrest and racial strife,' sadly still, that could benefit Trump. That's the truth,” he said.
Journal Sentinel reporter Oren Oppenheimer contributed to this report.
Craig Gilbert has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and chronicled Wisconsin’s role as a swing state at the center of the nation’s political divide. He has written widely about polarization and voting trends and won distinction for his data-driven analysis. Gilbert has served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a Lubar Fellow at Marquette Law School and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied public opinion, survey research, voting behavior and statistics. Email him at craig.gilbert@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @WisVoter.