State’s primary should be true to wild history
Welcome to the most important Wisconsin presidential primary since Kennedy beat Humphrey — and maybe the wildest ever.
I’ve covered only the last eight. This one is in a league of its own, but there are threads that connect it to the past.
I learned two big things from my first Wisconsin primary 28 years ago.
One is that demography isn’t always destiny. Every state has its own makeup. Wisconsin is very white and blue-collar. But the same groups of people don’t vote the same way in every state.
Mike Dukakis beat Jesse Jackson by 20 percentage points here in 1988, but something pretty historic happened. In a major, high-turnout presidential primary, one out of four whites voted for an African-American.
Twenty-years later, Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton by 17 points here.
Once more, Wisconsin was an anomaly. Obama won all kinds of demographic groups (working-class whites, rural whites, white Catholics) that he lost almost everywhere else.
The other lesson I learned is that politics is a participatory sport here. The Wisconsin primary had the highest turnout in the nation in 1988 — 38% of the voting-age adults.
We’ll top that Tuesday if the official turnout forecast (40%) is correct.
That kind of engagement alters the nature of campaigns and elections in Wisconsin.
Sometimes it makes for a more moderate electorate that’s not skewed by a party’s most conservative or liberal voters. In 2004, only 13% of the state’s Democratic primary voters described themselves as “very liberal.” (Expect a higher number Tuesday.)
Sometimes it makes for a volatile end game, because voters respond to events. In the brief run-up to the 2004 primary, John Edwards came close to erasing a huge lead by John Kerry, boosted by a strong Milwaukee debate that drew stellar local ratings.
My second Wisconsin primary — 1992 — featured a recurring pattern here: the insurgent’s last stand. Democratic front-runner Bill Clinton fought off a last-gasp challenge from Jerry Brown, who lost by less than three points.
Clinton was battling a rival Democrat popular with young voters and independents. You could have written that same sentence in 2008 and again in 2016.
I haven’t said much about the Republicans because until now their primaries have been a lot less eventful. Wisconsin Republicans were 0 for 12 in picking their party’s nominee between 1912 and 1952.
I asked Mel Laird, the 94year-old former defense secretary from Marshfield, what the state’s hottest Republican primary was and he answered: “The Stassen one.”
That was 1948. Harold Stassen, in his second of nine presidential bids, beat Douglas MacArthur and Thomas Dewey in Wisconsin.
“That was a big one,” Laird said.
The Republican contest has often been over by the time the front-runner got here. I first met Texas Gov. George W. Bush on one of those trips, two days before the 2000 Wisconsin primary. He gave me an interview on his campaign plane. Earlier that day a controversy had erupted over the “long form” of the census questionnaire and whether it was too intrusive.
When I asked Bush about it, he said he hadn’t decided which form (long or short) to fill out for his own family.
I told him he didn’t have much choice. I explained that about one in seven households get the long form, and you’re supposed to fill out whichever one they send.
When our plane landed in Milwaukee, Bush got the same exact question from a TV reporter. He winked at me. “About one in seven households gets the long form,” he said, before repeating everything I’d told him about the census. After the news conference, he walked over to me, smiled and said, “Thanks for the briefing.”
In 2004, I had my only firsthand experience with staging a presidential debate. It was on the eve of the Democratic primary. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MSNBC were cosponsors. The candidates were Kerry, Edwards, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. I was on the panel, along with Milwaukee anchor Mike Gousha, current NBC anchor Lester Holt and current CNN analyst Gloria Borger.
It was a pretty quaint event by today’s standards. Nobody threatened to skip the debate, though Sharpton arrived barely in time to take the stage. There was no name calling or verbal abuse of the candidates or the questioners. Kucinich griped about his lack of speaking time. But he waited until the commercial breaks to do so, rather than complain on the air, as candidates do now.
Edwards, the trial attorney, watched the panelists like a hawk, anticipating the flow of questions, using eye contact and body language to signal when he wanted to jump in. When I asked Kerry if he felt any responsibility for the human and financial cost of the Iraq war after voting to authorize the use of force, the Massachusetts senator gave what media accounts described as two long and convoluted answers. I could see Edwards jumping out of his shoes to respond.
“That’s the longest answer I have ever heard to a yes-or-no question,” he told Kerry, making his future running mate look bad by accepting some responsibility for the war after voting the same way.
With Kerry hanging on to victory, Wisconsin went according to form.
It boasted the nation’s third-highest turnout.
Two more insurgents (Edwards and Dean) had their hopes dashed.
And the winners of the Wisconsin primary (Democrat Kerry, Republican President George W. Bush) became their parties’ nominees, as they have on every occasion since 1988.
Four years later, Obama arrived on a wave of momentum. Hillary Clinton all but conceded the state, scheduling one big flyaround two days before the voting.
Then a blizzard struck. Her campaign plane took off, flew around in circles and came back down.
Stranded in Milwaukee, Clinton winged it. She dropped by Miss Katie’s Diner (the same restaurant that Donald Trump visited Sunday), then the El Rey market, giving clerks and patrons a jolt.
“It was actually kind of nostalgic,” Clinton told me in an interview afterward. “Trying to find anybody who would talk to us, (as in) ‘Let’s go to the restaurant down the street. Let’s go to the bowling alley. Let’s go to the Dunkin’ Donuts.’ ”
In most primaries that year, the Democratic vote could be neatly projected based on a state’s political rules and population mix, since Obama and Clinton had very different coalitions.
But Wisconsin was an exception. For the first and pretty much the last time, Obama made deep inroads into Clinton’s base, especially blue-collar whites, winning them by five points here while losing them by 31 nationally. Obama won 27% of blue-collar whites in Ohio, 29% in Pennsylvania and 52% in Wisconsin.
This is the very same demographic grouping that on the Republican side has propelled Trump this year. These voters make up a disproportionate share of the GOP electorate in Wisconsin.
But demography isn’t always destiny. Trump won blue-collar whites by 16 in Illinois and 21 in Michigan, but was losing them by two points to Ted Cruz in last week’s Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin Republicans.
With close contests in both parties, this is the state’s most frantic and hard-fought set of primaries in decades. It will help determine how much hope Bernie Sanders has left against Clinton and whether there will be a contested GOP convention this summer.
The Stop Trump movement has a great shot here and is taking it. Either it will be emboldened or squashed, making this potentially the most consequential Wisconsin primary since 1960 when Democrat John Kennedy knocked off Hubert Humphrey of neighboring Minnesota, and took a major step toward the nomination.
Turnout that year was 50% of voting-age adults. It was a bitter fight that left long-lasting scars and divisions among Democrats in this state.
“It really hurt for a long time,” says Dave Obey, the former Wisconsin congressman. But it made history. Maybe Wisconsin Republicans will be able to look back one day at this primary and say the same thing.