Forward or Backward?

Wisconsin - another pivotal state that could have implications for the 2024 elections and beyond - just had its primary for the general midterm election.  Tim Michels, a 2020-election denier with the support of Trump, defeated Rebecca Kleefisch, who had the backing of Mike Pence and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.  Michels faces incumbent Democratic governor Tony Evers in November.  Michels could win thanks to favorable trends for the Republicans nationwide, and Evers barely won his office in 2018, a Democratic year. 

On the one hand, I was happy to see a Walker-backed candidate lose, because I still hate Walker, who lost the governorship to Evers. On the other hand, a Trump-backed governor could send Trump electoral votes to Washington in January 2025 even if the Democrats carry Wisconsin in the next presidential election in a landslide.  Talk about getting the feeling of watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new Mercedes . . . 

Be that as it may, the Democrats just nominated Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes (below) to oppose Ron Johnson for the U.S. Senate in November.  Johnson is a two-term incumbent who may or may not deny the results of the 2020 presidential election but does question COVID vaccine repeatedly.  Barnes is a progressive who has supported the Green New Deal and has the endorsement of noted non-Democrat Bernie Sanders. 

A black progressive named for a black South African icon running for the Senate in a working-class state that's also the whitest state in the Great Lakes region.  Oh, yeah, that's a recipe for success!

Well, maybe it is.  The first polls for the general election show Barnes with a slight lead over Johnson.  And Barnes' chief qualification to oppose Johnson is that he is not Russ Feingold, who lost to Johnson twice.  

No, Wisconsin

Scott Walker serves his long-awaited last day as governor of Wisconsin today.  But any hopes of the Badger State following the advice of its own motto ("Forward") was quickly dispelled by the Republican legislature passing - and Walker signing - legislation severely limiting the power of his Democratic successor, Tony Evers (below), as well as that of the incoming Democratic Attorney General, Josh Kaul.  (Kaul can't stop the state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act currently pending.)

To make matters worse . . . well, injury, meet insult.  Evers has said that he will not challenge in court the new laws limiting his and Kaul's power, as he'd promised.  He said that he went over a possible legal challenge with lawyers and found that he's have to sue the whole Wisconsin state government, including the executive branch - that is, he'd have to sue himself.

I can think of something else he can do to himself.

Democrats will continue to disappoint and disgust as long as they're too afraid to fight back against the Republicans as hard as the Republicans kick them.  Evers says he still hopes to be an effective governor by directing - ready for this? - economic policy.

With a Republican legislature.

Good luck, Tony - just don't expect me to put much faith in your way of "governing!" 

Power Failures

Not the sort I've been having for nine years and change.

In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled legislature passed - and outgoing scumbag governor Scott Walker signed - legislation limiting the power of incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers, making it illegal for Evers' administration to rescind a state suit against the federal health care law, and limiting early voting in an attempt to help Trump win the state again in 2020.  Evers asked Walker - pretty please, with sugar on it - to veto the legislation.  Yeah, right.   Walker responded by saying no to Evers with a bottle of elderberry wine.  With a touch of arsenic.  And similar efforts are afoot to undermine incoming Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan as well.

And then there are the new Democratic attorneys general in those states having their power reduced . . .

No matter how many state legislative seats the Democrats won in the 2018 midterms - 336, by one count - they still don't control enough state legislatures, and the newly elected Democratic governors in this cycle are more often than not susceptible to being failures as many of them will have to deal with GOP legislatures that will seem them damned before helping them run their states.  The Republicans are hell-bent on negating elections and rigging the system to keep themselves in power, or at least give them the upper hand in perpetuity.  The Democrats have to get smarter in winning back power in the states (and this goes for Win Back Your State) if they want to control more state legislatures.  Yet, even as Democrats won seats of Republican-leaning U.S. House districts by nominating candidates far more moderate than the Democratic base, this strategy translated into far less success at the state level - if indeed it was consciously employed at the state level.  Perhaps they should have nominated more moderates who could compete in Republican-leaning state legislative districts.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature turned Democratic governor Roy Cooper into a virtual figurehead and restricted voting rights in the name of stopping voter fraud, Mark Harris may have gotten himself involved in a voter-fraud case concerning absentee ballots in his race against his opponent Dan McCready for the seat for North Carolina's Ninth U.S. House District.  The local election board has refused to certify the results showing a Harris win, and a new election may be ordered.

Harris is the Republican candidate.