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I get it, many of you are baffled and depressed as we enter the presidential election year. Nationally, democracy feels threatened and traditional barometers of political popularity no longer seem to apply.

Despite a laudable post-pandemic record and a rebounding economy, polls suggest President Joe Biden is deeply unpopular. Many in the media echo Republican talking points that blame Biden for problems he cannot influence.

Why? Perhaps we underestimate how the pandemic has diminished our nations collective capacity for optimism and confidence.

In fishing for causes, an obvious contributor is often overlooked: the pandemic itself, opined David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times recently. It not only killed more than a million Americans but also threw much of daily life and economic activity and public confidence into profound disarray for several years, scarring a lot of people and their perceptions of the country, its capacities and its future.

At year-end, though, lets focus on happier tidings inside Wisconsin.

This past year-plus has been the most hopeful period in state politics for democracy and for Democrats small d and capital D both in more than a decade.

Results havent been this favorable since before those dark days in 2010 when Scott Walker and Ron Johnson rode a national Republican wave to victory as governor and U.S. senator, respectively.

Republicans that year also won majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. Worse, that election coincided with the 2010 U.S. Census, which dictated an update to political districts.

The GOP worked in secret and passed the nations most gerrymandered, anti-democratic political maps. As you know too well, Republicans have maintained voter-proof majorities in the Legislature ever since.

But 2023 brought welcome change on multiple fronts.

The good news began with the November 2022 elections. For four years, Republicans had tried to undercut the authority and belittle the record of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, reflexively refusing any compromise.

But Evers won in what was, by Wisconsin standards, a landslide. His three-point victory was triple the razor-thin margin of his 2018 defeat of Walker. Voters embraced Evers as the authentic, center-left leader he had always been.

Equally noteworthy was that Republicans narrowly failed to attain super-majorities in the state Assembly. That outcome, combined with a GOP super-majority in the state Senate, would have allowed the party to consistently override Evers. Republicans won 64 of the Assemblys 99 seats, two short of the two-thirds needed.

The truly stunning vote, though, came months later, when Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by an astonishing 11 percentage points, flipping the court to a 4-3 progressive majority.

Huge turnout by younger voters, especially in Dane County, sent GOP strategists back to the drawing boards to try to figure out how to suppress future youth turnout. Appealing on issues wont work. The suppression of reproductive rights and the racist culture wars that are at the core of the modern GOP are overwhelmingly unpopular with young voters.

The Protasiewicz triumph was made more gratifying when, in its aftermath, desperate Republicans tried and failed to drum up support to impeach the new justice because she had stated the obvious while campaigning that the states current political maps are rigged.

Their whining was laughable given the conservative courts longstanding subservience to legislative Republicans. The state Democratic Party mounted a well-financed campaign of ads and door-knocking against the idea of impeachment. Democratic efforts also succeeded in getting the state and national media to focus on Republican efforts to subvert the election outcome.

It worked. Republicans backed down.

Republicans didnt come to their senses about democracy, Democratic state party chair Ben Wikler told the Washington Post at the time. But they realized they didnt have cover.

While the court race got the big headlines, spring elections also brought more good news: progressive victories in mayoral races in Racine and Green Bay. Both mayors are former Democratic state representatives.

On the governing front, Evers again served as an effective bulwark against the statehouse extremism that prevailed during the Walker years. With a boost from federal infrastructure funding, Evers focused on rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects throughout the state. He also fought for more financial support for local governments and schools.

Republicans tried to pass regressive state income tax cuts, assuming they could bully Evers. He wouldnt dare veto lowering taxes, would he?

Well, yes, he would. He also won the war of words that followed.

When I interviewed Evers in July, he asked me rhetorically: Do I allow the 11 wealthiest people in the state to get an average of a $1.8 million tax cut or do I veto it?

The state still has a big budget surplus and Evers has said he would support a tax-cut plan focused on the middle class, but that does not seem to interest Republicans, who are always beholden to their donor class, whatever their populist rhetoric.

Other favorable budget news was a shared-revenue deal that increased the amount of state tax money that flows to local municipalities. Milwaukee also gained the much-needed authority to levy a local sales tax, prompting Milwaukee-area columnist Dan Shafer to write, For the first time in a generation, Milwaukee is not making cuts, and is beginning to turn the dial in the other direction and invest in its future.

Then there were the revelations around the 2020 fake electors plot. Kenneth Chesebro, the pro-Trump lawyer who helped concoct a strategy to get Republican toadies to cast fake electoral votes in several states Donald Trump lost, is cooperating with Wisconsin investigators after pleading guilty to conspiracy in Georgia. That may suggest an investigation by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, though Kaul has made no announcement.

Finally, and as a marvelous pre-Christmas crescendo last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the states current legislative district maps are unconstitutional and that new maps must be drawn before the 2024 elections.

Evers said of the ruling, At long last, the gerrymandered maps Wisconsinites have endured for years might soon be history.

The GOP has said it will try an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but interpretation of state constitutions is the province of state courts and any claim that Protasiewicz should have recused herself appears far-fetched.

Undeniably, 2024 will bring political angst. But someday, political scientists and historians might cite 2023 as the year when Wisconsin again allowed voters not politicians to decide who represents them.

And, just maybe, it will be marked as the year when the politics of resentment began to truly recede.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | For Wisconsin progressives, 2023 was a very good year - The Capital Times