Primary election results: Wisconsin Republicans will never learn.

The people who put two word salad constitutional referendums on a primary ballot are big mad the voters overwhelmingly voted “no.” In a state that is 50-50 Republican and Democratic, the referendums lost 58%-42%. That’s a wider margin than any of our current statewide electeds received.

So, what should right-wingers learn from this? And will they learn? (Spoiler: no).

Implementing one of the worst gerrymanders in the country and exploiting it to ignore the will and wellbeing of your own constituents has killed trust in the Legislature. The problem with the text message above (aside from being completely disingenuous) is that former Gov. Scott Walker lost reelection. You can’t gerrymander a statewide office. (Though you can block access to the ballot box, which the right certainly has done). If voters were opposed to the way Gov. Tony Evers handled federal COVID-19 funds, they could have elected his 2022 challenger, Tim Michels. The same could not be said about the widely unpopular legislature which spent the last decade sitting pretty in heavily gerrymandered districts.

Also, I think they pissed off some voter just by making the language of the referedums unintelligible. Last night I was chatting with someone who is passively interested in politics. She said she spent ages reading and re-reading the referedums, trying to figure out what she was voting for. Deliberately using an unreadable referendum to bypass the legislative process is not going to improve trust in the Legislature, which was the whole message of the “Vote Yes” campaign.

The overall scumminess of the referendums and the right’s campaign in favor of them was obvious, even to voters who lean right. Now, will the movers and shakers on the right learn from this? If this tweet from Rick Esenberg, President of law firm/hate group Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty is any indicator (and unfortunately it is), the answer is no. They’ll blame it on the money spent by Democrats in opposition to the referedum. Or blame Madison and Milwaukee (that ol’ chestnut), even though the referendums failed in several counties across the state. Any excuse to avoid the reality that voters do not trust them and for very good reason.

The referendums also pose questions for the left: how did they get on the primary ballot as they were written? Is there no one who could have pushed back? No one who could force the legislature to re-write them in plain English and/or put them on the ballot for an election with a higher turnout?

What to do about it? Vote. Keep voting. And keep up the pressure on our electeds to fight against these right-wing shenanigans.

What have I been up to?

I wrote a last-minute piece on a complicated Democratic primary in my own district where four of the five candidates in the Democratic primary for a northeast Madison-area Assembly race laid out detailed allegations that the fifth candidate, Andrew Hysell, misused millions of dollars in federal funds during his tenure as a partner at a company that operated reading programs for the State of Kansas. Hysell won yesterday’s primary, but the piece goes beyond that one race and opines on states like Kansas using welfare funds to run whatever bullshit programs they want.

I also wrote for Tone Madison about my part-time baking gig and the balance of mental and manual labor.

Finally here’s a conversation I had with author Kavin Senapathy about their book The Progressive Parent on WORT’s afternoon talk program A Public Affair. It got me thinking about biological essentialism so consider this a preview for a future column.