How the odd and wonderful people of this small Wisconsin town are slapping Republicans back into reality
I wasn’t going to get into all this small-town noise echoing off a borrowed song by a tone-deaf country music phony named Jason Aldean. Not because I don’t think it’s an important issue worth kicking around in earnest, but because I am not much interested in helping such an intellectual shrimp garner such big record sales.
So that’ll be the last mention of this three-chord poser. If you want more, hit Google, or better yet, wait until he undoubtedly becomes Trump’s opening act during one of those standup routines when he menacingly stalks an Iowa cornfield, shaking down his groupies to help pay for his endless supply of noxious gas.
All this did get me to thinking a bit about my town, Madison, Wisconsin, and I’d like to spend a few minutes telling you about it. After all, my town could well be the place the latest mega-election of our lives gets settled two Novembers from now.
Thanks to a career in journalism that took me around the world, and before that a nervous mom who was picking out our next place to live before we had even settled into the place we briefly inhabited two times before that, I’ve lived just about everywhere.
It took me about five minutes after walking away from my keyboard to count ‘em all. When I returned, the number I landed on was 22 — give or take.
I was born an Army brat in Ethiopia around the time Eisenhower was bowing out and Kennedy was strutting in. I’ve been bouncing around ever since. I’ve lived in mega-cities like Tokyo and New York City and small towns like Bloomsbury, New Jersey and Turner, Maine. I’ve lived in villages in Germany like Pfungstadt and Steinwenden, and big towns in Florida like Naples and Fort Myers.
I was living in Washington, D.C. when all hell broke loose on 9/11, and Winthrop, Massachusetts, when JFK was murdered.
I am now onto my 12th year in Madison, and I’ve never lived anywhere close to this long. It’s the first place I have lived since my mom finally put down roots in Plainfield, N.J., for a few years in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that feels like home.
When I arrived here from Germany to start another gig after finishing up my stint at Stars & Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper that serves the troops and their families overseas, Madison was positively up for grabs politically.
It took me about four days to realize I was in the right place at the right time as America began trying to sort itself out, and decide if it really was the land of the free and the home of the brave, or just some big-box empire owned by a clutch of judgmental, rightwing billionaires.
Republican Scott Walker was the governor here, and more important, the billionaire Koch Bros. No. 1 errand boy. He’d been elected the year before and was busy taking his gold-plated hammer to anything with a beating heart.
It was easy to see Walker was dangerous as hell, because of how effortlessly he overestimated himself.
I got to meet him a couple of times and came away from those encounters positively convinced he was dumber than dirt — with apologies to dirt. He’s vacant. Dead inside. He’s also one of these cats who wants you to know he leans on God, while at the same time stepping on the throats of the needy.
Turns out he was a useful Republican power tool until eight years later when he lost a race he figured he’d win, and ended up hanging on a hook in some worthless shed wondering where the power cord went.
And let me duck in here real quick to point out that this racist, Ron DeSantis, is nothing but a Scott Walker redo. Their loud music sounds great blaring from their speakers at home, but falls flat everywhere else.
There’s a lot of good news in that, because if I’ve got this at all right, by the time DeSantis is done patting the backs of slave owners on the campaign trail, he’ll be forced to return to Florida, a beaten, pathetic man — and a lot of the folks in the political middle in that state will have decided they’ve had enough of him.
That’s what happened to Walker in 2018, after his idiotic run for president in 2016.
Walker enjoyed about a three-week stint as one of the frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 along with the bumbling, Jeb Bush, before both of ‘em were shoved to the end of the debate stage in no time by an orange, nuclear-powered racist, who wasn't afraid of saying the horrific things out loud that they were only thinking.
Beaten to a pulp and finally exposed as the loser he always has been, Walker was washed away in the Blue Wave of 2018 and things have never been the same for him or the righteous people here in Wisconsin.
Democrats have been winning elections at an electrifying clip since then, and my town has had a whole helluva lot to do with that.
Madison is located in Dane County which is geometrically square, and socially wonderful and odd. Madison is so colorful and liberal, it was disparaged in 1978 by Wisconsin’s then-Republican Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus as “30 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality.”
Madisonians didn’t much like that insult, not because they disagreed with the stuck-up, frustrated governor, but because it’s actually closer to 77 square miles in size.
Madisonians are a pain in the political Right’s ass, and we take a lot of pride in that. We are also home to the University of Wisconsin, top-flight music venues, museums, bars, restaurants, markets, low crime, and wouldn’t you know it: a destination for the folks in all those small towns looking for some action and vibrance in their lives.
That’s the real reality.
You could also call an election in my town for literally anything and within minutes there’d be lines wrapped around every corner of the city. We are furious voters who have fought to reclaim what’s good and right about Wisconsin and America.
Choice for one thing.
We stand with the women and the right to vote. We stand up for the climate and put down racist hate. You could throw a rock in any direction around here and hit an activist. We are everywhere, and we are paying attention.
We are also growing by the second, which I can tell you positively terrifies Republicans.
I’d argue we have the most organized get-out-the-vote machine in the country, which is really saying something for such an odd group of people.
In the most recent statewide election here in April to decide the majority of our Supreme Court, Dane County and Madison voters showed up and pushed the liberal justice, Janet Protasiewicz, to an 11-point thumping of Trump’s conservative candidate, Dan Kelly.
Protasiewicz got 82 percent of the vote here in Dane to Kelly’s pathetic 18, winning 197,029 votes to Kelly’s 43,372. Our turnout was 63 percent. Those are remarkable numbers for an off-year election in the spring with no other state or national races on the ballot.
Just in case I haven’t impressed you yet, consider this: When Joe Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin in 2020, the turnout for registered voters here in Madison was an incredible 89.3 percent. The turnout across America was 66.1 percent.
Biden beat Trump by more than 20,000 votes statewide, but he beat Trump here in Madison by more than 181,000 votes.
Madison and Dane County are the engines that have led the Democrats’ resurgence in this battleground state. Since the disaster of 2016, liberal voters have flipped the Supreme Court, elected and reelected Democrat Tony Evers as governor and elected and reelected Democrat Josh Kaul as the state’s attorney general.
Currently, you will find us at all the choice spots, drinking beer, knocking back brats, hiking our beautiful parks, fishing our pristine streams, and readying ourselves to put in the necessary work in 2024 in this the battlegroundiest of all the battleground states.
We aren’t much about toxic masculinity or bragging about the size of our guns. We will put on a pink hat, however, organize and drive people of all shapes and colors to the polls.
Mostly, we are winners.
You don’t come around my town unless yer lookin’ to vote.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough