This coming week will be huge—but take a moment to soak in what happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday. A landslide against a GOP power grab. Even without Milwaukee and Madison’s Dane County, the GOP’s constitutional amendments lost.
There’s a lesson here.
This post tells a story, and it’s also a huge thank-you note—to everyone, from Governor Evers to allied groups to local volunteers—who made this victory happen.
One essential element: grassroots donors. Thanks! Can you chip in to help us keep fighting?
Okay. What happened on Tuesday?
Wisconsin defeated two power-grab ballot questions that the GOP thought would sail right past voters and into the Constitution. It wasn’t inevitable. Our polling in June had us losing both. But we all showed up. And in the end, it wasn’t close.
We’ve learned to fight. And when we fight, as Vice President Harris says, we win.
The GOP wasn’t dumb to think that passing these constitutional amendments would be a cakewalk. 12 of the last 13 constitutional amendments in Wisconsin have passed—all but one in the last 28 years. In June, internal polls found both of the power-grab amendments poised to pass—one of them by 3, the other by 10 points.
What was the idea behind these amendments? Two words: revenge and control.
Revenge—because the Wisconsin GOP is still furious about how Governor Evers successfully spent COVID relief money sent from the federal government.
Gov. Evers helped 8500 small businesses launch or expand, across all 72 counties. He expanded broadband access to 410,000 homes and businesses.
Evers sent funds to local governments to ensure that towns and cities didn’t have to lay off first responders, that school districts didn’t have to lay off teachers, and that more kids could access mental health care.
It worked. Wisconsin hit record-low unemployment. Our state’s economy has flourished. And voters responded by reelecting Governor Evers in 2022 with triple his victory margin from 2018.
But Republican politicians, who had wanted to use those funds for tax giveaways to the state’s biggest landowners, were furious. They couldn’t claw back the funds that had supported communities small and large all over the state. That left plan B: undermine Wisconsin's governorship.
The GOP’s plan was a power grab to seize control of federal emergency funds. The legislature that didn’t meet for 300 days during the pandemic decided they, not state’s executive leader, should be trusted with moving decisively in the face of disaster.
Republican legislators drafted two constitutional amendments that they themselves admitted were confusing, giving the legislature “sole power” over funds like the disaster relief money from the federal government.
GOP legislators passed the amendments in back-to-back legislative sessions, the key step before amendments go to voters for approval.
They used a tactic that Robin Vos had bragged about before: putting the amendments on normally low-turnout, GOP-heavy election days. For the first time in Wisconsin history, these questions would be voted on in August, the day of Wisconsin’s partisan primary.
It was supposed to be so easy. Their plan had it all. But they forgot one thing: us.
On Tuesday, August 13, turnout surpassed 26% of the voting-age population—the highest turnout in a fall partisan primary during a presidential election year since 1964.
Wisconsinites voted “No” in a landslide. Question 1 fell 57-43. Question 2 went down 58-42. Remove Dane and Milwaukee counties from the calculation, and Wisconsin still voted no. “No” won an outright majority of counties, including 24 where Trump won in 2020.
Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, “No” won 72-28—and in Dane County, “No” won 82-18.
How did all this happen? A full-court press.
WisDems was one part of a coalition-wide effort led by Governor Evers, who barnstormed across Wisconsin; Democratic legislators and other elected officials, who spoke out and held town halls and an array of allied groups who joined together, led by Wisconsin Conservation Voters, in the extraordinary Wisconsin Votes No coalition, which led a $1.9 million campaign incorporating everything from door-to-door canvassing to digital ads to mail to “Vote No!” yard signs.
Wisconsin Votes No included groups that represent huge swathes of our coalition: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin; Power to the Polls; Blue Green Alliance; Evergreen Action; the Wisconsin Farmers Union; The Wisco Project; LIT (Leaders Igniting Transformation); Forward Together Wisconsin; For Our Future Wisconsin; and the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC).
Many additional groups went to bat: Working Families Party, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, AFSCME, Protect Wisconsin’s Constitution, Oregon Area Progressives, A Better Wisconsin Together, 350 Wisconsin, Main Street Alliance, Standing Up for Racial Justice, and America Votes—among others.
The whole of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin—from the thousands of volunteers in our mighty county parties, neighbor-to-neighbor action teams, and other units to the staff on our core team and coordinated campaign, now 245 strong—pulled out all the stops.
From the moment our party endorsed “Vote No” at our state convention in June through the moment the polls closed on August 13, WisDems volunteers knocked on more than 300,000 doors and placed more than 500,000 phone calls.
This wave of action crescendoed over the final four days of Get Out The Vote, when volunteers completed more than 2,500 action shifts, knocking on more than 110,000 doors and making roughly 100,000 phone calls.
On top of that, WisDems invested in $250,000 of digital and television advertising, a five-figure investment in SMS mobilization, a digital amplifier and influencer campaign, and a huge push to ensure that the “Vote No” message was unmissable in local news coverage.
And all of this, all this work by so many people and organizations and elected officials and party volunteers—it empowered voters to defy history, defy the polls, and vote “No” in a landslide.
To everyone involved in this fight, in front of and behind the scenes: THANK YOU.
There’s a lesson here.
Intensive campaigns educate the public. They clarify the stakes. They raise the alarm. They don’t, as some imagine, convince people to vote against their own beliefs and values—instead, they enable people to see how their values connect to their ballot.
The plain truth is that Wisconsinites support Governor Evers. They approve of the job he’s doing. And they don’t want to bend our Constitution to enable a GOP power grab to undermine him.
A profoundly cynical strategy has informed Republican campaigning and policymaking for at least four decades: break the government, and then point to its brokenness to undermine the public’s trust that government can ever help.
When Democrats take office, over and over, they find they have to clean up the messes left by Republicans. The financial crisis under George W. Bush. The botched response to COVID from Trump. The potholed roads and defunded schools from Scott Walker.
But when Democrats show that government, in partnership with workers and business leaders and civil society, can be a force for good, voters see it. And they want it to work.
When Republicans try to warp the constitution, when they try to undermine effective leaders who actually care about the people—and, critically, when a campaign makes sure that voters find out about it—voters fight back.
It’s a little thing called democracy. On Tuesday, we saw democracy in action. This November, democracy is on the ballot. Let’s take action, buoyed by this victory, to ensure that democracy can soar.
