The States: Wisconsin’s Walker start of GOP shift?

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The States Big Narrative:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was once considered the perfect conservative answer to Barack Obama — and a frontrunner for president of the United States. He raised millions out of the gate and, in the quaint summer of 2015, most thought that the Trump-sized blip that had started to take hold of the race — surely, that wouldn’t last — was a mere stumbling block before candidates like Walker would reassume their rightful position in the race.

Walker would end up a mere afterthought — if he was ever any thought at all — and the rest of that campaign and what had shaped Republican politics … well, we’re still sorting through all that. And while Walker never took off nationally, he is nothing if a shrewd operator in a state that went for a Republican in Trump for the first time since 1984.

But he’s also a spooked operator after a Democrat picked up a state Senate seat in a district Trump had won by 17 points.

So this political shift deserves some amount of interest and thought: Walker, who at one time gained conservative favor because he wanted to blow Obamacare to smithereens, is now proposing $200 million in state funds to shore up the program.

Some excellent reporting from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel​:

A fierce critic of Obamacare, Walker is set to use his eighth “state of the state” speech Wednesday to propose that the state “step up and lead” by strengthening the Affordable Care Act. As part of the broad health package, Walker also wants the Trump administration to permanently authorize SeniorCare, the prescription drug program that the governor once sought to scale back.

Walker’s shift is a mark of both the congressional failure to overhaul Obamacare and a tough political climate in which Democrats have won special elections in northwestern Wisconsin and around the country.

“With Washington failing to act, we don’t think it gets better any time soon, in fact arguably it could get worse,” Walker said of Obamacare on Friday. “And so … where Washington fails to act, I believe it’s time for Wisconsin to step up again.”

I don’t know whether Walker’s pivot is the start of a trend — but it bodes well for Democrats in 2018, and, perhaps for the long-term prospects of Obamacare.

Welcome to The States! Each week we seek to understand what’s impacting the key swing states of Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Illinois (because that’s where I lay my head these days). Subscribe if you haven’t and share this newsletter.

Before we get to the news, this made me chuckle: “Losers appeal Ohio medical pot licensing decisions.” We know what the Dayton Daily News’ means but Freudian slip?

Five Big Stories in The States
5. The Roanoke Times editorial board suggests, sort of jokingly, that regions should really be grouped by economics instead of arbitrary state lines. Impoverished southwest Virginia has more in common with metro areas in North Carolina than it does all the defense contractors in Northern Virginia. They have a point — even if we didn’t shift state lines, why not allow for those regions to advocate for their issues across state lines more effectively? The editorial board suggests a less dramatic form of Brexit (!):

We’re in a completely different economic region, and we should act like it. If we’re going to solve the economic challenges we face — primarily slow growth and unforgiving demographics — we need to fix them ourselves. We can’t secede politically, but these maps show we already have seceded economically. We just need to secede mentally; think of it as a regional form of Brexit.

4. Talk of who’s allowed in what bathroom has been the most recent turn of the screw in the national culture wars, but the whole bathroom thing is waning in the South. Per NYT’s Alan Blinder:

One factor that seems to loom large is that, though the bills have often been popular with conservative voters, they go down very poorly with another important constituency: big business. Officials in states hoping to attract major investments from out-of-state corporations — like Amazon’s second headquarters — say they drew a lesson from the boycotts and cancellations that North Carolina suffered over its bathroom bill.

3. Wait a minute… a contradiction on the whole simmering of the Culture Wars from the News & Observer? The N&O dives into anti-abortion movement’s energy and how it might affect NC’s contested elections. That’s a culture war debate that big business isn’t as concerned about — and doesn’t seem will ever subside.

2. When considering congressional Democrats’ recent waffling on immigration, consider what the Washington Post’s Daily 202 points out about Virginia. “The progressive movement’s most pugnacious groups have swung and missed before; in Virginia, infamously, the Howard Dean-founded group Democracy for America denounced now-Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) for a ‘racist’ statement that he would oppose sanctuary status if any of the state’s cities tried to implement it. Latino turnout surged regardless, powering Northam to a nine-point victory and sweeping 14 new Democratic legislators into the state’s House of Delegates.

Poltiically, Democrats know that Latinos will turn out in big numbers for them — whether they do the right thing on immigration or not.

1. We’ve covered gerrymandering extensively because it’s particularly stark in North Carolina. Lucky for us 538 has released a new podcast series and project on the subject called, easy enough, “The Gerrymandering Project” that shows how difficult solutions are to come by for drawing political lines. I’m still diving into this, but so far the series makes clear that both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander — i.e. draw legislative districts for partisan gain — and the solutions may be harder to come by than most think.

In North Carolina, for example, where Republicans drew 10 overwhelmingly Republican districts and three serpentine Democratic districts, not a single district had a Cook Partisan Voter Index score1 that was remotely competitive.2

But Republicans didn’t always seek to build impenetrable fortresses. In many places, their goal was to spread their advantage more thinly over a large number of districts. The risk? Over time, such maps can unravel or backfire — particularly if the party has a bad year.

It comes down to this: the 538 authors struggled to come up with completely fair maps by any criteria.

Gerrymandering is a really easy practice to condemn and a really complex problem to solve. And just as there are not permanent majorities in American politics, there may never be such a thing as a perfect map.

Odds and ends

Reopening the government comes with a drink and a slap on the back. (WaPo); Twist it around your head like a helicopter in NC (well, some do); the Hillbilly Elegy dude is too smart to get into politics (and I mean that positively); Dennis Kucinich is framing his campaign for Ohio governor around ‘We the People’ — vague but I suppose it’s all in how he delivers it.

New to The States? Subscribe! I’m Jeremy Borden, an independent journalist based in Chicago. The States will tell us where we’re headed. Each week, I keep track (or try — tips help, please!) of what’s happening in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia (which will be a swing state soon enough). I’m adding my home state of Illinois, the home of the Midwest’s urban epicenter, Chicago, which sits in the middle of America’s urban-rural divide.

Let me know how I’m doing and tips/ideas at borden.jeremy@gmail.com.