In the past decade’s general Republican takeover of once-purple Wisconsin, the Grand Old Opry Party has used many methods and techniques to maximize its shortcomings, for instance, badly gerrymandering the state so it can win two-third of legislative races with less than a majority of the overall vote, and making it harder for voters inclined towards Democrats to vote at all via invidious Voter ID laws.
But the sleaziest, most anti-American tactic of them all has been the Wisconsin GOP’s concerted effort to foist stealth Republican candidates on the state and local electorate. Some people call these candidates "fake Democrats," but that makes it sound like Democrats are somehow to blame. One doubts any coincidence in that usage, once reporters or the actual Democrats notice what’s happening and call the Republicans on their underhanded methods.
It looks as if the GOP's stealth approach might be coming into play again a year from now in the Milwaukee County race for district attorney, about which a bit more later. First some background:
In several rounds of recall elections the past several years as well as some local races (even nominally non-partisan ones), Wisconsin Republican Party strategists clearly decided their best chance to win was for their flag bearers to instead pretend to be Democratic candidates and file to run on that side of the ballot. This especially has tended to occur in the more politically blue parts of the state, such as Milwaukee.
Last year the notoriously conservative, billionaire Koch brothers tried to elect a slate of stealth conservatives to the rural Wisconsin Iron County Board of Supervisors, pouring unusual amounts of money into the ultimately fruitless effort. Apparently when it came to a contentious local mining issue, the locally elected supervisors just weren’t sufficiently Koch-like in their thinking).
The Wisconsin GOP’s stealth tactic has seldom worked, which is a testament to the general intelligence of progressive voters. However, Republicans haven’t been aced out. For instance, although the Koch brothers lost in Iron County's board race, their money did secure a couple local public school board seats in Kenosha County for right wingers.
Most notoriously, for more than a decade, now, Milwaukee County has been afflicted by Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. Clarke is a peculiarly pneumatic African American first appointed to a vacancy by then-Gov. Scott McCallum, a Republican. Clarke has since won four straight elections.
The law ‘n order, take-no-prisoners Clarke wears leather jackets and cowboy outfits or elaborately medaled and embroidered uniforms, and sometimes he rides a horse, all the while going on local right-wing radio talk shows to denounce his liberal or moderate detractors and threaten to take on the progressive mayor of Milwaukee. He thinks everyone should own a gun to help him fight crime, although in urban Milwaukee, the sheriff’s department engages in relatively few shootouts -- a job handled mostly by city police.
Some local political observers regard current Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele -- nominally a Democrat -- as a stealth Republican. Abele, who'd never held office before winning the post in the wake of Scott Walker's departure, is a millionaire with strong business ties. He was widely seen as a liberal, but his decision-making in his service to date often veers toward conservative talking points and he has successfully entertained help from the right-wing GOP legislature to amass more power at the expense of the county's more progressive board of supervisors, who are now part-time and underpaid as a result.
Another black candidate has announced she will take on a sitting Democrat in the 2016 race to choose the Milwaukee County district attorney. She's running in the Democratic primary, and that would be fine, except that there are some burrs in her narrative suggesting she might be the next Republican in disguise.
Follow me below the fold for rest of the story. When you have politicians who pretend to be something they're not, and major campaign donors who hide in the shadows, you arguably are no longer living in what the founders planned as a democratic republic.