Scrimshaw Spotlight: The Two Wisconsins

Two Theories, Both Alike In Dignity

Who would be the best candidate for Democrats to run in Wisconsin? Is it Ron Kind, champion of Southwest Wisconsin and popular candidate with the kinds of cultural conservatives that Democrats need to not get wiped out with to win statewide? Or, is it Mark Pocan, the erstwhile gay sitting member for Madison, a candidate more aligned to succeed in the Milwaukee collar? Honestly, I have no idea - or, I didn't, until I wrote this. But it might be the most important question in Democratic politics these days.

Now, I'm aware Mark Pocan has said he will not run for the Senate seat, preferring to stay in the House. I am not persuaded that that statement is rock solid in March of 2021, because I lived through Steve Bullock not announcing his Senate run until March 2020 and Marco Rubio coming back into the Senate race in Florida late in the cycle in 2016. Everything is hard and fast until it's malleable and flexible. Everything is what it seems until it needs to be something else.

The case for both the Kind and Pocan candidacies relies on a winning coalition from the very recent past - Kind, on Tony Evers' coalition from 2018, and Pocan, on Joe Biden's from last year.

This map (courtesy of Jackson Bryman) shows where Evers outran Biden, and Biden outran Evers. Biden outran in the blue areas - with the WOW counties outside Milwaukee showing up the most - while Evers outran in red areas, namely Kind's patch, the Wisconsin 3rd. The battle over which candidacy - and which coalition - is best is hard to answer. You can easily make the case that the right answer is minimizing decline in the Driftless and then letting global trends do the work in the collar, but you can easily make the opposite one - that the Driftless is going right, and there's little that can be done, so instead of honing in on a strategy that tries to recreate the past, lean in on the one that is designed to maximize the ascending Wisconsin Democratic coalition - the Biden one, centered on the cities and suburbs.

In some ways, the question isn't which of the candidate's good qualities matters more, but where are their weaknesses less harmful. Put another way, which is more plausible - Kind getting a "good enough" result in the collar, or Pocan getting a "good enough" result in the Driftless?

Let's start with Pocan - the case for him doing better than Biden in the Driftless is pretty easy, as all those Trumpy low propensity whites don't turn out, and the voters who do turn out in the Driftless are a more Democratic sample than the ones in 2020, meaning you don't have to do persuasion while also getting a swing. It's a plausible enough theory, but I also think that if you ran a candidate with less credibility amongst a certain class of working class whites at the top of the ticket, then you don't suffer a very mild swing against you there from 2016 to 2020, you suffer a fairly large one - not one likely big enough to cost you the state, but not an insubstantial one.

(Thanks to Lakshya Jain for the elasticity map.)

Those voters are also hugely elastic, meaning that a Kind candidacy has a lot of upside attached to it. If the GOP voters don't turn out, and ours do - and the Trump/Kind 2020 voters break for Kind again - you could see a fairly sizable swing to Democrats there. I'm not predicting that, but Kind represents an amount of upside that can't be ignored. Could Pocan do better than the nearly 5% loss of both Biden and Clinton? Sure. Could he win it? Probably not.

If Pocan can't win the 3rd, then he needs to match, or come damn close to matching, Biden in the WOW-based 5th. Can he get it? Honestly, not quite, in all honesty. The 5th has gone from Trump +20 to Scott Walker +24 to Trump +15, showing a tendency to ticket split that can't be dismissed. Now, I don't think Ron Johnson or whoever runs if/when Johnson retires will win it by 24, but if you're underrunning Evers in the 3rd, you can't really get Hillary levels in the 5th and expect to win. You're going to need to get closer to Biden, and I'm not sure Pocan can.

Kind's path is a lot simpler - get Evers' result in the 3rd, which is what he gets in Congressional elections anyways, and then just do Hillary-level well in the 5th, which is also known as "let six years of movement with well-off white social liberals work to your benefit without actually doing much of anything yourself." Six years can do a lot, and Kind running ahead of Hillary in the 5th is perfectly well on the table. He's not a great candidate for the metros or for the WOW, but he's not bad - he's not too left wing, he's not particularly ideological, and he's not like pro life or some shit. He'll need to spend some time there, but he can outrun Evers in the 5th. And if that's true, then, he should be the nominee.

I think Kind is actually quite a strong nominee - I think he can credibly be considered the favourite in the race. I can't really make a case for how the GOP wins if he's the nominee that isn't "the GOP win the Wisconsin 5th by more than they did with Scott Walker four years ago," and if you've read literally anything I've ever written, you know I don't think that's happening. I think Pocan is a fine candidate, but I think Kind is fairly firmly the right choice at this point. I think it's debatable, I think it's reasonable to disagree, but at the end of the day I think Kind does well enough with his worse area (the collar) to be the clear better choice. And, if he is the nominee, then I think he starts a general election as the narrow favourite.