It's Time to 'Railroad' the Oligarchs: Some lessons from the (almost) Great Railroad Strike of 2022.

• Author: Nelson, Thomas M.

Bernie Sanders clutched both sides of the sturdy wooden podium at the UAW Local 578 hall in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as he prepared to address a packed house of 400 union workers, students, campaign staff, and curiosity seekers. Looking like a cross between a history professor and a professional wrestler from a bygone era, the Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont leaned in, then rocked back and forth. He was pacing himself before launching into another stem-winder lecture on income inequality and the states fiercely contested U.S. Senate race, whose Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson, lives in Oshkosh.

"We're going to have to knock down a wall or two," Sanders remarked. "This is a good turnout."

Oshkosh, a city of 67,000 people, was built by a union workforce. Its sawmills were organized in the late nineteenth century, and the University of Wisconsin campus a few miles up the road was the state's first teachers college, founded in 1871. Labor's roots run deep here on the western shore of Lake Winnebago.

In recent years, Winnebago County has become a bellwether. When it goes narrowly blue or grazes the 50 percent mark, Democrats win statewide. Blue-collar Oshkosh anchors the county, and Democrats must ramp up turnout here to win tightly contested races.

Democrats lost the U.S. Senate race in November's midterm elections but prevailed in the race for governor, and kept the Oshkosh-based state assembly seat in the Democratic fold, thereby staving off a Republican run for a supermajority in the lower house. In November, Governor Tony Evers lost Winnebago County by just one percentage point. For the first time in decades, Democrats are on track to burnish their street credentials as a truly economic populist party, a sharp turn from the ideologies and philosophies of the previous three Democratic administrations: neoliberalism (Barack Obama), neo-neoliberalism (Bill Clinton), and rudderless-ism (Jimmy Carter).

Shifts in the gubernatorial race have been significant since 2010 in the outer-ring suburbs of Milwaukee, namely Waukesha and Ozaukee Counties. But movement in counties like Winnebago and Eau Claire--the latter of which saw a sixteen-point increase for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate between 2010 and 2022--which have college and working class populations, was not as well noticed. Democrats held their own in rural areas like Wood County, home to Verso Paper, which was shuttered two years earlier and had supported more than 900 local jobs...