THE PRICE OF IGNORING RURAL VOTERS.

• Date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Nichols, John
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Nichols, John

BLUE RIVER, Wisconsin

My ancestors settled in rural Southwestern Wisconsin in the 1820s, and it is in this region that I learned about politics. My great-grandfather served for almost four decades as the village president of this community located just south of the Wisconsin River. He was an economic and social progressive who campaigned in rural Grant County for "Fighting Bob" La Follette, the U.S. Senator who founded The Progressive, and his friend John Blaine, a Lincoln Republican who a century ago served six years as one of Wisconsin's most radical governors.

When I was born, the Congressman from the district was Gardner Withrow, a railroad union activist from La Crosse who was elected several times on the ballot line of Wisconsin's independent Progressive Party. Withrow finished his career as a liberal Republican who voted for civil rights, strong unions, and rural policies that helped family farmers stand up to corporate agribusiness.

The lines of Withrow's old Third Congressional District have changed somewhat during the ensuing decades, but the values that historically underpinned its politics have remained reasonably consistent. As the Republican Party abandoned the progressive stances associated with Blaine and Withrow and veered to the right, the district began to back Democrats. Western Wisconsin voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for every other Democratic presidential nominee until 2016--when Republican Donald Trump narrowly won the region and the state. Joe Biden increased Democratic numbers in 2020, when he carried the state once more for the Democrats. That year, the Third District re-elected its Democratic Congressman, Ron Kind, and sent a crew of Democratic state senators and representatives to the Wisconsin legislature.

Kind, who was first elected in 1996 and served for a quarter century as a quiet member of the House Ways and Means Committee, decided against seeking re-election in 2022. So the Third District was up for grabs.

On a map where Democrats faced several tough contests, the Third shaped up as something of a bright spot. The 2022 Republican nominee was a noisy right-winger named Derrick Van Orden, who had won 48 percent of the vote in 2020. But Congressional redistricting had gone reasonably well for Democrats in Wisconsin. The Third District was competitive. And Democrats had a solid candidate in state Senator Brad Pfaff, a Western Wisconsin native with a track record of leadership on the agricultural...