A Riot In The Suburbs: Inside The Changing Face Of Wisconsin 2020
By Chris Bedford and John Daniel Davidson
‘Is this the way you solve problems? We’re barely making it with the lockdowns, and now this.’
Dale Kooyenga is emblematic of how the new populist, working-class shifts in the Republican Party can cut both ways. Trim and handsome at 41 years old and the father of four children, he’s the sort any local political party would want to run: a former college basketball player, an Iraq War veteran, and a major in the Army Reserves. Yet in the once button-downed, middle class, solidly Republican stretch of suburbs and farm country bordering Milwaukee, two things have shifted — and with them, the political fortunes of the local GOP.
First, a growing influx of liberals from the solidly blue city have changed the electorate; second, President Donald Trump of Queens, New York, has changed the party. While Trump’s brash, impulsive and no-bull style reverberates with disaffected union Democrats and other working-class types, those mannerisms aren’t such a hit among the married, Christian, college-educated suburban women that Wisconsin Republicans like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan could once reliably count on.
“Absolutely, [the top of the ticket] is hurting us here in this part of the WOW counties,” Kooyenga tells us, using a common state acronym for Milwaukee’s three suburban counties. “I think it’s hurting us, but it’s helping us in [rest of the] state so everything that we’ve lost in the WOW counties we’ve picked up with the other people who liked the new brand and the outcomes.”
In a county he won comfortably for years as a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Kooyenga’s 2018 state Senate race was a close call, besting his Democratic opponent by just 2.4 points. In all likelihood, his 2022 political fortunes come down two things: if Trump is still in the White House, and if 2020’s redistricting moves him further east into the city, or in any other direction — where his style of Republican politician still resonates.
The question is, does that trade-off with the suburbs keep Wisconsin in play nationally? While he’s focused on his district, Kooyenga thinks so: “Yeah—it’s a margin of error.”
Nothing is quite normal in Wisconsin right now, though. Thursday morning had been an unusual one for Kooyenga, too: Downtown, he’d been meeting with business owners who’d just been the victims of a riot.
We’d taken the express ferry from Michigan to Milwaukee Wednesday afternoon—a quick two-and-a-half hours hurling across open water at about 35 knots — disembarking south of downtown just as a Black Lives Matter mob was pouring onto I-94 a short ways up the highway.
full story at https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/09/a-riot-in-the-suburbs-inside-the-changing-face-of-wisconsin-2020/