Defending the Dream and Defeating Scott Walker

When the Dream Defenders ended their 31 day occupation of Florida Governor Rick Scott’s office they went back to their respective communities with a specific goal in mind: to register  61,550 new voters for the 2014 elections. Scott won the 2010 election by exactly that margin.

At a press conference announcing the initiative, Dream Defenders Executive Director Phillip Agnew said:

“ We intend to register the people that are forgotten: the black, the brown, the indigent, the poor, the LGBTQ community and we will meet them where they are, in the classrooms, in the mall, at the club, on the corner, at the bus stop. So when the time comes again for us to move on issues like the school-to-prison pipeline, like Stand Your Ground, we won’t have to sit on the floor again.”

Scott Walker won the 2010 election by roughly 70,000 votes. He won the recall election by roughly 170,000 votes.  So we have a lot of work to do between now and November 2014, but I think we can do it. Actually, I know we can.

All across Wisconsin hundreds of thousands of low income voting age adults are seeing their taxes go up and their health care costs increase as the result of Scott Walker’s budgets, while the wealthy and corporations are getting tax cuts. Changes to the Earned Income and Homestead tax credit programs, and Walker’s refusal to expand Badgercare with money available under the Affordable Care Act, is punishing working families at a time when jobs are still in short supply, prices are rising, and wages are stagnant. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  It’s a situation the Wisconsin Budget Project has called “ Robin Hood in Reverse .”

I strongly believe that it’s within this income demographic that we’ll find the votes we need to defeat Scott Walker. I can tell you multiple stories of conversations I’ve had with low wage, working class people over the last two years that have led me to this conclusion, and I’ll be happy to elaborate on these in the comments below, or perhaps in a future post.  But how do we find these voters, and what do we say to them when we do find them?

There are 99 Assembly districts in Wisconsin. I have no doubt there are at least 2,000 unregistered, or non-midterm, low income voters in every one of them.  That’s 198,000 potential new voters. I live in the 73^rd Assembly district, the northwestern most district in the state, and here’s what my wife and I would be willing to do.

We’d start with a petition that calls on Walker to keep Badgercare eligibility for parents of minor children at its current level of 200% of the federal poverty line, and to further accept the federal money available under the Affordable Care Act to expand Badgercare to childless adults up to 138% of the federal poverty line. Our petition would also call on Walker to use the savings from accepting the money, 120 million dollars, to restore both the Earned Income and Homestead Tax Credit programs.

And since Phillip Agnew said he and the Dream Defenders would meet people  where they are , so would we. We’d take our petition and, just after the first of the year, we’d start knocking on doors in trailer parks, public housing projects, and low income neighborhoods in Spooner, Minong, Solon Springs and Superior. I can guarantee you from both personal and professional experience that we’d find a lot of people very interested in our petition.

After several weeks we’d arrange a meeting with a couple of dozen directly affected people and our representative, Nick Milroy, and ask him to introduce a bill based on our petition demands. We’ll call it the Budget Fairness Act. We’d invite the press. If the press won’t come (I have no doubt Nick will) we’d use social media to broadcast the meeting. We’d publish letters to the editor about the petition. We’d get a story or two in local papers.

Then we’d knock on more and more doors, building our core group of organizers constantly and expanding our outreach throughout the spring and summer of 2014, until we’d found 2,000 petition signers who’d either never voted in a mid-term election or never voted at all and who would be, through our education efforts about Walker and his budgets, plenty pissed off that millionaires are getting richer while they’re getting poorer.

Then, just a few weeks before the election, we’d go into full Get Out The Vote mode and do our absolute best to get all 2,000 of them to the polls for the candidate that has their best interests in mind, presumably, the Democrat. It’s that simple. We just need to replicate this strategy across all 99 Assembly districts.

Is this a large scale undertaking? Of course it is, but most of what we need to do it is already in place. If the Dream Defenders think they can register 61,000 plus new voters to defeat Rick Scott, surely United Wisconsin can find 170,000 to defeat Scott Walker. They/we managed to gather 900,000 signatures to trigger a recall election, so there’s no question they have a huge database of names and contact info for thousands of volunteers. And announcing a statewide issue campaign to mobilize upwards of 200,000 new mid-term election voters could prompt financial support from progressives around the state, and the country, who would love nothing more than to see Wisconsin rise up yet again and, this time, defeat Scott Walker.

And we already have a prospective Democratic candidate for governor, Kathleen Vinehout, whose alternative budget includes expanding Badgercare via the ACA and restoring the Earned Income and Homestead Tax Credit programs.  If we make enough noise I’m confident Mary Burke, and the DPW, will both get on board what we’re doing.

Think about it for a minute. Walker made history when he won the recall election. Do we want to let that stand?  Is that the way we want this to end? I don’t think the Wisconsin Uprising is over just yet, not by a long shot.  We can write the final chapter in this particular bit of history in November of 2014, and if we’re successful it would reverberate across the country and turn conventional political wisdom on its head. We just need to dig deep and find the resolve, the commitment, and the determination to make it happen.

Let’s do it.