Wisconsin, Tariffs, and France

The Week that Was

Dear Readers,

I’m sorry for my lack of posts this week. I was in Washington DC, working throughout the week, and was pulling fourteen and fifteen-hour days. I fully intended to write about a number of issues. Still, I didn’t have the time, so instead of a weekly newsletter, I will give a take on what I saw from last week's most prominent national and international stories. I’ll be back with a real newsletter next week.

- Ryan

Wisconsin

As everyone knows, Wisconsin held its elections last Tuesday, and the progressive candidate aligned with the Democratic Party, Susan Crawford, won by about 10 points. My school board PAC competed in multiple elections in Wisconsin, where we were extremely successful in helping conservatives in 20 seats in different suburban and rural districts.

So what happened?

First, the conservative candidate Brad Schimel was a solid candidate, unlike their pick from 2023, who ran a terrible campaign. Schimel actually got more votes than the winning progressive judicial candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, received in 2023. He outperformed the previous losing conservative by about 250,000 votes.

On paper, the number of votes he received should have been enough to catapult him to victory.

But even though he received 250,000 more votes than the previous conservative, Crawford received 280,000 more votes than the last liberal.

Democratic operatives got to work in the state earlier than Republicans, building an impressive early vote operation. They capitalized on the fact that Democratic voters are likelier to turn out in these off-cycle elections.

According to Lakshya Jain of Split Ticket, Democrats had a +21-point advantage going into election day. Counties that gave a majority of their vote to Kamala Harris had a majority of their electorate mailing their votes in, and they were also more likely to vote early than in 2024.

In these kinds of special elections, education usually predicts turnout. People with college degrees have a higher turnout than people without them. The fact that Republicans depend on non-college-educated voters to win works in a presidential election, but it means they have a herculean effort in non-presidential/non-November elections.

Republicans likely won the election day vote by double-digits, but it doesn’t matter since they were starting 21 points in the hole. This is also true for why Republicans performed so poorly in Florida, though Randy Fine from FL-06 was an awful candidate.

If Republicans are going to rely on this young, multiracial, working-class coalition to create a voting bloc that can put a candidate into the White House, they will need to figure out how to bring out these voters more frequently than they’ve been doing so far.

I also think it was a mistake for Elon Musk to be so present in the election, including holding rallies.

While a lot of Republicans like Elon and support the President working with him, normies find him very off-putting. It’s not that they don’t like the work DOGE is doing or the idea of DOGE, but I should say they don’t like him. The autistic rocketman with 14 or 15 children, I’ve lost count, who talks about putting chips in people’s brains and dystopian visions of AI make people very uneasy.

According to a Marquette University and IPSOS poll, Musk’s favorability is between 36-38 percent, while unfavorability is around 60 percent. (Fox News)

Musk is unquestionably more disliked than President Trump and has become a mobilizing force for progressives.

France

What to do with a problem like Marine?