For Democrats, the electoral picture had darkened with the arrival of the fall. In Wisconsin, an influx of donations from billionaires helped Senator Ron Johnson open up a small lead over Mandela Barnes. Worse yet, from Wikler’s perspective, the Republican businessman Tim Michels pulled even with Tony Evers in the governor’s race. Michels, who was endorsed by Trump, has echoed the unfounded claims of voter fraud in 2020 and has declined to say if he would certify the results of the presidential election in 2024. From the beginning, Wikler had viewed Evers’s re-election as the party’s top priority in 2022, and the race, which had become the most expensive gubernatorial contest in the country, was clearly going to be very close. “The risk profile is pretty real,” Wikler told me in early October.
By October, WisDems had pulled in more than $28 million in individual donations, about two-thirds of which came from outside the state. It was an unusually large amount for a Democratic state party; by contrast, the equivalent figure for Arizona was about $8 million. And yet WisDems’ cash needs as Election Day approached were seemingly bottomless.
Because the Senate contest is a federal race, campaign-finance laws prevent the state party from moving large amounts of money to the Barnes campaign. But in October, Wikler steered an additional $150,000 to the Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, whose opponent, Eric Toney, has said that if he is elected, he may permit doctors to be prosecuted for violating Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. WisDems also directed an additional $2.5 million to the governor’s race, in addition to the $6 million the party had already given to support it.
Wikler and the leader of the Democrats in the State Assembly, Greta Neubauer, were making final decisions about which legislative candidates to back. They had updated their modeling on the 51st Assembly District — Leah Spicer’s district — and it appeared to be edging closer toward the Democrats. In early October, Wikler and Neubauer moved the district into the party’s potentially “flippable” column. Spicer would be receiving another $50,000 — $25,000 from WisDems, $25,000 from the caucus — to spend on advertising and billboards in the final weeks of her campaign.
After the election, fund-raising will taper off, and Wikler’s staff will shrink from 200-plus to about 70, which is still large for a Democratic state party. WisDems will need to quickly ramp back up for a State Supreme Court election in April, though. The race may not attract much attention outside Wisconsin, but it too has national stakes: The court played its own critical role in the 2020 presidential election, when it rejected Trump’s lawsuit and upheld Biden’s victory by just a single vote.
Even as Wikler was preparing for his last frantic push before the midterms, he was hopeful that no matter what happened, on Nov. 9 he would be able to say that the party had made progress. “The basic idea of organizing is that you should come out stronger whether you win or lose,” he told me over the phone from La Guardia Airport in mid-October, on his way back home from a final fund-raising swing in New York. “Every single year, Democrats in Wisconsin win some races that they’re not supposed to win. You don’t know where the forces will come together to make that happen. But if you are always organizing and investing everywhere, and cheering on the folks who are willing to put their names on the ballot and do the work behind the scenes, if you do all that, then you’ll be ready when the opportunity comes.”
