Are The Crowd Shots In The New Leah Vukmir Add Really Wisconsin Protestors.

Leah Vukmir. Photo from LeahVukmir.com

Republican state Sen. Leah Vukmir has announced her campaign for U.S. Senate in 2018, and I seem to loom large in the press release for her candidacy.

Near the top of the testimonials to Vukmir is this 1 from WISN conservative talk testify host Dan O'Donnell: "If the Shepherd Express hates you lot and Milwaukee Magazine hates you lot and Bruce Murphy hates you lot… I'g struggling to discover how that's a negative hither…"

Ouch. I was not aware I hated Leah Vukmir, but no dubiety O'Donnell knows more than well-nigh this than I do, being such an expert on hate. Leah and I occasionally appeared on the Idiot box pundit shows of Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling and I e'er found her personally likable.

As for pairing me in the hate department with the Shepherd, that won't delight the publication, which once bashed me in its anonymous Expresso cavalcade for my allegedly Republican views.

The larger indicate here is that Leah is happy to be hated by many people, even if it includes "the Republicans that are fighting to increase road taxes and gas taxes and usage fees and import tollways," equally O'Donnell notes. They are probably simply RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, and hate from them is patently good, too.

Or as conservative talker Mark Belling noted, in another testimonial quoted by the campaign: "Leah Vukmir has been the one who has always been trying to push the envelope and continue the Republican Party bourgeois, and move it more than bourgeois."

Yes, the political party must move ever further right, and the best way to practice that, it seems, is to excoriate and exclude people. Once Wisconsin'south Republicans were the party of the Big Tent; now they like throwing campers out into the cold. That's why loyal longtime political party moderates like Mike Ellis and Dale Schultz had to be hounded past conservatives until they quit the legislature.

Vukmir could be the poster child for that arroyo. As a 2016 characteristic story in Milwaukee Magazine by Matt Hrodey found, Vukmir has "adult a reputation for walling herself off from debate and anyone who disagrees with her," and for working with "a tight group of people" that excludes any moderate conservatives. This apparently is seen every bit proof to O'Donnell that Milwaukee Magazine hates Vukmir, but the description is exactly the portrait of her that Vukmir'south campaign glories in, so go figure.

Strategically speaking, Vukmir's hard-edged portrait of herself equally the state's uber conservative makes some sense, given that her opponent in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate is Kevin Nicholson, a one-time Democrat who switched parties in 2005 or 2008, depending on whose account you intendance to believe.

But there is little incertitude that Vukmir, should she win the primary, will run in the general ballot with the aforementioned sort of draconian, us-against-them campaign confronting incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin . Baldwin is clearly a liberal, but rather old school: both equally a state legislator and congresswoman, she's loved finding someone from the Republican Party to co-sponsor legislation. Mayhap because she is a lesbian who has long dealt with prejudice, she typically looks for ways to convert those who disagree with her. She had a friendly and respectful relationship with former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, the man she shell in 2012 to go U.Southward. Senator.

Thompson always wanted to win everyone'southward vote; he carried Democratic Milwaukee Canton every time he ran for governor. Past contrast, he once noted, Republicans like Gov. Scott Walker now seek to become one vote more than 50 percent. Walker uses a "separate and conquer" approach, as he one time confessed to his wealthy campaign contributor Diane Hendricks, who now backs Vukmir.

Information technology is Walker, more than any political leader, who has helped make Wisconsin i of the most politically polarized states in America. "No other country in America is equally polarized over its governor," as an analysis of voting and polling information past Periodical Sentinel reporter Craig Gilbert found.

Consider the dispute over the farthermost gerrymandering of Wisconsin, which has led to a legal challenge now before the U.S. Supreme Court. A long list of Republicans, including Arizona Senator John McCain and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, support a ruling that ends gerrymandering, as exercise 68 percent of all Republican respondents nationally, a new poll has found. That would be heresy in Wisconsin, where Republicans vociferously defend a rigged system that gives them a built-in, 25-seat advantage over Democrats in the race for 99 associates districts.

Should she win the chief, Vukmir won't exist out to win the voters' dear, merely to win their detest — for everything Baldwin and her supporters represent. She wants to brand this an all-out war between far right and far left, to make Wisconsin every bit polarized as possible, to stoke the kind of anger for liberals that brings more of her supporters to the polls. All she needs is ane more vote than her opponent.

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