Military Historian Phillips O'Brien, and author of “How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II” has a saying, repeated within the book and much of his writing, “Battles reveal more than they decide.” One can say the same thing about elections.
He means that much of a battle is decided before it is fought, or in his words, “battles demonstrate how effectively combatants planned, prepared, and executed before the fighting began.” If you take on the idea, elections can be seen the same way; they reveal everything leading up to even the campaign and, of course, the election itself.
Campaigns are far more reliant upon the infrastructure, preparations, and plans executed before they are launched than many realize. At the same time, the election itself relies upon the campaign and all the preparation before. When we think about elections in these terms, we can develop better ways to analyze and learn from their outcomes.
While maintaining its purple status, state Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler lays out the numbers on their performance in Wisconsin quite well: There was “A nationwide shift toward Trump of 6%. But in Wisconsin, we nearly defeated that wave. The shift here was just one quarter the size: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger…We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America. ”
The numbers within and surrounding our largest city, Milwaukee, are even more revealing. Not only did Wisconsin minimize national rightward trends, but bucked some entirely.
The presidential election wasn’t the only revelatory result in Wisconsin; incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin was able to win her re-election. And because of the hard work in winning a more progressive majority in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court in 2023, Wisconsin had non-gerrymandered legislative district maps for the first time in over 10 years. This resulted in Wisconsin Democrats flipping “four state Senate and ten state Assembly seats on our new fair maps, setting the stage for majorities in 2026.” And now, in 2026 the Wisconsin State Assembly majority is within reach for the first time in over a decade for Wisconsin Democrats.
At the local level in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, we were also able to pass a series of tax levy referendums. One was to fund a structural operations budget deficit the City of Madison faced, a deficit designed by the Wisconsin GOP to squeeze the city into drastic austerity measures by refusing to raise state shared revenue along with inflation and limiting the ability of municipalities across the state to raise their revenue. And two more by the Madison School district to invest in its future, as again, the Wisconsin GOP has worked to starve public schools.
This all happened because of years of work and infrastructure built before the 2024 campaigns fully kicked off. Over the past decade, a broad coalition consisting of the State Democratic Party, issue advocacy groups, PACs, and grassroots organizations have worked fiercely to build community relationships in every corner of the state, coordinate communication strategies, and hammer away at what the coalition stood for vs what the reactionary right stood for.
The lessons I discussed in “Fighting Against Reactionary Takeover: Lesson from Wisconsin” seemed to hold true largely in the fall of 2024.
Even then, the election revealed a lot of work to be done to improve how we fight, but they also demonstrated a model in Wisconsin. One where we don’t shy away from standing on our values and one where we work to build connections to bring people over instead of relying upon “appealing to the right” to win voters. It demonstrated the effectiveness of base building, where relationships and community building are front and center.
Even when it came to the tax levy referendums in Madison, their success was because leaders in our communities spoke about the need for the city to stand tall against the state GOP, together. The need for us in the city to look to one another and build with one another, instead of embracing not just austerity but fascist alienation.
The model demonstrates a way forward for us all, electorally and communally. If we invest further into base and community building while preserving our values of freedom, choice, justice, well-being, and economic liberty, we carve ourselves a path forward. We have to rebuild relationships with those we’ve lost; Trump's win depended not on his hardcore voters, but on those who didn’t feel served or economically secure in a toxic media ecosystem and progressives staying home. We cut through that media ecosystem through our relationships, motivate our base through those relationships, and defend our values, not abandoning them.
This can be done by doubling down on expanding union, grassroots, and community organizing, deepening our training in relationship building, and bringing people in one by one. While there are many other things we must do to cut through the far-right narrative reality fed by the current media ecosystem, it starts with relationships.
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