2016 Postmortem

Milwaukee — I love telling people I’m from Wisconsin. Maybe it’s my defense mechanism for when people accuse me of being a coastal elite, out of touch with Real America. I like fulfilling all the Wisconsin stereotypes. I love cheese and cheese curds, of course. I love our sports teams out of a vague sense of homerism. And my accent (all hard A’s) comes out in full force after ah coupl’ah beers.

Mostly I love my grandma, who has called Wisconsin home for 88 years. Her parents immigrated to Wisconsin from Germany, and she started public school without knowing a word of English. She forgot most of the German her parents taught her years ago, but taught me the words to the “Liechtensteiner Polka” that we would sometimes hear when my family would go to a Friday night fish fry.

Up until Nov. 8, I still believed my state’s moral baseline bent toward empathy. The Wisconsin I thought I knew, where I lived for 21 years, was filled with complex but fundamentally decent people who recognized that everyone is deserving of respect and could disagree without being disagreeable. The state did elect Scott Walker as governor in 2010, and the Republican-led legislature gutted public-sector unions, setting off huge protests in the Capitol. But I didn’t think that state would vote for Donald J. Trump, turning its 10 electoral votes to a Republican for the first time since 1984. (I mean, come on, we even voted for Dukakis.)

As much as Mr. Trump won the election in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton lost it. Her campaign, which prided itself on employing all the data wizards and ground game gurus money can buy, did not do nearly enough to lock down the upper Midwest, particularly Wisconsin and Michigan, and instead treated those states as a given.'>>>

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016171309