September 25,
2000
With Its Independent Streak, Wisconsin Remains a
Tossup
By R. W. APPLE
Jr.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
Associated Press
The race in Wisconsin is expected to be close, but Gov.
Tommy G. Thompson, left, has been confident that Gov. George W. Bush will win
the state.
REEN BAY, Wis., Sept. 22 — After almost 14 years in
office, more than any other governor in the state's history, Tommy G. Thompson
bestrides Wisconsin politics like a colossus. He has built a national reputation
as a reformer and innovator, and this summer he headed the committee that
drafted the Republican platform in Philadelphia.
But he has never managed
to carry his state for his party's presidential nominee. Not for Bob Dole four
years ago, and not for George Bush in 1988 or 1992. He tried hard. On Halloween
Day, 1992, he whistle- stopped across the state with Mr. Bush, from Mukwonago
and Waukesha to Oshkosh and Chippewa Falls, a made-for-the-cameras trip on a
train called the Spirit of America.
This time, the governor recently
proclaimed, "I'm not worried."
If not, he is the only politician in
Wisconsin who is not. The race between Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and Vice
President Al Gore is breathlessly close here, in the estimation of political
pros in both parties. Like several other Great Lakes states, this is one of the
year's main presidential battlegrounds, although it is a bit smaller than most,
with only 11 electoral votes.
Some recent private polls, like one taken
for a big Wisconsin union, show an inconclusive edge for Mr. Gore; others show
the race even.
This is a quirky state, politically speaking, hard to
read, full of ticket- splitters and independents. It produced both the
LaFollettes, the great clan of Progressive reformers, and the right-wing zealot
Joseph R. McCarthy. Both of its senators, Herb Kohl and Russell D. Feingold, are
Democrats, but both take offbeat positions on some issues and work closely with
Republicans.
Ross Perot pulled 16 percent of the Wisconsin vote in
1992.
"We're 35 percent Republican and 35 percent Democratic and 35
percent independent," said Bill Dixon of Madison, a Democrat who managed Gary
Hart's 1988 presidential campaign. "It doesn't add up, but then, neither do
we."
Wisconsin is made to order, one might think, for Ralph Nader, the
Green Party candidate, and he campaigned here on Wednesday, pounding away at
"the concentration of power in the hands of a few." Mr. Nader sounded a bit like
Fighting Bob LaFollette, and he drew sizable crowds — more than 1,000 at a rally
in Milwaukee and about 1,800 in Madison. In a poll taken in June, he had 16
percent of the vote in traditionally liberal Dane County (Madison), and some
Gore backers have warned that he could hurt Mr. Gore in that area.
The
vice president's daughter Karenna Gore Schiff, who campaigned here on Tuesday,
and other surrogates argue that a Nader vote is a Bush vote.
"I don't
think they have much to fear," said John Bibby, a retired political scientist at
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "The closer we get to Election Day, the
more people will worry about throwing their vote away. He'll do well in Madison,
but not so well elsewhere. Obviously, if it turns out to be really close, even a
few percentage points could be decisive."
Mr. Nader is handicapped, of
course, by a shortage of money and a resultant inability to match the major
parties' television spending.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore have been saturating
the state with commercials for months. According to a continuing national study
by Kenneth Goldstein, a professor of political science at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, they have spent $2.6 million in Green Bay and Milwaukee
alone since June 1.
Those cities are two of the places where Mr. Gore has
advertised most intensively; this summer, only Flint, Mich., Scranton, Pa., and
Pittsburgh saw more Gore commercials than Green Bay and Milwaukee. This month,
Green Bay has seen more Bush commercials than any other city except Scranton.
This week, the Republicans were trumpeting the governor's new slogan, "Real
plans for real people," and the Democrats were replying with the taunt, "George
Bush's real plans hurt real people."
Nor have the candidates missed
opportunities to campaign here. Mr. Bush spoke to the American Legion national
convention in Milwaukee; both nominees spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in
August. Mr. Gore's first postconvention event was a riverboat trip down the
Mississippi, complete with a Mark Twain impersonator, starting from La Crosse in
southwest Wisconsin. Perhaps with an eye on possible defectors to Mr. Nader, Mr.
Gore arranged for his erstwhile rival, former Senator Bill Bradley of New
Jersey, to issue a belated endorsement here in Green Bay.
"Wisconsin,"
said Professor Goldstein, whose study is underwritten by the Pew Charitable
Trusts, "is seeing action like it's never had before."
Jeff Mayers, a
political reporter in Madison who runs a Web site that has been covering the
campaign intensively (http://wispolitics.com), sees the election as a fight, in
essence, between Governor Thompson's organization and the state's most powerful
union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, a teachers' group with
90,000 members.
The union's president, Terry Craney, was one of the few
Gore delegates at the 1988 Democratic convention, and his organization has
helped to set up the vice president's major Wisconsin appearances in the last
eight years. In 1996, it turned out a crowd of 30,000 for a Gore rally, one of
the biggest political gatherings in state history.
Governor Thompson, who
attributed the elder George Bush's 1988 defeat in Wisconsin to "just mistake
after mistake" by Mr. Bush and his strategists, has helped Governor Bush raise
money in the state. Several politicians here said they thought that in the event
of a Republican victory in November, Mr. Thompson hoped to be named United
States ambassador to Vatican City.
Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top national
strategist, said in Wisconsin on Thursday that Mr. Bush would return to the
state three or four times before Election Day. Mr. Thompson's support, he
asserted, will not transfer directly to Mr. Bush but will ensure that those who
like the governor and his policies "give us a better hearing."
At the
moment, Governor Bush is "a couple points up, a couple points down" in the
state, Mr. Rove said.
Darren Schmitz, Mr. Thompson's former press
secretary, is running the Bush operation in Wisconsin. He said the
organizational foundation laid down over the years by Mr. Thompson would
inevitably benefit Mr. Bush.
"But more important," Mr. Schmitz said,
"education is the crucial issue in this race. We are an education state, and
Governor Thompson is identified with education. He has poured $3 billion into
education during his time in office. He has supported the charter school
movement and Milwaukee's school voucher program, which is the most comprehensive
one in the whole country."
National Democrats and the teachers' union
oppose the voucher program, of course, but it is backed by Mayor John O.
Norquist of Milwaukee, a four-term Democrat, and it finally triumphed in 1999
when voters ousted antivoucher members of the school board.
Still, Teresa
Vilmain, Mr. Gore's top Wisconsin operative, thinks the vice president can win
on education and such other issues as health care, the economy and the
environment. In this state, Ms. Vilmain said, "we're fighting on our turf." Even
so, she added: "It's going to be very tight. We only won here by a few points
four years ago. It's totally challenging for us, because we are up against a
Republican governor who is totally engaged in this fight."
Mr. Schmitz
also sees a struggle to the end. Asked how things stand now, he replied, "I've
seen private polls that show it dead even."
Milwaukee remains a major
manufacturing city, and Wisconsin has a dozen or more smaller cities with
sizable employers, like Wausau and Oshkosh. It also has a significant farm
population, which supports the state's noted dairy industry. But here as
elsewhere, the suburbs seem to hold the political key this year. Not
coincidentally, one of the main Bush offices is in Wauwatosa, west of Milwaukee,
a town with a goodly number of Reagan Democrats. Ronald Reagan carried Wisconsin
twice, people here recall, and Richard M. Nixon carried it three times — in each
case with a lot of help from Democrats.
Any number of things could tip
the race one way or the other.
Low prices for farm products, for
instance. Or high oil prices. This is one of the states that is paying runaway
sums for gasoline, and that is a topic mentioned by many voters when asked what
issues are on their minds. But so far, they do not seem to have decided whom to
blame for the increasingly large share of their budgets taken up by heating
their houses and operating their cars.
Mr. Gore made a pre-emptive strike
this week by calling on President Clinton to release some of the nation's
Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Mr. Bush replied at once, accusing him of
playing politics with a major element of national security.
Another
imponderable is the possible crosscurrents that Senator Kohl's re-election race
could generate. A popular figure, he is expected to win easily, but he is not
much of a team player — his slogan is "nobody's senator but yours" — and many of
Wisconsin's ticket-splitters might find a Bush-Kohl combination attractive. Or
so some Gore senior strategists
speculate.