It’s gonna be a hot one this week! Temps approaching 90° F.
Pray for rain!
Campaigning for Tim Michels last autumn, Blaska was entrusted with maybe a dozen yard signs and a list of willing recipients. To his distress, the addresses stretched from Hilldale Mall 20 miles west to the village of Black Earth WI.
A lot of fossil fuel to find loyal Republican voters! (Well, it IS Dane County.) As we know, our nominee lost to Mr. Peepers in what was supposed to be a Republican wave election. Insult to injury, our favored state supreme court candidate got buried under an 11-percentage point landslide to the pro-abortion Democrat(ic) favorite this past April. We’re still smarting over those two.
At Politico today the reliable David Siders asks: “Did abortion make Wisconsin a blue state again?” Spoiler alert: Probably!
“We got our butts kicked,” Rohn Bishop, former chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP and now mayor of Waupun, told Siders. “What the Republican base demands and what independent voters will accept are growing further apart.”

RINOs vote, too
The Werkes tried to get Republican legislators to defuse the issue by proposing a reasonable compromise: say, a ban only after several weeks of gestation. (“Will abortion defeat Dan Kelly?“) Would they listen? NO! But what intrigued us about today’s Politico autopsy was this insight from Ben Wikler, chairman of Wisconsin’s Democrat(ic) party and a rising star. Siders reports:
Up until just weeks before the April election, the state [Democrat(ic)] party had been operating on a traditional, lower turnout model — focusing its outreach on the most reliable voters likely to cast ballots in an off-year election. But volunteers kept running into something unexpected when they knocked on doors: Many times, when they encountered someone who wasn’t on their list, they learned those people were planning to vote, too. As a result, the party shifted its strategy, broadening its targets to contact more than a million potential voters as opposed to hundreds of thousands of them.
— “How the GOP lost Wisconsin“
That conforms to Blaska’s own, pathetically small universe of experience. In his first campaign of seven campaigns for Dane County Board of Supervisors, the novice candidate was given a list of likely conservative voters in Spring elections. Found himself walking 10 blocks to reach two households. Enough of that frivolity! Thereafter, the candidate hit every door. If the door opened, give a 15-second spiel, shove a handbill at the surprised occupant, and sprint to the next house. If the householder didn’t sic his Doberman on the campaigner, offer a yard sign. On doors unopened, nail my turgid screed to the door like the Rev. Luther.
No litmus tests!
Campaigns need to win hearts and minds, which is why the Werkes still cannot understand for the Life of Brian why our candidates refused to answer newspaper and League of Women Voter questionnaires! “No response” to the question “Why are you running for election?” is suicidal! (Read & weep!)
Candidates are missionaries trying to convert souls. Go where the heathens live and talk to them in their language!
(Another) which is why: Blaska happily participated in candidate forums such as those hosted by the East Side Madison Progressives. Several Progs sidled up to this school board candidate to confess, in hushed tones, that they would be voting Blaska but don’t tell anyone I have to live in this town.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Got to get voters where they live before they will go your way. Purists lose elections.