Party of Fear

While watching the violent shenanigans at recent Donald Trump rallies, we wonder what is motivating these fanatic supporters. How can so many Americans be so whipped to a frenzy by the Orange Bully's third-grade oratory?

Current Trumpites remind us of the nativist Know-Nothing Party of the 1850's. That political movement was a backlash against the heavy immigration of Catholics from Germany and Ireland. Like Trump's modern Know-Nothings, the antebellum movement was based on fear of immigrants, fear of America being overwhelmed by a wave of outsiders. Today's fear is the same, only the names have changed.

The GOP has long relied on fear as a tool to motivate its base. Fear of immigrants. Fear of terrorists. Fear of criminals. Fear of Ebola. Fear of gays. Fear of black people. Fear of commies. Fear of change.

And scientists are beginning to understand why fear is an especially effective tool for motivating conservatives. A study by researchers at the University College of London found significant differences in brain structure between self-defined liberals and conservatives. It appears that the right amygdala of conservatives tends to be larger that that of liberals. This area of the brain is associated with the processing of emotions such as fear and disgust.
 
Other research reinforces the University College findings. For example, work from Cornell (Conservatives Are More Easily Disgusted Than Liberals) involved a series of questions that probed both political leanings and the level of sensitivity to disgusting situations. It found a strong correlation between conservatism and high disgust sensitivity.

Yet another confirming study (Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations) found that conservatives are more sensitive to disgusting pictures, such as a man eating live bugs. The sensitivity was measured by increased skin conductance (more sweating, higher conductance). Again, the right amygdala is involved in processing emotions such as disgust and fear.

GOP politicians recognize the high predisposition to fear in the psyche of their base, and pander to it. In Republican-controlled states across America, an all-guns-everywhere-all-the-time agenda has been implemented. Paranoid cowboys can now rest assured that they can shoot-down any threatening bad guys in their local Wal-Mart or the corner McDonald's.

The 2014 African Ebola crisis is a disgusting case in point. Many heroic American health-care workers volunteered to work on the front lines to halt this awful disease. But despite their bravery, they were treated as pariahs upon returning home. Republican Governors led the paranoid Ebola freak-out. Our own Scott Walker actually called for travel bans from affected African countries.

Current GOP front-runner Donald Trump was soiling his pants at the time, tweeting:“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” And further browning his shorts, “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days – now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” The Donald must have a HUGE amygdala !

Trump has been more effective than other GOP candidates in exploiting fear. He will round-up and export Hispanics because a few are criminals. He will stop Muslims from entering the country because a few are terrorists. He will shut-out all foreign trade goods because we lost some manufacturing jobs. We will all be safe hiding from the world behind our little wall. Everything will be great again. We will all be safe and secure.

I don't mean to imply that all Republicans are motivated by fear. Some are motivated by a desire to impose their morals on others. Others are motivated by greed. However, a big swath of neo-Know-Nothing GOP voters are driven by their high sensitivity to fear. Political hucksters like Trump are quite effective in stirring-up and riding that fear to political power.

Turn It Off !

It is difficult to go anywhere in public without being subjected to blaring television screens. Whether you are in a restaurant, medical waiting room, gym, airport, or hotel lobby, there is always some fool on a flat screen trying to tell you something or sell you something. Public TV sets are normally not even controllable by those forced to endure them, so we are continually exposed to the noise of shows and commercials that someone else selects for us.

We have a rule at our house - the television goes off when dinner starts. Why should that be any different when we dine out? I would rather not have a toenail fungus commercial or the equivalent, a Donald Trump interview, as background ambience during my meal.

It is much worse if the sets are tuned to Fox "News" (aka Faux News or Fox Noise), as are many of these public area screens. Fox, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, is where GOP Presidential candidates go to work when they are not campaigning. The network is a 24/7 cacophony of distortions, lies, and nonsense. 

Whenever I enter a room in which Fox is playing, my IQ drops 10 points, I start breathing through my mouth, and my forehead develops a distinct Neanderthalic slant. If I am in one of the few communal areas in which the customer has access to a remote control, I quickly turn to something more intelligent, like Cartoon Network.

Fox "News" makes people stupid. I am not kidding. At least seven separate studies since 2002 show that people who watch Fox "News" are significantly less informed about the world than people getting their news from other sources. For example, in a 2009 MSNBC/Wall Street Journal poll on health care, 72% of Fox viewers thought that the Affordable Care Act would give medical care to illegal aliens vs 41% of viewers of other news networks (it doesn't). 69% of Fox viewers thought that the Affordable Care Act will pay for abortions vs 40% of other viewers (it doesn't).

In a World Public Opinion poll from December 2010, Fox viewers placed first in percentage of misinformed viewers for eight of the nine questions asked. In the poll, 63% believed that the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (it did), 38% believed that most Republican legislators opposed TARP (they did not), and 63% believed that President Obama was not born in the U.S. (he was).

I no more want to be assailed by Fox "News" in public than my conservative friends would enjoy being forced to listen to MSNBC. If I enter a restaurant playing Fox, I immediately turn around and leave. It seems strange that a business such as the local frozen custard joint would knowingly anger a large portion of its clientele by playing such biased programming. Not a good business practice! I like a cheeseburger or chocolate shake as much as the next guy, but several local Fox-playing businesses have lost thousands of my fast food dollars over the years. I am not alone in this.

There are other ways of fighting back at the onslaught of right-wing propaganda. If you are in a Fox-saturated area where you cannot simply walk-out, such as an emergency room or an airport, ask the person in charge  to change the station. If that doesn't work, there is a cute gadget available, called TV-B-Gone. This device, small enough to attach to your key-ring, will allow you to turn-off any nearby television set. Guaranteed fun for the entire family!

How about if public waiting areas and businesses (other than sports bars) just stopped having televisions, period? Think of all of the money that could be saved on electricity and TV monitors that could go towards lowering our price of food, lodging, travel, and medical care. Think of the enormous carbon footprint that would disappear by disconnecting millions of sets across the country. Instead of slack-jawed passive public viewing, we might actually start reading again. We might even be forced to talk to each other. What a change that would be. 

(First Published by Paul Adair in Germantown NOW, Just Sayin' Blog, April 26, 2012)

Welcome to This Blog !

Welcome to our new blog. Our name is adapted from the cold-war organization, Radio Free Europe. This entity was established to transmit information from the free world to the heavily-repressed Eastern European satellites of the old Soviet Union.

W.O.W. is an abbreviation for Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha Counties, the ring of predominantly Republican counties surrounding Milwaukee. Just as Radio Free Europe brought news of the outside world to oppressed Europeans, Radio Free W.O.W. hopes to bring news of the outside, progressive world into the tightly-controlled media bubble that is the W.O.W. Ring-of-Fire.

The W.O.W. Counties are a politically important part of Wisconsin. With a total population of 616,000, the three counties are home to a hefty 10.7% of Wisconsinites. There are more people in these three counties than in Madison-centered Dane (516,000).

W.O.W. residents are very politically engaged. We vote. In the 2012 presidential race, our votes constituted a full 12.3% of state-wide turn-out. And in the 2014 gubernatorial election, our voters were an even greater percentage of the Wisconsin total (13.1%). Our political impact strongly outweighs our population. 

Progressive friends from other parts of the state believe that W.O.W. voters are a zombie-like monolithic bloc, mindlessly voting straight-ticket for GOP candidates in every election. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, in 2012, President Obama received 32.3% of major-party W.O.W. vote. In 2008, he garnered 36.9%. A flip of just 14% of voters would have given the three-county area to Obama.

In 2008, more than 131,000 W.O.W. voters cast ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate. Over a hundred thousand of our suburban neighbors believe that medical care is a basic human right, and that we should have strong public schools.Thousands feel that Medicare and Social Security should be preserved and that women should control their own bodies. Thousands think that saving the auto industry was a good thing and that the government should stay out of our bedrooms.

Progressives are not alone in Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha Counties. If you look past the "I stand with Walker" bumper stickers, and the snake flags, and the Ron Johnson yard signs, you can find a lot of us. We must reach-out to other progressives and let them know it is OK. In this populous and politically-crucial area of the state, we must gather as much support as possible for progressive causes and candidates. In a small way, we hope that this blog can help that effort.




We would like to use this blog as an outlet for other Wisconsin progressives. If you have something to contribute to this effort, please send us a note at gtownpaul@gmail.com and we will publish it here.  

The Democrats' Problem-Part II

Earlier, we discussed the alarming drop-off of Wisconsin voting during off year (gubernatorial) elections compared to presidential election years. This drop-off hits Democrats disproportionally hard. While there is typically a 10% drop-off in Republican voters, Democratic voters drop by a huge 30-40%.

In our examples, we compared the presidential elections of 2008 (Obama/McCain) and 2012 (Obama/Romney) with the off-year elections of 2010 (Walker/Barrett) and 2014 (Walker/Burke). However, maybe the drop-off isn't as severe as we think. Maybe there are simply many voters who selected both Obama and Walker during the four elections. Maybe there are some schizophrenic (or uninformed) voters who prefer centrist Democrats at the national level and Tea Party Republicans at the state level.

Let's look at voter drop-off in a different set of elections. Each seat in the US House of Representatives is contested every two years. Let's compare drop-off for Wisconsin congressional elections between a presidential year (2012) and an off-year (2014). For these two elections, every Wisconsin congressional district had both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. Each district except one had at least one common candidate on the ballot for both years.

During the presidential election year of 2012, a total of Wisconsin 2,847,010 voters selected a major party candidate for Congress. The power of grossly partisan gerrymandering was demonstrated by the fact that 43,000 more Democratic votes were tallied than Republican ones (1,445,015 D vs 1,401,995), yet we sent an unrepresentative 3D/5R delegation to Washington that year.

By contrast, in the off-year of 2014, only 2,335,917 Wisconsinites voted for a major party congressional candidate. That is an 18% off-year drop-off. And like the top of the ticket, the off-year drop-off was far greater for Democrats, at 23.7%, than for Republicans, at 12.0%. In 2014, the Republican votes edged-out the Democratic votes by 1,233,336 to 1,102,581.

Once again, the Democratic drop-off was statewide. The drop-off in Rep. Gwen Moore's Milwaukee-centered 4th district was 23.9%, about average for the state. This again debunks the myth of Democratic drop-off being primarily a minority/urban phenomenon.

The worst Democratic Congressional race drop-off was in Republican Reid Ribble's Green Bay-centered 8th district (35.2%), and Paul Ryan's Southeast 1st District (33.4%). The lowest? Our neighboring 6th district, which was an open seat in 2014 after the retirement of Tom Petri-R (10.1%), and Germantown's very own 5th District (Jim Sensenbrenner, 14.6% drop-off). Democrats in Sensenbrenner's district may not be numerous, but they are at least dedicated !

In addition to drop-off, there is a voter phenomenon called drop-down, in which voters cast their ballots for the top of the ticket- the president or gubernatorial race-but do not vote in contests for lower offices.

For example, in 2012, of the 3,023,951 Wisconsin voters casting their ballots for President Obama or Mitt Romney, 5.9% did not vote in the Congressional races. This drop-down was almost exclusively Democratic. A staggering 175,970 Obama voters did not vote for Congressional Democratic candidates (10.9%). Only 5,971 Romney voters did not vote for Republican candidates (0.4%).

How about drop-down in gubernatorial elections? Of the 2,382,619 voters casting ballots for Mary Burke or Scott Walker, 2.0% did not vote in the Congressional races. However, here the much lower drop-down was about evenly split between Democrats (1.8%) and Republicans (2.1%). The lower-participation gubernatorial race seems to bring-out only the most partisan voters, ones that tend to vote down the ballot.

The drop-down between the top of the ticket and Congressional races should be fairly small. After all, the US Representative is a pretty important office and those races tend to be highly publicized. The drop-down in less publicized races should be much larger. For example, in the 2012 Assembly race in the 24th district, of which Germantown is a part, there was a 20.4% drop-down between Obama votes and those for the Democratic candidate, Shan Haqqi. There was no corresponding drop-down from Romney votes for the Republican candidate, Dan Knodl.

Both voter drop-off and drop-down from presidential election totals are a serious problem for Democratic candidates. If we want to return to clean government, to progressive policies, and to a robust state economy, this issue must be alleviated. Democrats need to implement strong GOTV policies in every corner of the state. The party must stress its entire slate of candidates, not just those at the top of the ticket.

(First published by Paul Adair in Germantown NOW Just Sayin' blog, November 23, 2015) 

The Democrats' Problem-Part I

With recent Republican over-reach, the state of Wisconsin has become unrecognizable. A wholesale rewrite of our laws has paved the way toward a kleptocracy. Unlimited, untraceable dark money has been codified into our state campaign laws. Political ethics watchdog organizations and investigations have been enfeebled or eliminated. Walker's WEDC has been turned into a taxpayer-funded ATM for political contributors. Our state civil service system is being scrapped in favor of the hiring of political cronies, children of contributors, and party hacks.

If we want to turn around Wisconsin, it is clear that we must throw-out the corrupt politicians in power. Despite grossly partisan and crooked gerrymandering for legislative districts, we certainly have the votes to remove GOP politicians on the statewide level. After all, Wisconsin has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the Reagan landslide of 1984. So what is the problem? Why does a state that reliably votes blue for President often fail to elect Democrats during non-presidential years?

Like in the rest of America, Wisconsin voter turn-out is much lower for off-year elections. As we pointed out last week, the ten-year average Wisconsin turn-out for Presidential elections is 66.5%, while that for gubernatorial elections is only 46.0%. If the voter drop-off between Presidential years and off-years hit both major parties equally, we would have Democrats in all statewide offices. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We decided to dig a little deeper into the data.

Let's compare the last four elections. In President Obama's first presidential election (2008), 2,939,604  Wisconsinites voted either Democratic or Republican. The 2010 election between Tom Barrett and Scott Walker saw a 27.4% drop-off from this number. However, there was a major difference in how the drop-off voters were distributed. Between the 2008 and 2010 elections, the Republican vote dropped by 10.6%. In contrast, the Democratic vote dropped an incredible 40.1%, effectively ceding the election to Walker.

A comparison between the 2012 and 2014 elections tells a similar story. In President Obama's reelection victory, 3,023,951 Wisconsinites voted for either Obama or Romney. The 2014 election between Mary Burke and Scott Walker saw a 22.0% drop in that turnout. The drop-off for Republicans between 2012 and 2014 was almost identical to that between 2008 and 2010 (10. 5%). In contrast, the Democratic drop-off was an unacceptably high 30.7%, again handing the election to Walker.

Is the off-year Democratic drop-off uniform across the state, or do some areas experience it more than others? We looked at patterns in the state's two largest cities, in the WOW counties, and in two random rural counties (Ashland and Dodge). Together, these counties account for about 43% of the statewide Democratic vote.

The drop-off in these five areas for the 2014 and 2010 gubernatorial races compared to the prior presidential races (30.7% and 40.1% statewide) are: Milwaukee (30.4%, 34.4%), Dane (18.6%, 27.3%), WOW counties (30.9%, 39.1%), Ashland (23.1%, 37.0%), and Dodge (32.1%, 47.1%).

The common wisdom is that the Democratic drop-off is due to lower engagement by students and minority voters during off-year elections. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to US Census data, the Milwaukee County population is only 53% White, not Hispanic or Latino. Yet this heavily minority County has a drop-off similar to the overall state. Dane County, with both large minority and student populations, has a drop-off substantially lower than the state average.

No, the Democratic drop-off in off-year elections is spread over the entire state-from the North Woods to small rural towns, to the Ring-of-Fire WOW Counties, to our largest cities. No area is immune.

Continued Democratic voting drop-offs of 30 to 40 percent is a prescription for off-year election disaster. There is an old saying, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line." Progressives need to field charismatic candidates that voters can fall in love with. Candidates that give people a reason to go to the polls. And we could take a cue from our GOP friends and instill a little more discipline in our voters to turn-out for every election, not just the presidential ones.

If we want to return to clean government, to progressive policies, and to a robust state economy, we must face up to this problem. We need to implement robust GOTV policies in every corner of the state to fix Democratic off-year drop-off. To do otherwise is to settle for Walker and Walker clones running Wisconsin for the foreseeable future.

(first published by Paul Adair in Germantown NOW  Just Sayin' blog November 19, 2015)