As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the extreme right, they have abandoned environmental protection and focused on protecting corporate polluters. As with so many issues, Democrats are the only party still fighting for the public interest instead of the interests of the rich and powerful.
In early 2017, I began building a statewide network of Party leaders to make that case, and we were constituted as a caucus within Wisconsin Democratic Party—with me as chair—at the 2018 state convention. A year later, the Caucus successfully pushed a party platform resolution calling on Democratic candidates at all levels to feature environmental issues prominently in their campaigns. Knowing the wide range of issues in the state's different regions., we didn't specify particular issues. Above all, though, we didn't want to just impose a top-down mandate on candidates. Instead the Caucus functions as a messaging workshop, putting our heads together candidates and other Party leaders to find ways of luring voter support for Democrats as the party that's best for the environment. See below to learn what our Caucus did during the 2020 election cycle, and what we're gearing up for 2024.
The Caucus' focus for the 2020 election cycle was on State Senate and Assembly races, particularly persuading rural voters in swing districts. During our Summer 2019 listening tour, local party leaders steered us to the issue of pollution from oversized industrial dairy and hog farms. (Kathleen Sullivan and I described the listening process more fully in our post for the rural affairs site the Daily Yonder.) On these issues, Republican strategy has been simply to label any anti-pollution measures as “anti-farmer.” In response, the Environmental Caucus focused on large-scale feeding operations that generate truly unmanageable amounts of waste. In our messaging to rural voters, we contrasted such factory farms versus the traditional family farms. As I put it in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, “The real problem doesn’t come from the vast majority of dairy farms or hog farms. The bad actors hide behind the good ones.”
CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ DAVID & KATHLEEN'S DAILY YONDER POST
Based on the advice of Democratic Party leaders in rural areas, we looked for ways to expose mega-farms for what they are: bad corporate neighbors maximizing profits by pushing the burden of pollution onto the local community. Most important, we centered the neighbors of factory farms and the polluted well water and unbearable smell they deal with. Fortunately videographer Eric Peterson had already made several videos about the fight against factory farms. Eric's footage included several clips that matched our messaging strategy, and four of Eric’s subjects were willing to appear in a partisan political ad. Lynda Cochart of Lincoln, Wisconsin (pictured right) made the key point: struggling small farmers aren’t the source of the problem. We were also lucky that Wausau-based ad agency G. Morty & the Makers offered to edit the clips into two two-minute videos. The ads' tag line summed up our main pitch to voters: “Vote to send representatives to Madison to protect communities, not polluters.”
CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE THE CAUCUS' ISSUE AD
In July 2020, the caucus held a webinar for 17 Democratic candidates for the Wisconsin Legislature, with many of them affirming that the mega-farm pollution threat could indeed help their outreach to undecided voters. Then in the final months of the 2020 campaign, the Caucus leaders worked with G. Morty & the Makers on a digital advertising buy targeting two key State Senate races.
In 2024 the Caucus saw a new statewide political opportunity to spread word about the Biden-Harris Administration and congressional Democrats' landmark package of climate actions. Contrary to cynicism about a general failure to respond to the dire climate crisis, Democrats used our brief control of Congress to enact the biggest set of climate actions any nation has ever taken. For the Environmental Caucus, the challenge has been to do a much better job of bragging about the positive difference Democrats have made. In presentations to local county party committees around the state, Caucus leaders talked about the early unpopularity of Obamacare as a history we don't want to repeat. So we worked with WisDems staff to draw up a flier Party activists are using to spread word of the many benefits of the Biden-Harris climate package (see right).
As the 2024 election neared, the Caucus mounted an effort to publish letters to the editor in newspapers around the state. Here's how I made the case in my own letter:
"The climate package was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and it’ll save the average household almost a thousand dollars a year on your energy bill. For hundreds of thousands of Americans, it also means good paying clean energy jobs. But the real payoff is for our environment and the kind of planet we leave our kids and grandkids. With all the household and industry subsidies to shift to clean energy, the total impact will be to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from peak levels and fill our Paris Agreement commitments. This is a bigger reduction than any nation has ever made.
Another important point: Vice President Harris and Senator Baldwin accomplished this against the total resistance of Republicans—who seem more concerned with the corporate profits of the fossil fuel industry than the health of our planet and grandkids. If we don’t elect Democrats in November, the Republicans could undo all of this progress. In nutshell, the GOP climate plan for the planet is very simple: Let It Burn."
That last "Let It Burn" line was borrowed from the book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts, a manual on effective communications by elections scholar Rachel Bitecofer. Hopefully our efforts will help Vice President Harris win this crucial battleground state of ours.
