By Chris Satullo
Over the years, Refuse to Lose has served as a catchphrase for several scrappy and beloved sports teams e.g., Ken Griffey Jr.’s Seattle Mariners and John Calipari’s UMass hoops squads. In those contexts, it’s harmless fun.
But it’s a lousy, dangerous slogan for a major political party – as we are witnessing lately in the fever swamp that our Republican party has become. And the swamp extends from Washington D.C. to states like Wisconsin.
In sports, coaches get hired knowing some day they’ll likely be fired. Similarly, in a functioning democracy, a major political party should expect to lose some elections, just about as many as it wins. That’s one of the vital signs of a healthy democracy.
But today’s Republicans seem not the slightest bit interested in competing for voters in a healthy, level-playing-field democracy. They simply refuse to lose – and they are perfectly willing to burn the whole thing down so they won’t have to.
It’s inaccurate – and way too easy – to lay all this at the feet of the Orange One. The warning signs that the GOP was headed down a toxic Refuse to Lose path were apparent long before Donald Trump descended that escalator in that Manhattan skyscraper he may not own very much longer.
Long before 2016, Republican leaders had begun toying with voter suppression tactics and floating utterly bogus claims about massive voter fraud. In 2011, they fired up their laptops and gerrymandered the land to a fare-the-well, which is a favored fix-the-game ploy of the Refuse to Lose crowd.
So, no, it wasn’t that Trump somehow – and suddenly – brainwashed a sane and rigorously constitutional party into Stop the Steal mania. He simply jumped in front of a parade that had already formed. Granted, he proved to be an excruciatingly bombastic, shameless and dishonest drum major as he led the party right off democracy’s playing field and into a MAGA hall of mirrors. That’s why so many in the grips of the mania love him so. He made it OK to shout out loud the antidemocratic, sore-loser thoughts they’d long been harboring.
But understand: Even if Trump keeled over tomorrow, or got marched in handcuffs to federal prison, this fever wouldn’t break. It’s so deep in the blood now, many Republicans don’t even recognize it as the anti-democratic, unconstitutional malady it is.
Understand: This goes well beyond a party going all out to win, playing hardball, spending wildly. This is a minority party that recognized it faces a choice between trashing the Constitution or losing. Its conclusion: Screw the Constitution, we have to win.
Current events in many states show how ingrained this GOP belief – “democracy” means never having to say you lost – has become. In several places, state Republican leaders are pursuing strategies so anti-democratic, flamingly hypocritical and likely doomed that you’d think at some point they’d slap their foreheads and go, “What the hell are we doing?”
In many of these states, whatever issues are in the foreground of controversy, the blatant beast of gerrymandering – the twisting and warping of election boundaries for partisan gain – lurks in the shadows.
Let’s review a particularly stark and heated example: Wisconsin.
In 2022, Democrat Tony Evers won that state’s gubernatorial election with 51.2 percent of the vote. But in state legislative elections, Republicans won 64 of 99 Assembly seats. After an equally successful romp in state Senate races, the GOP locked down a 22-seat supermajority in the upper house. That kind of stark contrast between statewide and district results is both the goal and the proof of an extreme gerrymander.
Then, earlier this year, Wisconsin held an election for a state Supreme Court seat that would determine which party held the majority on that bench. Just a few things hung on the result: the future of abortion rights in Wisconsin, that now-contested 2021 GOP gerrymander, and the ability of that MAGA-tilting state legislature to deliver the state’s electoral votes to Trump next year no matter what voters say.
It turned into the costliest judicial election in American history. The Democrat, Janet Protasiewicz, won resoundingly, 55 percent to 45. Abortion was clearly the driving issue, but gerrymandering also seemed to matter to many voters. Protasiewicz, answering a question at a debate, had called the state’s election maps “rigged,” so voters knew where she stood.
With that kind of victory margin, the state’s Republicans couldn’t use the first page of the Refuse to Lose playbook (cry fraud and demand a recount). But here’s what was on page 2 of House Speaker Robin Vos’ binder: Move directly to impeach Protasiewicz.
Never mind that she hadn’t even heard a case yet, let alone issued a ruling. Harping on the “rigged” comment, they demand that she pre-emptively recuse herself from any case having to do with gerrymandering. They also claim that the campaign cash she got from the Democratic party is an insurmountable conflict of interest.
Next step: When she, quite reasonably and predictably, refuses to recuse, call that grounds for impeachment.
Never mind that the Democratic party is not a plaintiff in the gerrymandering suit before the court. Never mind that conservative judges on the same bench got plenty of dough from the GOP when they ran – and just a few years ago, they flatly rejected a proposal to amend the judicial code to require recusals in cases involving major donors, saying that such a rule would “infringe the First Amendment rights of the people of Wisconsin.”
Never mind, also, that the Wisconsin GOP has not had a mumbling word to say about the recently exposed – and utterly grotesque – perk-grubbing and conflicts of interest by those right-wing darlings, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Let’s pause here for a thought or two about the notion that the “rigged” comment shows overwhelming bias. First off, electing judges is a bad idea. Full stop. But if you’re going to do it, the voters of Wisconsin – and anywhere else – deserve to be able to ask judicial candidates candid questions about their views and get honest answers, not the coy prevarications that Trump’s court nominees gave the U.S. Senate.
Second, Protasiewicz’s remark about Wisconsin’s maps had the virtue of being 100 percent accurate as well as transparent. She forthrightly alerted any voter who thinks those maps are just swell not to vote for her. Her landslide win signals that most Wisconsin voters want their high court to order up a new, fairer set of maps.
That’s really what has Vos’ knickers in a twist. He loves the current maps. They’re what got him his huge, phony majority – and the supermajority in the Senate that will rubber-stamp anything his caucus can cook up.
Yeah, he cares about abortion; yeah, he’d probably like to deliver Wisconsin to Trump next fall. But the gerrymander that Wisconsin’s GOP pols gave themselves for Christmas in 2021? That’s the kind of Refuse to Lose insurance modern-day Republican pols covet above all.
In this mindset, extreme measures are justified. Impeach and try a judge just elected in a landslide before she’s ever ruled on a case? Sure, why not.
Or perhaps, more diabolically, just impeach (easy to do, when you occupy all those gerrymandered seats) then slow-walk the trial. If impeached, Protasiewicz would be suspended, casting the high court into a 3-3 stalemate.
If the Wisconsin Senate went ahead and convicted, Gov. Evers would just appoint a Democratic replacement. So, once you get the hang of Refuse to Lose mode, you realize it might be better to let the no-trial limbo linger. Maybe even all the way into next year, so that the 2024 legislative elections get held under the old sliced, spindled and warped maps.
When you convince yourself that the other side is evil – and that any election it happens to win is ipso facto illegitimate – you can talk yourself into all manner of anti-democratic, flamingly hypocritical gambits.
Vos’ impeachment-for-nothing ploy is especially reckless, though. It could set up an endless, partisan cycle of tit-for-tat payback that would paralyze the state judiciary and undermine its authority. That’s a scary prospect.
But the good news, for now, is Vos doesn’t seem to be getting away with it. The public in Wisconsin, urged on by millions in Democratic messaging about his scheme, seems to have twigged that the state’s Republicans are trying to slip a judicial coup past them. Public polling has been very unkind to Vos’ plan.
So he’s backtracking, talking up a bill to give Wisconsin a version of Iowa’s long-standing, much-praised system of nonpartisan map drawing. Except, oops, people swiftly realized that, under this bill, any maps that came out of such a process could be reviewed and revised by the very same partisan legislature that the old, flawed redistricting system had created.
It’s the Refuse to Lose party’s wet dream: Gain a phony majority via gerrymandering, then use it to block any attempts – at the polls or in the courts – to prevent you from locking in that majority for all time. Maintain a pretense of democracy, while nestling happily into authoritarian power.
Wisconsin is hardly the only place where the Refuse to Lose gang is trying such moves; Ohio, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida and other states come to mind. But Wisconsin has always been an early testing ground for the gang’s next-level strategies.
So it’s good to see Vos getting beaten up by public opinion. But it’s not over yet, so we all need to keep a wary eye on how things play out in the Land of the Cheesehead.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia