Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin Writes Her Way Into the History Books

Senator-elect Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.Gary Porter/MCT/ZUMAPRESS.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

There she goes again, making history.

Liberal congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin ended Republican Tommy Thompson’s four-decade political career, winning 51 percent of the vote on Tuesday in the state’s bitterly fought US Senate race. Baldwin will be the first openly gay senator in the institution’s history and Wisconsin’s first female senator, just as she became the first openly gay Wisconsin State assemblywoman in 1992, and the first openly gay candidate to win a US House election in 1998. Baldwin knows the significance of her election: “Sometimes I think my most significant contribution is not the legislative initiatives I introduce, but the stereotypes I shatter.”

Baldwin said that in 1993. During her victory speech Tuesday night, she downplayed her history-making win. “I didn’t run to make history; I ran to make a difference,” she said. “A difference in the lives of students worried about debt and seniors worried about their retirement security.”

That comment speaks volumes about the campaign run by Baldwin and her team. They didn’t tout Baldwin as a pathbreaker; instead they pitched her to Wisconsinites across the state as a champion of working people and an avowed defender of Wisconsin manufacturing.

Baldwin’s first campaign ad set the tone: It was a broadside against China’s currency manipulation and a full-throated defense of Wisconsin’s paper industry. “In Wisconsin, we lead the entire nation in paper industry jobs,” Baldwin said. “But China, they lead the world in cheating.” You could imagine a tea partier saying that—but a Democrat from Dane County, Wisconsin, a bastion of liberalism “surrounded by reality”?

Political experts praised Baldwin’s decision to focus on economics and jobs. “You’re talking about someone stepping outside the stereotypes and representing herself in a way that is right up the alley of job creation,” Charles Franklin, a political scientist who oversees Marquette University’s polling, told me this summer. “I don’t think you can win on just the paper issue, but she’s chosen the issue that seems to me to have the potential for much broader appeal.”

Baldwin’s focus on manufacturing and blue-collar workers, and also the discipline and hard work I saw her put in on the trail this summer paid off in the end. “I think Tammy ran a flawless race,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “She was unflappable.”

Tommy Thompson…not so much. He courted controversy during his campaign by, for instance, claiming he was the man to “do away with Medicare.” His years as a Washington lobbyist and the money he made from that gig dogged him all the way to Election Day. (Wisconsin Democrats made sure of that.)

Thompson, who served four terms as Wisconsin governor, also began his battle with Baldwin short on cash after a tough primary fight. He raised $7.4 million for his Senate campaign, well short of Baldwin’s $12.6 million haul. As the general election got underway Baldwin used her financial advantage to blitz the airwaves with ads supporting her. Both candidates saw outside money-funded ads hammer them. Of the $66 million spent in the Baldwin-Thompson race—a state record, by the way—almost $46 million came from super-PACs and nonprofit groups.

Thompson led Baldwin in the polls right after his mid-August primary win, but Baldwin’s barrage and finely tuned message paid off. She took the lead in the race in late September, and never relinquished it.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate