If you’re the betting sort, maybe bet on the 2020 election being decided in the Rust Belt. It was there, in 2016, when the Democrats’ fabled “blue wall”—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—crumbled, handing an Electoral College victory to Donald Trump. In the 2018 midterms, however, Democrats began to rebuild that wall, electing three governors, three senators, and a host of state legislators. “Let our country—our nation’s citizens, our Democratic Party, my fellow elected officials all over the country—let them all cast their eyes toward the heartland, to the industrial Midwest,” Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said after the election (even though Democrats had little to celebrate in his state).

Six months later, Donald Trump and the party he commands are increasingly worried about the president’s fate in this trio of essential states. “Behind the scenes, they’ve rushed to the aid of languishing state Republican Party machines,” reported Politico’s Alex Isenstadt on Monday. “Scrutinizing the map for opportunities to fire up his base,” the article noted that the Trump campaign “recently completed a 17-state polling project that concluded the president trails Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.”



In Wisconsin, Republicans just released an autopsy of their disastrous performance in the midterms. Under Republican governor Scott Walker, who lost his bid for a third term last November, the state turned into what Dan Kaufman, the author of The Fall of Wisconsin, described as a “laboratory for corporate interests and conservative activists.” But you won’t find this sort of reckoning in the autopsy. Instead, the document focuses primarily on reforms to the party’s infrastructure. In a way, it is a document emblematic of the GOP in the Trump era, at once a self-excoriation—in which the party digs into its structural weaknesses and its struggles to reach women and minority voters—and a dodge, with none of the party’s actual ideas examined with any rigor.



The majority of the report is focused on the kinds of problems you hear from organizers of every persuasion: It’s hard to keep people motivated and connected; communication between campaigns, state parties, national parties, and other organizations is a mess; everyone acknowledges that data is important, but no one agrees on how best to use it. Nevertheless, the most damning criticism is aimed at the state party, which the report argues “drifted from its roots as a grassroots organization and became a top-down bureaucracy, disconnected from local activists, recklessly reliant on outside consultants and took for granted money that was raised to keep the party functioning properly.” (Alas, the Wisconsin GOP does not appear to have hired a writing consultant.)



That’s a particularly interesting assessment given the role that outside consultants and money has played in Wisconsin’s transformation into a Republican laboratory. “There is tremendous frustration with the influence of out-of-state organizations and out-of-state money,” Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, told Kaufman in a 2012 New York Times article about the state. The Kochs, in particular, have taken interest in the state’s Republican Party—particularly its assault on organized labor—and have poured millions of dollars into the state in recent years, aiding the conservative revolution. Unfortunately, after going for broke to re-elect Scott Walker in 2018, the party is now broke—one maxed-out credit card cost the party $600 a month in interest payments alone.