MADISON, WISCONSIN—Snow blew in mighty squalls all morning over the waters of Lake Monona, into which we lost Otis Redding 49 years ago this coming December. All morning, citizens scrambled through the freshening snow into the four local offices of the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles. They were there to get the identification cards they will need to cast a vote on Tuesday under the state's new voter ID law that is having its shakedown cruise that day. There's a lot of talk about what's going to happen, both on Tuesday and next November. On Fox News, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its Midwest subsidiary here, pronounced the law a necessary bulwark against the voter fraud which he sees as being an actual problem, all evidence to the contrary.

WALKER: Yeah, for us, it is simple. We want to make it easier to vote, but hard to cheat. Our state is—you look at the facts. Our state has one of the highest voter participation rates in the entire country. It will again on Tuesday, it will again in the fall in the general election. Why? Because we make it easy to vote, but we make it hard to cheat. In our state, you need a driver's license, you can get a state issued ID card for free at our DMV offices. If you're a veteran, you can use your veteran's card. But we make it, so we make it easy to vote. You can vote same day with voter registration. You just gotta have that voter ID along with. But we also make it hard to cheat. And that's the difference. He should look at the facts.

(Connoisseurs of Walker's stillborn presidential campaign will note the familiar habit he has of arguing by catchphrase. "We make it easy to vote but hard to cheat" makes an appearance twice in one paragraph. Maybe that's where Young Marco Rubio picked up that rhetorical tic.)

This was in response to Bernie Sanders' having arrived here this past week aiming to make Walker's tenure as governor—and this law in particular—an issue in the Democratic primary. In a speech in Onalaska last Wednesday, Sanders came out swinging.

"It has never occurred to me and I think to most candidates that the way you try to win an election is to make it harder for people who might vote against you to participate in the election," Sanders said. "That is political cowardice." The room erupted in cheers—including one man who yelled "Go get 'em, Bernie!"—as he accused Walker and other Republican governors who support laws requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote of trying to deny people of color, poor people and the elderly their right to vote. "If you don't have the guts to participate in a free, open and fair election, get another job. Get outta politics," Sanders said.

Moreover, as Ari Berman pointed out in a deeply reported piece in The Nation, the Wisconsin law is an open invitation for citizens to lose their franchise through clerical errors and bureaucratic pigheadedness.

Randle's account is hardly unique in Wisconsin. The lead plaintiff who challenged the voter-ID law, 89-year-old Ruthelle Frank, has been voting since 1948 and has served on the Village Board in her hometown of Brokaw since 1996, but cannot get a photo ID for voting because her maiden name is misspelled on her birth certificate, which would cost $200 to correct. "No one should have to pay a fee to be able to vote," Frank said. Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.

Tuesday is going to be bad but, as Berman told Chris Hayes on Friday, the November election is a looming nightmare. And none of Walker's platitudes are going to make a difference because the law is working precisely the way such laws are supposed to work, especially since John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee. It is one of the most visible manifestations of the change that Walker and his pet legislature have wrought in Wisconsin, which has a proud tradition of engaged politics, especially on the progressive side. The state was one of the leaders in the movement that brought us the direct primary election and the direct election of senators. In 1897, in a speech in Mineral Point, Robert LaFollette, the progressive firebrand, delivered an address entitled, "The Danger Threatening Representative Government." In it, LaFollette connected good-government initiatives with defending the people against closed politics that serve predatory wealth.

It is because today there is a force operating in this country more powerful than the sovereign in matters pertaining to official conduct. The official obeys who he serves. Nominated independently of the people, elected because there is no choice between candidates so nominated, the official feels responsible to his master alone, and his master is the machine of his political party. The people whom he serves in theory, he may safely disobey; having the support of his political organization, he is sure of his renomination and knows he will be carried through to election, because his opponent will offer nothing better to the long suffering voter.

Walker has reversed this entire formula and so remade Wisconsin politics. He has closed the process again, and he has given the common property of the people of Wisconsin back to the same kind of corporate interest against whom LaFollette and the Progressives of his day railed. Walker remains popular among the Republican base voters here—his endorsement of Tailgunner Ted Cruz will carry considerable weight on Tuesday—but his approval generally throughout the state has cratered. There are more than a few indications, though, that Walker's base considers itself to be the true heirs to Wisconsin's independent political traditions. This may send Fightin' Bob LaFollette a'spinning under the sod up at Forest Hill Cemetery, but it's a powerful and resonant call to political arms nonetheless. Which makes the unenthusiastic reception given to several Republican superstars at the Milwaukee County Republican Party dinner on Friday night unusually signifying.

Sarah Palin showed up and gave what veteran Milwaukee political reporter Daniel Bice called the worst political speech he'd ever seen. (When it comes to Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods, this is a highly subjective standard.) She was there representing He, Trump, which certainly was a fitting end to the worst week of his campaign. John Kasich laid a big old egg, but the Tailgunner wowed the Serb Hall up to its rafters. Every one of his unmoored proposals—doing away with the IRS, enact the flat tax, making the sand glow overseas—was greeted rapturously. The Tailgunner was particularly wet-eyed while praising Walker's busting of the public-employee unions, the move that brought 100,000 of Walker's alleged constituents to the capitol lawn in 2011.

"The courage and principle that Scott Walker and the people of Wisconsin demonstrated in that fight, over and over and over again …" he began. He dropped his voice and slowed the sentence, inviting listeners to lean forward and catch the unexpected ending: "… is exactly the courage and principle we need in Washington, D.C., to turn this country around."

Cruz also has used Wisconsin to campaign for a national right-to-work law along the lines of the one Walker signed after spending his re-election campaign assuring the voters of Wisconsin that he would do no such thing.

Tuesday's primary elections, and the general election next November, are going to be a referendum on Wisconsin's essential political identity. This is why people were scrambling to beat the clock at the local DMVs to get the IDs that might enable them to vote, slipping and scrambling through a November snow that came blowing into town on the winds of April.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io