MADISON, Wisconsin — When Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice-elect Susan Crawford gave her victory speech this week, there was no second-guessing who her real opponent was in the race.
“I’ve got to tell you, as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice and Wisconsin,” she told supporters at a celebration in Madison. “And we won!”
National Democrats also claimed victory in the state judicial contest, selling the race as the first step in reclaiming the U.S. House in the midterm elections.
“Tonight, the people of Wisconsin squarely rejected the influence of Elon Musk, [President] Donald Trump, and billionaire special interests,” Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
The Democrats then posted a picture of Musk on X standing in front of an American flag, wearing a foam cheesehead hat, accompanied by a single word: “loser.”
“We needed this,” Crawford supporter Amelia Carpenter told the Washington Examiner a day after the election. “The party has been taking hits. We fell apart after the 2024 election. This gives us some momentum going into the midterms against [Trump] and that awful man Elon. I knew we could get it done for Judge Crawford and Wisconsin. We cannot be bought.”
It’s no secret that Democrats have lost their mojo ever since Trump beat former Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race last year. Trump’s victory united a new working-class populist coalition and enabled the political comeback of the century.
Now, Democrats seemingly have snapped out of their Trump-induced fog and are refocused on getting that coalition back. Their introspection has seen them slowly but surely come to terms with the fact that things like diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender ideology haven’t landed with a majority of their base or independents who are simply more worried about what’s in their paycheck and if their family is OK.
There finally seem to be some shots of recovery, though, for the Democrats, and it’s coming from a familiar place — class warfare.
Winning strategy emerges for Democrats
It was a strategy successfully used in Wisconsin and one that could be replicated across the country, Patrick Guarasci, chief strategist and a consultant for Crawford’s campaign, said.
“The American people elected this administration to get things done,” he told the Washington Examiner. “They cared about their pocketbooks; they cared about their lives. They didn’t go in for some kind of remaking of the American government, and I think the American president and Elon Musk have overshot here and are attempting to remake America. Everyday people want someone looking out for them, and I think Susan Crawford was somebody who really connected with voters, a salt-of-the-earth person from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.”
Democrats, Guarasci said, need to get back to appealing to the average American, who aren’t billionaires like Musk or Trump.
“I’ve been reading these analyses that Democrats are never going to win another election or that the Electoral College is going to change, but wait a minute — the Democratic Party stands for the little guys and has for as long as I’ve been in politics,” he said. “It’s not that deep. We just have to go back and remember that.”
ELON MUSK FANS GOP ANXIETY WITH OFF-YEAR ELECTION PERFORMANCE
Notably, Crawford had more in her campaign coffer than her Musk-basked conservative opponent, Judge Brad Schimel, relying on billionaires of her own. She had mega donors George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) in her corner and a massive ground game in play. Yet the Democrats successfully turned the race into a class war and beat Musk, their billionaire bogeyman, on a national stage.
“Angry voters are more likely to turn out, and that benefited Republicans during the Biden years, and it’s benefitting Democrats during the Trump years,” Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington, said. “What’s particularly interesting about 2025 is that Democrats are also able to use Elon Musk as the villain.”
Farnsworth said that he sees a pivot, at least in Wisconsin, to an “anti-oligarch” narrative.
“I think that makes a lot of sense when you think about where the Republicans have been able to make gains with historically Democratic voters, particularly white working-class males,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And so to the extent that if Democrats can offer a message that can reconnect with those voters who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party, that is a strategy that could be really useful.”
Alejandro Verdin, the campaign manager for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s campaign, said the dynamics in the Wisconsin race were perfect to turn the contest into a class war.
“People are pissed off about the role the president has elevated Elon to and what he is doing in the federal government,” Verdin, who is based in Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s why his approval numbers are plummeting. I don’t think it’s a smart play. But again, Wisconsin was so perfect because Musk was investing personally in the race and has a case going through the court system. We’ll see what the dynamics are in the other states. Does he invest in more races? I think holding Republicans and their feet to the fire on Elon is a good move, but that’s not the only thing.”
Democrats have to go deeper and make the class divide the issue, one senior Republican strategist out of Green Bay told the Washington Examiner. Verdin agreed that 2024 was a wake-up call for Democrats who had alienated parts of their base by becoming hyper-focused on topics that didn’t affect a majority of their base, like transgender issues.
“Things are going to have to be done differently but I also think people are more fired up than ever now,” he added.
DOGE firings not viewed the same across the country
One potential pushback to the class warfare theory working broadly is that Wisconsinites were simply fed up with Musk and the chaos he has created as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE’s blunt approach has led to mass firings, confusing initiatives, and other cost-cutting measures that have wiped out entire departments.
The idea that people hate Musk because of DOGE, however, doesn’t hold sway with the analysts the Washington Examiner spoke to. They said it’s not just about Musk but what he and those close to Trump represent: an oligarchy that will continue as long as Trump stays in office.
“The DOGE layoffs, the canceling of [the U.S. Agency for International Development], all the stuff they are doing doesn’t affect the nation uniformly, both geographically and economically,” Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Washington Examiner. “Their impact is much more heavily felt in Northern Virginia. In Northern Virginia, there are a lot of people walking around muttering very dark things about Donald Trump.”
The win in Wisconsin, which could be a pattern for the country, was a statewide push against an oligarchy.
Winning back voters
A recent report by think tank Third Way warned, “For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class.”
The policy shop even organized a meeting of heavyweight Democratic Party leaders to develop a new strategy to win back the working class that had become practically invisible to elite Democrats. The strategy includes moving away from identity politics, emphasizing shared values and cultural alignment, framing rights as about ‘freedom and justice,’ engaging with the working class in their spaces, getting out of elite circles and into real communities, and owning the failures of Democratic governance in large cities.
Sanders takes the message to the people
Another sign that Democrats are leaning into class warfare and learning from their 2024 mistakes is the popular “Fighting Oligarchy” tour Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are on.
The liberal duo, which is starting a new leg of their tour with a stop in Los Angeles on April 12, are holding rallies and town halls to challenge Trump’s policies and economic disparities in the United States. The duo warns that Trump is really for billionaires and corporations, not the average voter who will see prices on almost everything skyrocket.
Sanders, as he did in 2016, leads with his eat-the-rich message. What’s different is that the tours take Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez into places that often broke for Trump in 2024, as well as in swing states.
It’s those places where their message seems to resonate with some one-time Trump voters who have been dismayed by the way the country is headed.
In a recent interview with NPR, Sanders explained: “Well, when I talked about oligarchy over the years, I think for some people it was an abstraction.”
He added: “People understand you have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s election win, Sanders raised the alarm that Democrats had turned their back on the working class.
DEMOCRATS TURN TO THEIR OLD FAVORITE — CLASS WARFARE
A return to championing causes such as income inequality and healthcare should see the working class “come back into the fold,” he believes.
“If not, I suspect the party will continue to decline.”
