Home > Wisconsin Towns Vote for Withdrawal
Elections-Elected Governments USA
by John Nichols
In November 2004, the village of Luxemburg, Wisconsin, voted to re-elect George W. Bush by a hefty margin of 701 to 431. Always a GOP stronghold, the community voted for other Republicans as well, even the challenger to popular Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who was winning by a landslide statewide.
There’s not much question that the majority of the 2,000 residents of this rural northeastern Wisconsin village of well-maintained homes, neat storefronts and large churches think of themselves as old-fashioned Midwestern conservatives.
So, by the calculus of the Bush White House and its echo chamber in the national media, Luxemburg ought to be just about the last place in the United States to express doubts about the President’s handling of the war in Iraq. And surely, no national pundit would have predicted that the village would vote in favor of a referendum declaring: "Be it hereby resolved, that the Village of Luxemburg urges the United States to begin an immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, beginning with the National Guard and Reserves."
Yet on Tuesday, the citizens of Luxemburg did exactly that, endorsing the immediate withdrawal referendum with a clear majority of their votes.
Luxemburg was not the only Wisconsin community that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 but voted against his war Tuesday. Up the road from Luxemburg, the villages of Casco and Ephraim voted for Bush in 2004 and immediate withdrawal in 2006. Across the state in northwest Wisconsin, the towns of Ojibwa, Draper and Edgewater, all of which backed Bush two years ago, voted against the war on Tuesday.
Their votes came as part of a statewide rejection of the war that saw twenty-four of thirty-two communities where Bring the Troops Home Now referendums were on local ballots vote for withdrawal. Added together, the referendums produced a resounding 40,043 to 25,641 vote against the continued US occupation of Iraq—producing an antiwar margin of 61 percent to 39 percent.
Apologists for the war—from the Republican National Committee to conservative talk-radio hosts and Fox TV commentators—are spinning like crazy to suggest that the referendums offer a reflection only of liberal, anti-Bush sentiment in college towns such as Madison, the state capital of Wisconsin.
The problem that the spin doctors are running into is that, while the Bring the Troops Home referendum won Madison by a thumping 68-to-32 margin, similar referendums won by a 70-to-30 margin in the well-to-do Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood and by a dramatic 82-to-18 margin in the community of Couderay in rural Sawyer County.
"These thirty-two communities were a representative sample of the state, with twenty-two of the thirty-two located in counties that George Bush won in the 2004 election," explained Steve Burns, Program Coordinator of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. "This is yet more evidence of a new antiwar majority in Wisconsin."
It was particularly notable that a Bring the Troops Home referendum won in a LaCrosse, the western Wisconsin city where Democratic and Republican presidential candidates—including Bush—have regularly campaigned over the years because the region around it is seen as a bellwether for national politics. Indeed, despite an aggressive campaign against the withdrawal referendum by LaCrosse County Republicans, the Bring the Troops Home measure won by a solid 55-to-45 margin.
It is true that referendums were defeated in eight cities, villages and towns. But only in two of those communities did the vote for immediate withdrawal fall below 45 percent.
The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, the Green Party and other groups that plotted the campaign for these referendums — and that received important assistance from new Liberty Tree Foundation and the national Voters for Peace initiative — took a number of risks. They wrote resolutions with uncompromising "immediate withdrawal" language, and they put them on the ballot not just in traditionally liberal communities but in traditionally conservative cities, villages and towns. They bet that they could win the votes not just of liberals but of honest conservatives, and in so doing they secured a message that—for all the attempts to spin it away—cannot be denied.
By a wide margin, an honest cross-section of communities in a Midwestern "battleground" state—where Bush and Kerry wrestled to a virtual tie in 2004, and where the House delegation is split between four Democrats and four Republicans—have told Washington that it is time to bring the troops home.