Carpetbaggers: Why Are We Still Doing This?
Representative democracy is a fundamentally tricky balance: it means picking someone, or a few someones, to stand in for a much larger group, and make decisions on that group’s behalf.[1] In a way, it’s a contradictory phrase: democracy should mean active participation, people having daily agency and an effective say in the structure of their lives and of society. If you’re just one voice among hundreds, or thousands, or millions in choosing someone to represent you. Someone whom you’ve likely never met, will never have direct influence on, and who will never know what you, specifically, want or need – how is that democratic? (This is one of those “rhetorical questions”: it isn’t, definitionally.)
This isn’t an especially “radical” framing: the question of how to effectively, profitably, exploitatively run a society while giving regular people the false impression that they’re in charge was a well-documented obsession of the United States’ rich, democracy-hating founders, especially James Madison.[2] Some contemporary conservatives openly denounce democracy – while liberals usually make the extra effort to use euphemisms. Liberals criticize “populism[3]” and “NIMBY[4]” to justify limiting or outright preventing direct public participation.
The bigger the group, the stronger the likelihood that those in charge will be too powerful and too detached from the people they’re supposed to represent.[5] Various things have been tried to prevent this from happening, at least in the legislative sphere: term limits and population-proportional representation both address the problem of too much power in too few hands, albeit in very different ways.[6] And neither are especially effective at addressing the problem of the powerful being woefully out-of-touch with the people they’re making decisions for.
Now, to get to the point: there are a lot of people running for Wisconsin Assembly and Senate who seemingly do not live in the place they’re running to represent. That’s perfectly, strangely legal: winning candidates for the state legislature in Wisconsin have until thirty (30) days after taking office to move to their district.[7] The history of why that is will not be a focus of this article, but it’s a practical reality.
Consequently, legal or not, many incumbent Wisconsin politicians are running again- but to represent districts they either don’t live in or have only moved to for seemingly purely electoral purposes, including Rep. Elijah Behnke (R-Oconto), Rep. Tyler August (R-Lake Geneva), Rep. William Penterman (R-Columbus), Rep. Scott Johnson (R-Jefferson), Rep. Bob Donovan (R-Racine), Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine), and Rep. Karen Hurd (R-Fall Creek).[8] And “new,” sometimes perennial, candidates are running in districts they’ve only moved to since the very recently officialized maps became official. There are even races, like for Assembly District 14 in West Allis, where five candidates (so far!) are running – and as of May 26, 2024, only one officially resides in the newly-drawn district.[9]
Carpetbagging is an old, derisive term for people who opportunistically move to wherever there’s money and power to get a bit for themselves.[10] The underlying implication is that someone who moves someplace for money or power or clout is untrustworthy – and certainly shouldn’t be trusted to act on behalf of people in a place they have no meaningful connection to, apart from the crass opportunity that brought them there.
Few of the candidates in question here are seemingly moving to Wisconsin from another state in order to run for a $60k a year job – unlike US Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who at least has long owned property here, for whatever that’s worth.[11] But do we really want a political system where a class of professional politicians, when handed new, complicated electoral maps, simply sort out amongst themselves where to run, and why, without any preexisting connection to the specific community? There’s a caucus-sized amount of candidates openly saying, “Oh, well, this district just became too hard for me to re-win, I’m going to call dibs on another one, instead.” Isn’t that, very obviously on its face, pretty fucked up?
It’s up to the reader to decide how much this actually matters, but it certainly isn’t something that many candidates for electoral office like to talk about. Unsurprisingly, Milwaukee Beagle is not aware of any candidates who proudly say that they are running in a district they don’t live in. There are several candidates, however, who’ve indicated that they don’t live in the districts they’re spending time and money to represent. Milwaukee Beagle is wondering: why isn’t anyone else talking about that very much?[12]
As a diligent and almost annoyingly trustworthy publication, Milwaukee Beagle is committed to finding out just how many candidates for Wisconsin Assembly and Senate don’t really live in the districts they apparently want to represent. Here’s how we’re going to do that:
Wisconsin’s legislature aren’t required to disclose their home addresses on the nomination papers they have to submit to get on the ballot. And frankly, even if they were required to do so, a lot of these weirdos can afford to just rent or buy a new place in a whole ass different neighborhood, when they need to. So, we’re going to look at campaign documents like finance reports, nomination papers, and other documents available through the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the Wisconsin Campaign Finance Information System, but won’t consider those documents to be definitive proof of actual residency in a place.[13]
This means that we’re going to have to do some old-fashioned journalism: citing reputable public sources re: where candidates live, vs. where they’re seeking power. And when those sources aren’t available, we will attempt to ask the candidates themselves to tell us where they actually live – and if they are moving to the district they’re running in, or already have, for primarily electoral purposes.
While we may have our biases re: candidates’ ideologies and partisan affiliations, we will endeavor to present our findings as objectively as possible, even as they pertain to fascists/Republicans (sorry if that’s redundant).
Consequently, we’ll be using two primary categories for this ongoing investigation: suspected Wisconsin carpetbagger and confirmed Wisconsin carpetbagger. The former category will include 1) candidates/incumbents identified by WisPolitics and other outlets collecting direct evidence from candidates and their campaigns and 2) candidates with mailing addresses, used on official documents, that are not in the districts they are running to represent. Suspected carpetbaggers will only be considered confirmed once we have received additional, clear evidence that they are moving to, or have already moved to, the district they are running in for primarily electoral purposes. With that said, please follow our ongoing work on Wisconsin Carpetbaggers here.
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[1] More on the internal contradictions of the US representative “democracy” in Louis Menand’s August 15, 2022 article in the New Yorker, “American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic.” [2] See the Federalist Papers, No. 10, wherein Madison rails against “pure democracy,” meaning direct, participatory democracy, as a concept that fails to prevent the factionalization of society, a thing that representative pseudo-democratic republics have clearly had immense success at.
[3] More on the liberal/centrist use/abuse of the term “populism” in Benjamin Moffitt’s February 14, 2020 article in the Guardian UK, “The trouble with anti-populism: why the champions of civility keep losing.”
[4] This one’s a bit more complicated, but there is a “movement’ to relax zoning laws, building codes, and other regulations of housing in order to encourage more “market rate housing” at pretty much any political cost. This movement calls itself YIMBY (or “Yes In My Backyard.”) While they generally act in opposition to conservative, monied anti-development interests (traditionally called NIMBYs, or “Not In My Back Yard,” think the type of rich asshole who gets mad about a halfway house a mile away from their condo), YIMBYs also often veer into a blanket hate of *any* opposition to a participant development proposal, even from tenant advocates and working class neighbors, whom they will call “left-NIMBYs” or just NIMBYs, too. This leads YIMBYs to a deep distrust/hatred of public participation in the housing development process, even when it lacks the actual teeth to stop development. More on this in YouTuber Radical Planning’s February 8, 2022 video “Don't Fall Down the YIMBY Pipeline.”
[5] This is, again, not really a controversial or new critique. See James Madison’s Federalist Paper No 55 (1788).
[6] Term limits, broadly speaking, limit how long X politician can serve in Y office. The concept has long been favored by right-libertarians and those who generally seek to limit entrenched government power. But it has only been met with limited success in states where they’ve tried, like Michigan. See Citizens’ Research Council of Michigan’s May 8, 2018 report, “Evaluating the Effects of Term Limits on the Michigan Legislature.”
[7] This is a bit complicated, but Wisconsin’s constitution says that members of the legislature must be 1) qualified electors *and* 2) reside in the state for at minimum, one year. Electors are only required to be 1) a United States citizen who is at least 18 years old and 2) a resident of an electoral district. In Wisconsin, 30 days at a residence is generally sufficient to be considered a resident. In any case, this is a very uncontroversial interpretation of WI law, so please step off.
[8] This information is largely drawn from WisPolitics and via its agents’ direct conversations with candidates/their campaigns. For the purposes of this article, we will consider WisPolitics’ assertion that a candidate is “moving to” or “moved to” a district in order to run there as tentatively true. Where possible, we will confirm it by another source *and* via Wisconsin’s voter file.
[9] This is, again, according to Wisconsin’s voter file. We’re not naming names, but you can check for yourself.
[10] From the Texas State Historical Association, “Carpetbagger was the pejorative term applied to Northerners who moved to the South after the Civil War, specifically those who joined state Republican parties formed in 1867 and who were elected as Republicans to public office.”
[11] More from Hope Karnopp, January 3, 2024 article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel titled, “Who is Eric Hovde? What to know about Republican candidate challenging Tammy Baldwin.”
[12] Apologies to WisPolitics, because they clearly are asking this, sort of, but not in an especially critical way.
[13] This is a lot of electoral database gobbledygook, apologies – as this is an ongoing investigation, we will try to break this stuff down more as we go.
