By Julio Covarrubias (April 8, 2020)
The most heavily black and Democratic part of Wisconsin has the greatest obstacles to the ballot. It is much easier to vote in Waukesha county, for example; it is 92 percent white and has 50 polling locations for a population of 404,198. Madison, which is 78 percent white, has 66 open polling locations for a population of 258,054. For a population of 48,376, Wauwatosa has 10 polling locations; it’s 86 percent white. Meanwhile, Milwaukee, which is almost 39 percent Black, went from 180 polling locations to just 5 for a population of 592,025.
Outside of Milwaukee, fewer interruptions have been reported, and wait times have been as low as 5 minutes to a half an hour in some suburbs and rural areas. In Milwaukee, it is an average 2.5 hour wait.
What we are seeing is a demonstration of what the journalist Mark Ames noted long ago: the right in this country understand power politics and the left do not. The right are so ruthless they are even willing to take collateral damage to their base in order to gain and retain power, while the “left” (really, the liberal center)–“imagining politics to be a country club instead of a battlefield”–are willing to bend the rules only to keep the center-left from power. They can’t even help themselves, much less aid the people.
Useless. It’s in the blood and marrow of the American liberal to lose; the whole of their recent history is a history of concession and compromise with the right. Rotted out and hollow, they are a limb that has to be amputated for us to survive.