Sen. Tammy Baldwin will deliver a victory speech Thursday at the Steamfitters Local 601 hall east of Madison after winning a third term Tuesday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
While a majority of Wisconsin voters helped elect Republican Donald Trump as president this week, one statewide candidate managed to defy the odds that favored the Republican Party.
Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin managed to gather enough votes to overtake Republican Eric Hovde and return to Washington DC for a third term.
Although the victory was much smaller than her last re-election in 2018, the outcome maintained Baldwin’s winning streak.
“2024 marks a continuation of Tammy Baldwin’s record of undefeated elections,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler said Thursday during a brief celebration of Baldwin’s victory.
“The way we won this race is the way I’ve always approached this track,” a smiling Baldwin said in her 10-minute victory speech. “We did everything, everywhere, at once. I traveled to red, blue, purple, rural, suburban and urban parts of our state. I listened to people. I really listen to people and do something for them, and in turn, these Wisconsinites showed up for me, and I’m so grateful.
Baldwin is “extremely good at cultivating her own brand and separating it from the national brand of the Democratic Party,” Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari said in an interview Thursday.
Wisconsin Democrats often seem to do better in midterm elections, “where it’s a little less nationalized and the candidates can cultivate their kind of personal and local brands,” Azari said. “Baldwin has been quite successful and she is ahead of Democrats statewide in many contests.”
Baldwin got her political start on the Dane County Board, graduated from the Wisconsin Legislature and was elected to the U.S. House in 1998, the state’s first female and first gay congresswoman. After serving in the House of Representatives for fourteen years, she was elected to the US Senate in 2012, the year Barack Obama won his second term.
In 2018, when he ran against a Republican senator, Leah Vukmir, Baldwin easily won reelection by nearly 11 points, while her fellow Democrat, Tony Evers, won his first term as governor by 1 percentage point.
“She’s focused on more types of state priorities and has become known in rural parts of the state that we don’t really associate with Democrats,” Azari said. Baldwin’s much narrower victory in 2024 came in “a very difficult national environment for Democrats.”
Baldwin held her event Thursday at a Steamfitters union training center on Madison’s east side.
Doug Edwards, business manager of Steamfitters Local 601, called Baldwin “a homegrown individual” who has “just been fantastic for working families in Wisconsin” and a staunch ally of the union.
“Tammy has just been a good advocate for all the people of Wisconsin, and I think that put her over the top, even though it was close,” Edwards said in an interview.
In her victory speech, Baldwin summarized the wide range of issues she has taken on as a lawmaker, along with the people behind those issues who have been her supporters.
“It’s the farmers in the dairy industry that I fought alongside and got the support of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau,” Baldwin said. “It’s the workers on the foundry floors who are getting more sales thanks to my Buy America rules – a big shout out to labor.”
Baldwin has successfully pushed colleagues in Congress to include provisions that favor domestic suppliers and manufacturers in bills such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“It is the LGBTQ families who saw through the vicious campaigns of attacks and knew I stood with them, and it is the women who have had our rights taken away and who saw me on the front lines fighting for their freedom,” she added .
Baldwin favors legislation to restore federally protected abortion rights, which ended in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The bill she drafted has stalled in both houses.
But also in 2022, Baldwin argued that the loss of Roe meant that the Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage could be in jeopardy. She led one successful bill which received bipartisan support and affirmed same-sex marriage and interracial couples.
Baldwin also emphasized her involvement in the Affordable Care Act, for which she wrote a provision that allows children to remain on their parents’ health insurance until they reach age 26.
After four years in the Senate as a member of the Democratic majority, Baldwin will begin her third term as a member of the minority party in January. However, during her tenure in Congress, Baldwin repeatedly aligned herself with Republicans on bills that aligned with her own positions.
On Tuesday, her margin of roughly 30,000 votes was about the same as the margin by which Harris lost to Trump in Wisconsin. And the senator’s final tally was about 5,000 more than Harris’s — indicating that some Wisconsin voters who chose Trump split their tickets to vote for Baldwin.
Baldwin diplomatically acknowledged the outcome of the presidential contest on Thursday.
“While we did our utmost to elect Kamala Harris, I recognize that the people of Wisconsin chose Donald Trump, and I respect their choice,” Baldwin said.
“You know I will always fight for Wisconsin, and that means working with President Trump and standing up to him when he doesn’t have our best interests at heart.”
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES IN YOUR INBOX
