Current gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann sounded whiny after he lost a close race to first-term incumbent Senator Russ Feingold (D-Middleton) in 1998.
Appearing petulant for a politician on election night, Neumann singled out "one county" - Dane County - and blamed the voters there for costing him the election to which he appeared to see himself entitled after a hard-fought campaign.
Never complain Mr. Neumann, a safe bet that this 2010 candidate won't make that mistake again.
Of course Neumann neglected to mention that Waukesha County, where Neumann now resides, gave him a similar winning margin as Dane County gave Feingold in '98.
More importantly, Neumann might have noted that votes by folks in Dane County municipalities like Sun Prairie, Middleton, Fitchburg and Madison count just as much as anywhere else in a democracy.
But Neumann had a valid point.
In the same energetic election year that saw Tammy Baldwin (D-Madison) first win her seat to Congress in a historic campaign 10 years ago, polling sites all over Madison (including the undergraduate dormitory wards of UW-Madison) ran out of ballots and City poll workers frantically scrambled, sometimes asking voters to come back when more ballots became available.
The Isthmus
And nowhere as much as in the densely populated and high-turnout Isthmus wards did Mark Neumann meet electoral defeat.
The Isthmus wards supplied 15-to-one victory margins for Feingold and Baldwin, as is typical, and campaign volunteers' addresses often indicated Isthmus residency.
The people who live and work on the Isthmus are self-conscious about their electoral power and are proud of it. They take the notion of a classical liberal democracy seriously, so don't look for Neumann or Walker to knock it.
Read one homemade sign on an East Dayton Street house in the heart of the Isthmus in the spring 1999, "one neighborhood" beat Mark Neumann. That's about right.
In the 1992 presidential general election, a UW-Madison law student working for a national exit-polling organization, was stationed outside of a polling site on Williamson Street. But the law student had to repeatedly confirm the results to her uninformed, national contact who could not believe that people were voting 20-to-one Democratic in this ward.
Of all of Dane County and Madison, the Isthmus wards have become the single most effective killing machine of GOP politicians running for county and statewide office. The stories are legion and the stuff of oral political history, and the power has only grown the last 10 years.
The GOP doesn't dare try its voter suppression tricks in the Isthmus; better not to irritate the electoral equivalent of a perpetually pissed-off badger.
This spring as Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk actually lost Dane County outside of Madison by running a heavy-handed campaign that saw many small town taverns sporting huge anti-Falk signs, the late-reporting Isthmus wards came in and saved the day, granting the Democrat Falk the usual winning margins and a countywide electoral blowout.
It doesn't hurt that the get-out-the-vote infrastructure in Madison is a well-oiled machine. But when GOP strategists plan their statewide campaigns, they have to contend with and plan for the 1,000s-vote Isthmus deficit that is as predictable as Mark Neumann not kissing another man on the lips in a TV spot.
Bohemian, hyper-educated, young, old, pro-jobs, pro-health care, anti-war and hyper-politicized, the Madison Isthmus traces its cultural and political history as far back as the progressive movement identified with Robert M. La Follette.
The country has trended more politicized and progressive after eight years of Bush-Cheney, and the Madison Isthmus is blazing the path to the future as the GOP holds staged tea parties and the tried-and-false politics of division, hate and corruption.
Now the Obama administration works into the first 100 days, and it seems the GOP is on precisely the wrong side of history and of the Isthmus that will be an electoral hell for Mark Neumann or Scott Walker in November 2010.
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