After years in the wilderness, Snodgrass, Dems wield the power

Though Lee Snodgrass says she and her colleagues knew a couple of weeks before the midterm elections that something pretty special might be brewing for state Democrats, she’d been around long enough and suffered through enough electoral cataclysms in the past decade to know not to celebrate prematurely.

Even when the returns poured in on Election Night and she was able to announce to the large gathering at a watch party in Appleton that, indeed, it looked like the Democrats would achieve the coveted trifecta after 16 years in the Wisconsin wilderness, she didn’t fully grasp how monumental it was.

Snodgrass, who will be among the seven most senior Assembly representatives when they are seated in January, says it wasn’t until she drove to Madison a few days later that reality set in.

“I was on East Washington, seeing the Capitol, and I was completely overwhelmed with emotion and the sensation of I'm now going here with the real possibility of doing good,” she says 10 days after the election. “And I don't think any of us (Democrats) realized how much we were carrying until we were able to put it down. Like I think of it a lot like carrying kettlebells for a workout, and you don't really notice it's heavy and you're carrying it, but when you finally put it down, you can relax your body, and just everything lifts.”

Snodgrass came into the Wisconsin State Legislature in 2021 as part of what she calls “the Covid class” and has spent the past six years in the minority party at a time when collegiality across the aisle is rare to non-existent. Only four percent of Democratic-sponsored bills ever received even a committee hearing in the last session, rendering any opportunities at bipartisanship exasperatingly few and far between.

During that time when the best Democrats could do was play defense and defend Gov. Evers’ vetoes of Republican bills on everything from voting restrictions to voucher expansion to restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights to abortion access to allocations of federal dollars, Snodgrass’s frustration grew. 

Yet as a former backline soccer player she knows how to play defense.

“I was very good at giving speeches on the floor that smacked down bad legislation,” she says. “I was good at making sure that we were fighting back on the bad messaging that the Republicans had. I'm really excited to flip that defensive mindset to an offensive mindset now. 

“Where instead of saying to folks, ‘Oh, don't worry, that's not going to happen,’ I can say, ‘Don't worry, that's going to happen.’ As you might imagine, there's a flood of people contacting the office with a very long wish list.” 

Changing people’s lives

With the redrawing of the state maps in 2024 that addressed Republican gerrymandering in 2011 – considered among the most hyper-partisan in the country – a slew of formerly safe State Senate and Assembly seats were suddenly in play for Democrats. The result was a pickup for Democrats of 10 Assembly and four Senate seats. Before that radical change in the ‘24 election, Republicans were just two votes shy of a veto-proof supermajority, and they used every gambit in their arsenal to attempt veto overrides with little warning, hoping to catch two or more Democrats unable to make it to Madison in time. Plenty of times Snodgrass had to make a mad dash to Madison with almost no notice.

“I had colleagues who missed grandmothers’ 90th birthdays, kids' last band concerts, all sorts of momentous things that we missed in case Republicans decided to pull us in to try to override the governor's veto,” she says. 

The Republicans nearly pulled it off on several occasions, Snodgrass says, admitting it was a lot for her and her colleagues to carry.

“We really felt like we were at the enemy's gate, guarding it,” she says. “And if one of us fell, the whole thing could crumble. It was actually so difficult that I considered not running again. I'm sure glad I did, but it was a difficult session.”

Between that, the blocking of legislation Democrats saw as urgent, and what Snodgrass calls Republicans’ “hidden procedural administrative microaggressions,” it was emotionally draining, she says. 

“I feel like ‘endure’ is an apt word for it,” she says. “But I definitely don’t want to give the impression that it’s not an absolute honor to be in this role because it truly is.”

Along with the excitement that urgent issues such as full funding of public education; childcare assistance; labor union support; affordable health care; abortion rights; voting rights; etc., will finally get the legislature’s full attention next year, comes the realization that the responsibility is fully on Democrats’ shoulders. For whatever weight they carried as the minority party, Democrats have the new burden of following through over the next two years. Snodgrass says she woke up the day after the election feeling both elated and aware of what the achievement brought with it.

How state Dems went from the wilderness to wielding power

“I thought to myself, oh my gosh, I'm actually going to be responsible for laws that will fundamentally change people's lives, and I could never actually say that before. It comes with a whole other layer of responsibility. I think my stress before was, there's so much need, and we can't do anything about it. And now my stress is, there's so much need, and we need more money to be able to do something about it.”

Recognizing that a finite amount of revenue will be available, Snodgrass says the template will be how to do the most good for the most people by picking and choosing the most impactful and achievable legislation.

That she and the Democrats are in this position at all would have been unthinkable following the Republican gerrymander of 2011 that gave them, despite Wisconsin being a purple state, two-thirds of the legislative seats. One Republican gleefully declared that Democrats would never again hold power in the state. And there was little to suggest they would.

Snodgrass got involved in state politics following Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, eventually chairing the Outagamie Democratic Party before challenging Roger Roth for his Senate Seat in 2018. She lost by only six points, despite being a newcomer against a known name and the President of the State Senate. Through Snodgrass’s efforts, the work of the state party under Ben Wikler and county parties across the state, Democrats began to chip away at the solid rock of Republican dominance. Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in 2018, the same year, Rebecca Dallet won a seat on the State Supreme Court to narrow the Republican majority to a still formidable 5-2. In 2020, Democrats rallied to elect another progressive to the court in Jill Karofsky. Finally, in 2023, Janet Protasiewicz, won another Supreme Court seat and progressives had the majority they needed to address the gerrymandered maps.

With fair maps and the blue wave that swept across America on Nov. 3, Democrats have fully emerged from exile with a new Democratic governor in David Crowley and majorities in both chambers – 53 to 46 in the Assembly and 18-15 in the Senate.

Boots on the ground

“In that time, the ways that grassroots organizing went from regionalized, volunteer-based efforts to statewide, more broadly organized and funded by the state Democratic Party has changed so much, so I feel that everything that has happened from 2016 to now is something that the people on the ground did,” Snodgrass says. “I personally feel that if we did not have the field program that Democrats have, we would not be where we are. You saw how outspent we were. 

“Wisconsin is never going to be a state where spending at the end of the day is the reason somebody wins. It is going to be boots on the ground, organizing, talking to people, building those relationships, and that is something that Democrats have really gotten very good at.” 

Suddenly, Democrats are challenging every seat and Snodgrass is quick to laud those like Emily Tseffos, the chair of the Outagamie Democrats, Grace Abitz, and Alicia Saunders, all of whom ran in overwhelmingly Republican-majority districts this year. 

“I admire them more, in some ways, than people who run in blue districts because they're already running against all odds, and they're still putting their full weight into it, and they're still committing wholly to it,” she says. “I do believe if they weren't doing that work, we would be in a worse place as a state. I do believe that while it may not have paid off for them in this current election cycle, it will pay off for the state in future cycles.”

She says, just as she won a higher percentage of new voters in her unsuccessful 2018 race, she would guess both Tseffos and Abitz, if they drill down into the numbers, will find they won a higher percentage of new voters this cycle. And that makes it easier for the next candidate.

“So unfortunately, in those seats, it's incremental, and incrementalism is a soul killer,” she admits. “It's so important, but it doesn't have that immediate gratification.”

Joyful hard work

This was easily the most wrenching campaign Snodgrass has run. While she barely drew challenges in her first two campaigns for Assembly, her opponent this year was aggressive and shrewd and went after her personally, scouring her social media for anything he might use to call her out. Snodgrass won by 27 points and she doesn’t think it was her opponent that made this one so fraught. She thinks it was more the simple fact of doing this for so long. Snodgrass puts herself in front of people; speaks her mind; and can be vulnerable on social media.

“That's a long time to be putting yourself out there to be punched on the chin and yelled at at the doors,” she says of running five straight cycles. 

Over the course of those eight years, she says she learned a lot about the bare-knuckles nature of politics as well as the coping skills necessary to endure it.

“Just because somebody says something doesn't mean it's true,” she says. “I used to really obsess over how do I correct this? How do I make sure that I get the truth out there or whatever? And now I really realize if I know what is true, I can't let other people's perceptions impact me. So I got really good at saying, "I'm not going to please everybody. I'm just going to keep focusing on doing that work.’ “And I wish I had had that skill when I was in my twenties and thirties.”

She also says she recognizes that, in politics, you inevitably run the risk of being perceived as unlikeable by some people. The stakes are real and people are invested on one side or the other of an issue they are passionate about. She says she doesn’t blame those people for forcefully expressing their displeasure, as long as it remains respectful. 

One thing seems certain: Everything Snodgrass has had to endure to this point has been worth it. And that’s even before the midterm’s big payoff. But it’s a whole new ballgame starting in January and Snodgrass relishes the opportunity and the responsibility.

“It's joyful work, joyful hard work, as opposed to sad hard work (as a member of the minority party),” she says. “We have all these great things in front of us. We can pick three or four of these great things and really make an immediate difference. 

“And I think we just want to make sure that when you're turning on your radio, your news, or opening up social media in January and February, everybody in the state of Wisconsin, whether you voted for Democrats or not, is saying, ‘Oh my God, did you see what the Democrats are doing? That's going to be so much better for our family.’"