George Will writes about the Wisconsin Senate race:

In 49 states, when you order breakfast in a restaurant you might be asked if you would like pancakes or an omelet. In Wisconsin, you are asked if you would like pancakes with your omelet. Ron Johnson would, thank you. This Republican U.S. senator, who is burning prodigious amounts of calories campaigning for a second and final term, really does represent the hearty eaters who were fueling up at a Perkins Restaurant here on a recent Sunday morning.
In 2010, Johnson left his plastics manufacturing company that made him wealthy enough to try, against his preference for the private sector and against his wife’s adamant disapproval, to become the only manufacturer in the Senate. He surfed into that chamber on the Republican wave raised by two things that annoyed Johnson enough to propel him into politics — the Obama administration’s stimulus that did not stimulate and Obamacare, which six years later is in intensive care.

Johnson defeated a three-term incumbent, Russ Feingold, who this year is again Johnson’s opponent. Being devoted environmentalists, Democrats believe in recycling even their candidates: In Indiana, too, a former senator, Evan Bayh, is in a tight race trying to return to Washington.

In a season supposedly inimical to insiders, Feingold, 63, is more of this detested breed than is Johnson. Feingold first won elective office at age 29 and his involuntary six-year sojourn in the private sector has been an aberration he is eager to end. Johnson, 61, said when seeking his first term that he would never seek a third.

In contrast, Johnson’s opponent ran four times, and, having unaccountably (in his own mind) failed to have been elected six years ago, thinks he should be a senator yet again.

Johnson says he has traveled 130,000 miles — “that’s with me behind the wheel” — to ask audiences: How many of you think the government is efficient and effective? When no hands are raised, he asks: Why, then, would you want it enlarged?

Johnson was considered so vulnerable this year that the national party essentially wrote him off — indeed, it virtually announced as much by its parsimonious support. Ten months ago he trailed Feingold by double digits. He is attempting to become the first Wisconsin Republican since 1980 to win a Senate election in a presidential year. In that year, Ronald Reagan’s coattails pulled 16 freshmen Republicans into the Senate.

This year, Johnson faces headwinds beyond the fact that the unhinged spectacle at the top of the Republican ticket lost the Wisconsin primary to Ted Cruz by 13 points. Wisconsin last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 and is much more congenial to Republicans in nonpresidential years, when turnout is lower. In 2010, the total vote for Senate candidates was 2,171,331. In the presidential year 2012, when Democrat Tammy Baldwin defeated former governor Tommy Thompson for the state’s other Senate seat, the total vote surged to 3,009,411.

Nevertheless, although Hilary Clinton is expected to win Wisconsin handily, Johnson still could be the unlikely savior of Republicans’ Senate control: Two recent public polls show Johnson behind by less than the polls’ margins of error. This is partly because, in a year of unrelieved political ugliness, he has done something eccentric: He has run television ads that make people smile rather than wince. One concerns his support for a faith-based program teaching unemployed inner-city residents the modalities of job-seeking (interviews, etc.); the other highlights Johnson helping a Wisconsin couple bring their adopted child home from Congo.

This year of the counterintuitive has reached an appropriate culmination: Republican retention of Senate control might depend on weakness at the top of the ticket starting immediately. If Donald Trump’s chances of winning are soon seen to be, as they actually are, vanishingly small, Republican Senate candidates can explicitly encourage tactical voting: They can acknowledge that Trump is toast and can urge voters to send Republicans to Washington as a check on a President Hillary Clinton.

In 22 of the 36 election cycles — presidential and off-year — in the 70 years since World War II, voters have produced divided government, giving at least one house of Congress to the party not holding the presidency. This wholesome American instinct for checks and balances is particularly pertinent now because Clinton will take office as an unprecedentedly unpopular new president.

For conservatives, this autumn has been about simultaneously stopping Trump and preserving Republicans’ Senate control to stymie Clinton. Johnson will return either to the Senate and the invigorating business of preventing progressives’ mischief, or to private life. Come what may, he says, “I’ll be the calmest guy on election night.”

Kevin Binversie has questions about Johnson’s opponent, the phony maverick, that the Wisconsin media hasn’t asked and Feingold hasn’t answered:

Health Care

• Earlier this week, former President and potential “First Gentleman” Bill Clinton described the Affordable Care Act – which you voted for and once bragged about having ‘read every word of it’ – as a “crazy system,” is “killing small businesses,” “doesn’t work” or “doesn’t make any sense.” Do you agree with this assessment, if so, why have you not publicly said something similar in the past? If not, why and how is Clinton wrong exactly?
• An analysis by the New York Times find that residents in four Wisconsin counties (Menominee, Pierce, Polk, and St. Croix) will only have one insurance option available to them via Healthcare.Gov. What do you say to those Wisconsinites (they’re listening) who believed that your vote on the Affordable Care Act would mean more consumer choice, more affordable options, and access to doctors they know and trust when the exact opposite has happened?

Transparency

• In a world where the finances of candidates and the college transcripts of candidates are often released for public consumption, why has there never been any release of your course syllabus and reading list from your time teaching at Stanford Law School? Yes, there is a course description available online , but it comes off as rather vague. Also, would you be willing to release student evaluations made of you during your time there?
• Is there any particular reason why your campaign has not published its “Cash on Hand” for the just completed fund raising period?
• In 2010, your campaign was found to be using paid Labor Union staffers and activists as stand ins for “Average Wisconsinites” in your political advertising. Did you learn your lesson for 2016, or did you repeat that move?
• If you have nothing to hide from your emails during your time as a Special Envoy in the State Department, why not just openly call for their release?

Economics

• Could you please provide the definition of “Creative Destruction” as it is defined in most Economics textbooks?
• This week the International Monetary Fund downgraded its expectation for growth in the U.S. economy for the rest of the year. Isn’t that a stinging indictment of the Obama economic record? If so, why do you believe the American people essentially deserve a “more of the same” approach as being suggest by Hillary Clinton (infrastructure spending, “Green Jobs,” etc.), if it didn’t make the economy go “Gangbusters” in the first place?

We’ll see if any reporter does indeed run with these suggestions.

I have even simpler questions for the senator:

• Why did voters fire you in 2010? What did you learn about losing?
• Name one political position you have that cannot be described as “liberal” or “leftist.”
• Name one non-liberal position you have taken as a result of input from your “listening sessions.”
• If you are elected Nov. 8, given that Wisconsin already has a left-wing U.S. senator, how will you represent the people who didn’t vote for you and didn’t vote for Wisconsin’s other U.S. senator?

William Galston tries to reconcile the three parts of the Republican Party after the Nov. 8 disaster:

No Republican will ever try harder than Mr. Trump has to make working-class white voters the centerpiece of a majority coalition. His no-holds barred effort to mobilize them has offended minority voters as well as the more educated white voters who have long supported more mainstream conservative candidates. If current trends continue, he will register single-digit support among African-Americans, he will underperform Mitt Romney’s woeful showing among Latinos, and he will lose to Hillary Clinton among college-educated women.

Underlying these results are deep structural tensions. On economics, today’s Republicans are—like Caesar’s Gaul—divided into three parts. Establishment conservatives reflect the interests of corporate America. They favor free trade, immigration reform, and well-targeted public investment. They are broadly internationalist and mostly support the treaties and institutions through which the United States exercises global influence.

They believe in climate change and can live with reasonable measures to abate it. They want corporate tax reform, but not at the expense of provisions in the current code that benefit their economic sectors. They would like individual tax reform but already can use the current code to minimize their effective tax rate. They believe in “entitlement reform” but would accept revenue increases along with it—the ever-elusive “grand bargain” at the heart of blue-ribbon commissions.

Second come the small-town, small-government conservatives who channel the anxieties and antipathies of the National Federation of Independent Business and whose sentiments pervade the Paul Ryan-House Republican manifesto, “A Better Way.” They believe—passionately—that government is the principal obstacle to growth. They insist on major tax cuts, especially in the individual code through which their unincorporated businesses are taxed, and fervently reject any new taxes.

They favor reductions in domestic spending (especially welfare), structural changes in Medicare and Medicaid, and an all-out assault on the regulatory state. Compared to their corporate brethren, their outlook is more nationalist. They mostly depend on the domestic market rather than exports and frown on institutions such as the Export-Import Bank, which they regard as corporate welfare. They are not invited to meetings at Davos.

And lastly, we reach the populist conservatives, many of them working class, about whom so much has been written in this election cycle. They mistrust all large institutions, especially the federal government, but they do not have an ideological preference for smaller government. They depend on costly programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Disability Insurance and stand to benefit from the expanded infrastructure investments that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have proposed.

They see large corporations as indifferent, even hostile, to their interests and concerns. They view the world outside the United States more as a threat than an opportunity. So they oppose trade agreements as well as large immigration flows and are suspicious of the obligations that alliances such as NATO impose on the U.S. Like Mr. Trump, they regard such arrangements, on balance, as burdens rather than benefits. For them, “America First” is more than a slogan; it is a demand.

Despite the hostility between Paul Ryan and Mr. Trump, it is just possible to see how small-government conservatives and populist conservatives might make common cause. The small-government advocates could make their peace with Social Security and phase in changes to Medicare slowly enough to convince the populists, many of whom are near retirement age, that they have nothing to fear. Over time, they might be able to smooth the rough edges off the ethno-nationalism that has disfigured the Trump campaign and repelled so many Americans. Issues such as trade and immigration would remain points of contention, but focusing on border security and tougher enforcement of existing trade agreements could make the tensions manageable.

It is harder to see how establishment conservatives can find a place within this coalition. Their policy agenda contradicts the demands of the populists, and their outlooks are antithetical. They know that their long-term success depends on the kinds of public investments that small government conservatives shun—and the economic internationalism that populists abhor. Having abandoned the bipartisanship they espoused after World War II and casting their lot with the Republican Party, they find their influence shrinking among the kinds of conservatives who have come to dominate the GOP.

As working-class white voters left the Democrats after the 1960s, Republicans won them over with appeals to cultural traditionalism and American exceptionalism. It was a low-cost acquisition. Now, with the hollowing-out of the manufacturing sector on which working class communities depended, the bill—a balloon payment—has come due.

As a non-Republican I’d say I’m in Galston’s second group. Opposition to big government is not necessarily incompatible with opposition to big business, given all the similarities beyond the fact that business has to earn what it gets, unlike Govzilla.

The first group probably makes a fair amount of tacit Hillary Clinton supporters; they’re conservative in the original sense of the word — they don’t like change because the current system works for them.

The Wisconsin GOP has more from the first and third groups than the second. The state GOP hasn’t done nearly enough to promote small government, and that has been the case far longer than Ryan has been in politics. There are no effective constitutional limits on government growth in this state. There are legislative limits, but anything legislative can be erased by the Legislature. It is, of course, against the GOP’s political limits to advocate something that would make election results less important, but until a Taxpayer Bill of Rights-like mechanism becomes part of the state Constitution the GOP has to get voters to believe that the GOP will increase government less than Democrats would.

Chris Rochester:

Amid the noise and drama of the campaign for the Oval Office between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a kernel of truth about Obamacare – rarely mentioned by either candidate – emerged recently when Minnesota’s Democratic governor admitted the law has failed.

“The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people,” Gov. Mark Dayton told the Associated Press on Wednesday. Dayton in 2013 was among the law’s biggest cheerleaders, touting the state’s low health insurance rates at the time. …

Even Bill Clinton, in another rare moment of truth in politics, acknowledged that Obamacare is “the craziest thing in the world.” He has since backpedaled and apologized for accidentally saying what he really thinks.

Back in 2014, Wisconsin progressives seized on Minnesota’s full embrace of a state-based Obamacare exchange and its costly expansion of Medicaid to constantly point out that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, should do the same.

Citizen Action of Wisconsin in particular, a progressive group that has been pushing the one-size-fits-all, top-down bureaucratic health care model from day one, has repeatedly pointed to Minnesota as a model for lower health insurance costs and access. They have been non-stop in their criticism of Walker and legislative Republicans, explicitly blaming healthcare premium differences between the two states on Wisconsin’s refusal to accept a Medicaid expansion.

Earlier this year, Bill Kaplan even wrote on Citizen Action’s website that Walker and the GOP’s refusal to embrace Obamacare is “reminiscent of Japanese soldiers fighting on after WWII ended.” It’s now apparent he was wrong, and Gov. Dayton seems to agree.

As we are now finding out, Wisconsin lawmakers took the right path, thankfully ignoring Citizen Action’s cheap potshots and instead choosing fiscal responsibility. Minnesotans covered through Obamacare will see shocking premium increases from 50-67 percent in 2017. Worse yet, the only reason there are any insurers offering Obamacare plans in Minnesota at all is because state officials begged companies to stay in the exchange. The only way the regulators could force health insurance companies to stay in the exchange was to allow the astronomical rate increases.

“The Commerce Department pursued every option within its power to avert a collapse this year,” said Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman in a statement by the state’s Department of Commerce. “We succeeded in saving the market for 2017, with only Blue Cross leaving.”

Refusing to acknowledge the fundamental and obvious flaws that even Dayton and Clinton have now admitted, Citizen Action put out an absurd press release mindlessly blaming Obamacare rate increases on “sabotage” by health insurers and conservative politicians. The statement – less an analysis and more a desperate plea – advocates price controls for drug companies and a public option as the solutions to the problem of rising healthcare costs, a problem that Obamacare was supposedly enacted to fix.

Clearly, Citizen Action will never admit the colossal failure that Obamacare is and the horrific shape that the Minnesota exchange is in. They believe that bigger government is the solution to every problem that ails society – even the ailment of big government itself.

While Wisconsin is clearly in a better position than Minnesota – Wisconsin hasn’t faced a total collapse of its individual insurance market – health insurance customers here will also see double-digit rate increases in their Obamacare-compliant plans, according to the state’s Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI).

On average, Wisconsin Obamacare premiums will increase by 15.88 percent in 2017. The OCI recently reviewed and approved the rate changes requested by Wisconsin insurance companies. Insurers began filing their 2017 policies and rate increase requests in June.

UnitedHealth and Humana, two of the largest health insurance companies in the country, both backed out of Wisconsin’s market entirely earlier this year. Anthem also significantly cut back its offerings in 34 counties last year and withdrew from Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Racine counties entirely. With fewer companies competing in the Wisconsin exchange, premium increases have continued to far outpace inflation.

One major insurer remaining in Wisconsin, Aetna, will increase its premiums by an overall 29.32 percent for its small group PPO plan, with increases varying from 7.59 percent to a maximum of 59.71 percent.

Dean Health Plan, Inc. will raise premiums for its individual HMO plan by an overall 18.73 percent, with rate changes varying from a 9.73 percent reduction to a 46.34 percent increase. The company plans a 2.91 percent decrease for its small group plan.

Gundersen Health Plan, Inc. will increase its premiums by an overall 9.33 percent for its small group plan and 18.36 percent for its individual plan – that plan’s premium increases range from 7.87 percent to 42.67 percent.

Blue Cross Blue Shield filed a 3.96 percent decrease for its small group plan, but that plan is listed as “off-exchange” and only affects 270 people.

WPS will increase premiums for its small group PPO plan by 9.78 percent overall, with increases ranging from a 4.3 percent reduction to a 55.66 percent increase. WPS will also increase premiums for its individual PPO plan by 5.39 percent overall, with changes ranging from a 14.8 percent reduction to a 20.94 percent increase.

The Arise Health Plan, a subsidiary of WPS, plans premium increases of 6.29 percent for its individual HMO plan and 3.14 percent for its small group HMO.

Regardless of the reason for these steep price increases, Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance Ted Nickel had this warning for consumers: “While increases for Wisconsinites are lower than many other states, these rate changes and the recent exiting of numerous national carriers make it even more important for individuals to actively explore their health insurance options to ensure appropriate coverage.”

Last year, Obamacare-compliant plans saw premium increases between 11 and 19 percent, the MacIver Institute reported in December. In addition, our analysis found 600 fewer plans to choose from in 2016 compared with 2015. It also found the cheapest plan in the state in 2016 is an individual catastrophic level plan in Columbia County that costs $118.97 a month, with a $6,850 deductible and $6,850 maximum out of pocket.

The news is even more dire for the taxpayer-supported health insurance provider Common Ground. Wisconsin’s Obamacare co-op, established as an alternative to for-profit insurance companies, was created to supposedly provide competition in the Obamacare health insurance market. Common Ground has been on life support for years.

Common Ground’s final increase averages 27.69 percent for its PPO individual plan, with premium hikes ranging from 8.95 percent to 41.8 percent. It’s also increasing its small group PPO plan by 17.25 percent, with premium hikes ranging from 0.43 percent to 30.95 percent.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Common Ground had already spent half of the 20-year funding it was given by taxpayers in just one year. In 2014, Common Ground had $74 million in assets. In that year alone, the co-op reported $37 million in operating losses. Since its inception back in 2012, Common Ground has received more than $107 million in taxpayer-supported loans and other funds.

One analysis found that Common Ground would likely be among the co-ops that fail in 2016. If it does, it would join 17 other co-ops that have closed their doors since Obamacare went into effect, taking billions of taxpayers dollars with them.

However, Common Ground recently received a cash infusion from a private, undisclosed source that will likely keep the co-op in business at least until next year.

Common Ground’s struggles come despite higher-than-expected enrollment, which President Obama praised in a visit to Milwaukee earlier this year. By the end of 2014, the co-op enrolled 26,000 people when they expected only 10,000. Despite the enrollment numbers, Common Ground’s net income loss of $36.5 million in 2014 was $35 million larger than expected.

Under Obamacare, 23 non-profit health insurance co-ops were set up around the county in an effort to provide competition in the insurance market. Just six remain in business, with many on life support. Taxpayers have spent more than $1.2 billion dollars on the now-closed co-ops.

Common Ground’s struggles parallel those of private insurers, which have cited massive losses as they’ve withdrawn from Obamacare exchanges around the country. Plans available on the exchanges tend to attract older, sicker, and more expensive patients than predicted when the law was first passed, leading to unbalanced risk pools and unsustainable financial losses.

The much-heralded market in Minnesota is experiencing the same problem. “Minnesota’s individual market also faces unique challenges because of a disproportionate concentration of individuals with serious medical conditions whose high claims costs must be absorbed by a relatively small risk pool, pushing up rates for everyone in the individual market,” said the Minnesota Department of Commerce in a statement.

Meanwhile, the individual mandate and financial penalties for those choosing to go without increasingly expensive insurance have largely failed to encourage younger, healthier individuals to buy health insurance.

Despite Citizen Action’s blame game, the real picture is clear: Obamacare is now in the downward spiral that everyone except groups like Citizen Action saw coming years ago.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner got it right in a statement issued after the rate increases became news: “Affordable health care is a thing of the past under Obamacare,” he said.

“As insurance companies continue to opt out of this disastrous policy, increasing costs are passed on to hardworking Wisconsinites who simply cannot afford the additional financial burden. It’s critical we repeal this terrible law and bring quality, affordability, and accessibility to our healthcare system,” Sensenbrenner said.