Democratic Infighting Grows & Wisconsin’s Judicial Showdown | 3.24.25

Democrats find themselves facing angry voters as a massive rift opens up between the far left and more moderate members. Will the party's leadership consolidate or continue to splinter? I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
It's Monday, March 24th, and this is Morning Wire. President Trump and Elon Musk draw national attention to what could prove to be a pivotal battle for control of Wisconsin's Supreme Court.
This is about preserving democracy in America

and not having ridiculous districts drawn that effectively disenfranchise voters in Wisconsin. And Trump says access denied to a number of Biden allies, while ICE and the IRS prepare to team up.
Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned.
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Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode. Democrat lawmakers have found themselves confronted by angry constituents as the party searches for a unifying message.
Meanwhile, new polling shows Democrats continue to be less popular than ever before. Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips is here to discuss the brewing intraparty conflict and how voters are responding to it.
Hey, Cabot, let's start with those numbers. What do they tell us about how Americans feel about the current political situation? So historically, there's often a sort of buyer's remorse with voters, but that has not happened this year.
Trump's approval ratings have held steady around 48 percent. That's well above where he stood during his first term.
And Democratic popularity has only plummeted since Election Day. Last week, CNN found that just 29% of Americans view the party favorably.
That's a 20-point drop from 2021. And over the weekend, things got even worse.
A new Quinnipiac poll showed that just 21% of Americans approve of Democrats' job performance in Congress. That is the lowest mark in the history of the poll.
And even more concerning for the left, only 40% of Democrats approve of the job their leaders are doing in Congress. Oh, and that's where the infighting comes in.
Exactly. The best example came last week during the Democrat debate over whether to shut down the government.
Rank and file members in Congress wanted to kill the Republican spending bill and, you know, stick it to Trump, forcing a shutdown. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, arguably the most powerful Democrat in the country, opted to support the deal and keep the lights on.
That resulted in a wave of backlash from prominent Democrat lawmakers like AOC and Nancy Pelosi, and importantly, from voters. To give you an idea of their anger, Schumer had to cancel his upcoming book tour, quote, due to security concerns.
And now that anger has been evident at town halls across the country. For example, here's the message from one voter at a rowdy town hall for Arizona Democrats Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego.
We're not willing to get in the mud with them. Maybe it's time we start getting a little bit dirtier with our messaging.
Here's another raucous event for Democrat House member Sean Caston, which had to be shut down by police after angry protesters attempted to rush the stage. What you're saying is I'm not going to get my way when my people are being slaughtered and I want you to stop funding them.
If you would like to run for office, run for office. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
You are the most soulless piece of crap I've ever seen. So how are Democrat lawmakers responding to this anger coming from within their own party, their own voters? Well, there seem to be two main strategies emerging.
First, there are those who say the party needs to listen to its far left base and double down on their opposition to Trump, doing just everything possible to prevent his agenda from being implemented. In that camp are Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who kicked off their quote, fighting oligarchy tour last week, hitting Tempe, Las Vegas and Denver in recent days and drawing crowds in the tens of thousands.
We're going to take on their effort to move us to an authoritarian society, but we have got to ourselves have a vision for the kind of country we want to become. But the problem for Democrats in that camp is that the far left vision for America they're describing just doesn't seem all that popular with Americans right now.
Remember, polling shows that Americans are still widely supportive of Trump's policies on legal immigration, foreign policy, transgenderism, and DEI. Right, he's really maintaining strong support for that.
So the progressive wing is fighting to go further left. What is the other faction calling for? So on the other side are Democrats who feel November's results were a clear rebuke of progressive ideologies and governance.
They say the party has to shake that woke label and moderate on social issues while embracing a more old school blue dog Democrat approach. Leading the charge on that front is, ironically, California's Gavin Newsom, one of the nation's most far left governors.
He launched a new podcast where he's been having very friendly chats with hardline conservatives like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. He's openly criticized his party as being elitist and out of touch, while conceding that he understands why folks supported Trump in November.
He even went as far as saying he opposes trans-identifying males in women's sports and called on Democrats to stop using gender-neutral language like Latinx, though he himself has used that term many times in the past. And it's worth noting, polling continues to show a real split on which strategy voters want.
The latest numbers from Gallup have 45% of Democrats wanting the party to become more moderate, 29% say more liberal, and 22% say hold the current course. So Democratic voters are just as divided as their leaders on how to approach these next four years.
And in the meantime, the infighting continues. It's hard to see how these two sides end up aligning anytime soon.
Kevin, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
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This is for the soul of Wisconsin. Your vote for Brad Shemmel will keep Wisconsin and America winning.
That was Super Bowl champ Brett Favre endorsing the conservative candidate in an election that will determine whether liberals or conservatives control Wisconsin's top court. Already the most expensive judicial race in U.S.
history, analysts are calling it the first referendum on Donald Trump's presidency. Here with more is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
So Megan, you don't typically see a single state judicial race garner this much national attention. What's so significant about this seat? Well, it's because this is a rare chance to flip the ideological balance of the highest court in a key swing state.
So depending on how things play out on April 1st, Wisconsin Supreme Court could go from a 4-3 liberal majority to a 4-3 conservative one. And that will, of course, have a lot of ramifications on national policy.
Arguably, the biggest factor here is congressional redistricting. So after the 2020 census, Republicans who controlled the legislature drew Wisconsin's congressional maps.
Democrats cried gerrymandering and they sued. And then in 2022, the liberal court threw out the GOP's maps and adopted new ones that had been drawn by Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat.
And that new map helped Democrats flip one congressional seat in 2024. So if conservative candidate Brad Schimmel wins, he will likely uphold those GOP-drawn maps that help cement the very slim margin that Republicans have in the House right now.
On the other hand, if liberal Susan Crawford wins, the court is likely to strike down those Republican maps again, meaning Democrats will have a greater likelihood of winning more seats in the state. Now, I imagine this court could also impact the GOP's chances of taking the state in the presidential election as well.
Yeah, absolutely. And election integrity legislation, like voter ID, has also been a very big focus here.
We have to remember that Trump won Wisconsin in 2024 by less than a percentage point. So these were the issues that Elon Musk stressed during an X space late Saturday night.
In my opinion, that's the most important thing, which is a big deal, given that the congressional majority is so razor thin, it could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place. And then we won't be able to get through the changes that the American people want.
Republicans also see a conservative court in Wisconsin as a potential firewall that could shield Trump's policies from state level challenges. Think things like lawsuits over federal overreach or immigration crackdowns.
So on Truth Social yesterday, Trump called Crawford a radical left Democrat. And he said she's insistent on bringing hardened criminals that we remove to faraway places back into our country and allowing men into women's sports and open borders, quoting there, of course.
And then pro-lifers are closely watching this race as well, as Crawford has made protecting access to abortion a major part of her pitch to voters. Well, this election is on Tuesday, April 1st, so we're going to have you back on to discuss the results.
Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime.
Immigration authorities may soon receive help from the IRS. Reports of the new agreement come as thousands of law enforcement officials are expected to be redirected toward President Trump's mass deportation agenda.
Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce is here to talk about the administration's new tactics on immigration. Hey, Tim.
So before we get to immigration, I actually wanted to talk about a story you reported on over the weekend. Trump's actions on security clearances, those revoked for a number of high-profile public officials, the most high-profile.
What exactly happened there? Right. President Trump officially revoked the security clearances of a number of people late Friday that included top Biden administration officials, as well as some of the president's top antagonists, those who brought and supported the court cases he faced during the election and who pushed Russian collusion conspiracies.
Some of the most prominent names on that list included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Liz Cheney, and over a dozen others. It's worth noting that Biden blocked Trump from intelligence briefings back in 2021.
Right, a what goes around comes around situation here. Yeah.
So on to the issue of immigration, the IRS is reportedly near an agreement to help Homeland Security locate illegal aliens. How will that work? The IRS and ICE are near an agreement that would essentially allow immigration agents to cross-check information on aliens with IRS databases.
That's according to the New York Times. To be clear, DHS would not have access to IRS systems, but agents would be able to verify with the IRS whether the home addresses agents have for illegal aliens are correct.
The Trump administration has tried before to get the IRS to help locate illegals, but the agency has always resisted because of the sensitivity of taxpayer information and because it didn't want to run afoul of federal law. But this way, the IRS can keep complete control over its taxpayer database.
Got it. How much will this help Trump's deportation efforts? It should be a useful tool for ICE.
Illegal immigrants often do work in the U.S. and file tax returns that include information such as where they live, who they work for, and their income.
There's some pushback against this, but it's worth pointing out that while Democrats don't agree with Trump's immigration agenda, the president is picking up a little bit of support across the aisle. For instance, here's Senator Bernie Sanders on ABC saying Trump is right to shut down illegal immigration.
Is there anything that you think Trump has done right? Yeah, I mean, I think cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger. Look, nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate.
Now, I happen to think we need comprehensive immigration reform, but I don't think it's appropriate for people to be coming across the border illegally. According to Reuters, the Department of Homeland Security is in the middle of a massive reshuffle to focus resources on deportations.
It's like what the Biden administration did for January 6th, taking a bunch of agents off their usual beats to investigate alleged rioters. Trump has taken that strategy and is using it to carry out his deportations.
Really a story of two very different priorities there. And now there's news that Trump will roll back Biden's use of parole to allow aliens into the country.
What's the latest there? Right. The parole program you referenced was started under Biden and applied to aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The CHNV parole program, as it was called, let 30,000 immigrants a month from those countries apply for entry to the U.S. And since 2022, over half a million entered the country, sometimes on flights set up by the federal government.
Trump ended that program on his first day in office, but over the weekend, DHS issued an order revoking legal status for those aliens who entered the country through it. The order encourages them to self-deport within 30 days or risk deportation.
Sounds like there's going to be a lot more people eligible for deportation in the next few weeks. Tim, thanks so much for reporting.
Good to be on. Thanks for waking up with us.
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