First, for fun, read the exit poll results.
In summary, Walter Russell Mead:
The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election. The left lost this election because it failed to persuade the people that its analysis was correct.
On the flip side, generally speaking, Democrats can screw up an anvil and can’t campaign to save their lives. They run campaigns like democracies when, in truth, their benevolent dictatorships.
Even Barney Frank is saying “big mistake”: ”I think the people on the Democratic side made a big mistake and the funding thing was a big deal,” Frank told The Hill Wednesday afternoon, alluding to Republicans’ big cash advantage in the race. “My side picked a fight they shouldn’t have picked. The recall was upsetting to people, the rerun of the election with [Democratic Milwaukee Mayor] Tom Barrett — it’s not a fight I would have picked.”
Leading Up the Recall
The Democrat primary was damaging, essentially wounding Barrett before he ever faced Walker. Interestingly, Barrett wasn’t even who the unions wanted.
…unions failed even to get their preferred candidate through the Democratic primary in the recall. They spent more than $4 million to back former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, only to see her beaten badly by Barrett in the primary and the resources lost for the more critical general election.
Meanwhile, the Democratic primary process was damaging. The favorite of the unions was Kathleen Falk. Most of the money spent in the primary process was in favor of Falk, the former Dane County executive. The combined spending for Falk and the union group in her favor, Wisconsin for Falk, spent $4 million. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett only had his own resources to draw upon, contributing around $1 million in the primary. In spite of this, Barrett was able to prevail. Those $4 million dollars ultimately weren’t contributed to defeat Walker, a major waste of resources.
Organized labor, which isn’t a big fan of Barrett’s policies as mayor, lined up behind Kathleen Falk, a liberal candidate who entered the race for the Democratic nomination weeks before the Milwaukee mayor. She fired up her base by promising to veto any budget that didn’t end Walker’s anti-collective bargaining measure while Barrett, tacking to the middle, did not.
A labor-dominated coalition spent over $4 million trying to Falk win a primary she ultimately lost to Barrett by double digits. None of the money was spent sullying the mayor’s record, but it was a substantial sum dedicated to a pre-general election intraparty fight. Barrett, who from day one ran to end Wisconsin’s “civil war,” and has some residual name ID form his 2010 campaign against Walker always appeared to be the more electable election candidate.
“I don’t understand unions spent many millions of dollars on Kathleen Falk when it was clear to any observer she was going to lose primary,” Graul said. “I don’t understand why Democrats watched this recall process without a consensus candidate that unified and energized their party. There were a lot of tactic decision on the Democrats’ side that have been quite perplexing.”
Interestingly, 90% of voters had their minds made up in April – over a month before the recall. This reaffirms my belief that there are very few true independent voters.
Money
Libs claim Scott Walker and his allies outspent Tom Barrett and his allies 7-1 (or 10-1, depending on the source) and decry the influx of money into Wisconsin, blaming it for Barrett’s loss.
However, it appears that spending may have been on par.
In terms of strict numbers, Walker spent some $30 million; Barrett and the unions spent $25 million. That’s not a 7-to-1 differential. And when you add in unions’ inherent advantage in ground game, you’re talking about a better-than-even split for Barrett.
Money is one thing. Spending it smartly is another.
For the last six weeks of 2011, Walker put in $2.4 million in paid media. The only other advertiser on the air at this time was the Democratic umbrella group Greater Wisconsin Committee. In this period, they placed only $680,000. Though Walker wasn’t saturating TV sets, he was establishing his narrative at an early point in the recall process—a critical part of his success.
The only time in which Walker was not on the air was a six-week period from mid-January to the beginning of March. In this time, Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth carried the pro-Walker message. Americans for Prosperity put in $1.5 million and Club for Growth placed another $81,000 over two weeks. The only anti-Walker advertiser on air in this period was the League of Conservation Voters-Sierra Club, which placed a small $30,000 buy on cable. None of the Democratic big guns were up in this period, which was a missed opportunity to define the terms of the recall.
Walker was able to raise so much money that Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth, two of the biggest national conservative groups, felt confident the governor and his state allies would be able to handle the race without their funds. But Walker still had plenty of help. Right Direction for Wisconsin, a group associated with the Republican Governors Association, was the first outside group to come in for Walker, dropping $6.5 million. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a business trade organization, spent $4.7 million, all over just the last five weeks. Over the last two months, Walker, Right Direction and WMC spent a combined $16.9 million.
But money is only part of the picture.
Recall Not Appropriate Method to Deal with Policy Disputes
Underlying the entire process was the feeling, by 60% of voters, that recall wasn’t the appropriate way to deal with policy disputes. Ohio is an example of the appropriate method, when available to voters.
Message
The debate in the final months turned from workers rights to the job climate and a referendum on Scott Walker, essentially defining the race in Scott Walker’s favor, borne out in the exit polling results.
Sixteen months passed since the impetus of the recall – anger over union reform – and the improving economic picture, with Wisconsin’s unemployment rate at 6.7%, far lower than the national average, allowed for cooler heads to prevail.
Machine
Walker, frankly, did a better job of motivating and turning out his voters:
The exit poll, conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool consortium, shows that 13 percent of the 2012 voters did not participate in 2010, and they favored Barrett by a 53 percent to 45 percent margin. That result was positive for Barrett. Unfortunately, these self-reports also imply that Walker did a better job than Barrett of turning out 2010 supporters. Those who voted this year reported supporting Walker in 2010 by a larger margin (47 percent to 34 percent) than Walker actually enjoyed. According to the exit polls, both candidates held over 94 percent of their 2010 vote.
Their intensity spilled over in several key areas where Walker equaled or improved his 2010 performance, according to county returns. In Brown County, which Obama won in 2008 and Walker carried with 56 percent of the vote in the midterm wave, the governor was nearing 60 percent support, with over 90 percent of precincts reporting. In GOP-heavy Waukesha County, Walker hadn’t ceded any ground since 2008, and even in Democratic-dominated Dane County, Walker was running ahead of his 2010 pace. Labor did an impressive job turning out its core supporters for Barrett, but was still outgunned by the GOP base.
This is also coupled with how the union management were neutered in Wisconsin due to Scott Walker’s reforms, with membership and dues falling drastically.
National Review:
Early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at a healthy 62,818. By February 2012, the labor behemoth had shrunk to 28,745.
Voting
Scott Walker won 37% of union households, indicating weaker than assumed support for Tom Barrett; 54% approved of how Scott Walker was creating jobs, 67% did not or didn’t have someone in their household that belonged to a union, and 64% of reported their financial picture was bout the same or better than two years ago.
Voters viewed this as a referendum on Walker; not his reforms.
After the Votes Were Counted
Barrett got slapped for his troubles:
And liberals called for Walker’s assassination.
Impact on Public Sector Unions
Losers. Governing writes:
Though public unions will not disappear as a result, they were the clear losers in a race that confirmed Walker as a national celebrity for Republicans. They now have no prospects for recovering what they lost, with neither the money nor manpower they had when Walker rose to office.
Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, said his group would continue in much the way it did more than 50 years ago, when it had no bargaining rights.
Democrats in particular are likely to see union’s influence as having waned; Republicans are especially likely to say union influence will decrease in the future.
Americans are divided on the extent to which public employee unions should have collective bargaining rights. 30% would give public employees collective bargaining rights on all issues, and another 31% would grant them some collective bargaining rights. Just 17% oppose collective bargaining completely.
According to the Journal, when Walker first proposed his fiscal reforms in early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at a healthy 62,818. By February 2012, the labor behemoth had shrunk to 28,745. “It’s a profound shift,” says George Lightbourn, the president of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the state’s former secretary of administration. “It’s similar to what Indiana experienced after Governor Mitch Daniels changed the collective-bargaining laws. If these numbers are borne out, it will significantly change the whole nature of Wisconsin’s state workforce and the relationship between management and employees.”
Interestingly, there’s a dissonance between union rank-and-file and union leaders:
State senator Alberta Darling, a top Walker ally and the co-chair of the upper chamber’s joint finance committee, says the bosses of the public-sector unions aren’t battling Walker as much as they are their own members, who have been unhappy with paying hefty dues for decades. “People who refused to pay used to be blackballed,” she says. “Now I’m hearing from many teachers that they feel free to work with their school boards without going through the unions first. They can manage their own issues without outside involvement.”
According to the Journal, when Walker first proposed his fiscal reforms in early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at a healthy 62,818. By February 2012, the labor behemoth had shrunk to 28,745. “It’s a profound shift,” says George Lightbourn, the president of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the state’s former secretary of administration. “It’s similar to what Indiana experienced after Governor Mitch Daniels changed the collective-bargaining laws. If these numbers are borne out, it will significantly change the whole nature of Wisconsin’s state workforce and the relationship between management and employees.”
Impact on Wisconsin’s Taxpayers
Losers, also. They paid $16 million to reaffirm the 2010 election results over a grudge that ended up being a secondary issue in the very election which sprung from that grudge.
I foresee recall reform in the next legislative session.
As for Florida, Javier Manjarres at the Shark Tank claimed that Wisconsin’s results derailed plans to recall Gov. Rick Scott, despite the fact that Florida doesn’t have a recall mechanism at the state level and legislation introduced had zero chance of being heard or ever being heard.
Pete Schorsch asks what I’m too polite to: Javier, are you an idiot?
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
