Beltway media conventional wisdom is often stupid, but it wasn't wrong that Scott Walker needed a great debate performance Wednesday night to revive his campaign, what with its cratering poll numbers and worried donors. He didn't deliver, so
let's all point and laugh a little:
After the debate, he sounded exasperated for having received only two questions from the moderators. “Short of tackling someone I don’t know what more I could have done,” Walker said. “I aggressively interrupted Jake Tapper a bunch of times along the way, and short of an absolute brawl I don’t know what more one can do. We jumped in, and for us its quality and not quantity.”
Too bad nobody much thought the quality was amazing, either.
In the final tally, Walker spoke less almost anyone on stage, except Mike Huckabee, and for about half as long as Trump or Jeb Bush.
About halfway through, Walker was only the seventh most-searched candidate of the 11 on stage, according to Google Trends, and by the end he was lagging in tenth. And the third and fourth most-asked questions about him: “What happened to Scott Walker?” and “Where is Scott Walker?” Walker also finished dead last in his share of the conversation on Twitter, getting a mere 1.21 percent of mentions, according to Twitter.
That's ... not good, particularly for a candidate who, despite sinking polls, was still positioned relatively close to the center of the stage. Walker's donors are worried, with
one of the big ones saying he might give money to other candidates as well. There's also concern that, aside from the candidate's weak debate performance, his campaign isn't being well managed:
Most of the ire is directed at campaign manager Rick Wiley, who Walker supporters believe expanded the staff too quickly and has failed to calibrate spending during the summer fundraising season. A recent count put the number of full-time staff at around 90, and there have been no cutbacks in salaries, as there were earlier this summer in former Florida governor Jeb Bush's campaign.
Walker's people point to internal polling that's better for their candidate than the public polling, as well as to his relatively high favorables even where he's drawing low support. But when you're on the wrong trajectory, with low confidence in you as a candidate and in your campaign operation, you need some straightforward good news. And Walker did not deliver that Wednesday night.