Peter Bildstein, Gov. Scott Walker’s (R. WI) now former secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, has a brutal piece out in The Atlantic that highlights what a colossal fuck up Walker has been:
I joined Walker’s administration at the very beginning, in 2011, and at first I enjoyed my job and respected the governor. I thought he was more of a technocrat than a partisan, driven to improve governance of the state he loved. We’d have regular one-on-one meetings where he showed genuine interest in how we were helping financial institutions pull out of the Great Recession. During my first 90 days in office, I had to close three failed banks, and Walker appreciated the hard work that went into such challenging situations. He held Cabinet meetings every week or two, and encouraged open debate and discussion on the affairs of the state.
Even early on, however, I noticed that not everything was as it should be. At more than one Cabinet meeting, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, Mike Huebsch, told us never to send him or the governor any electronic documents of consequence, and to avoid the use of our state-issued cell phones. “If you send me an important report electronically, I won’t open it,” I remember him saying, “and if you call me on your state phone, I won’t answer it.” If we had any important documents, they were to be “walked over” and hand delivered to the governor’s office. As a result, open record requests by the media or political opponents would be almost futile. This lack of transparency would be a hallmark of the Walker administration.
Walker’s move to limit the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public employees led to the infamous recall election of 2012 and massive protests to the capitol. Marches were held around the clock, and the capitol rotunda was filled with protesters carrying signs, some pretty clever. My favorite featured a dorky picture of Walker with big, bold letters declaring “Dred Scott!” During the protests, Walker usually entered and exited the capitol building via a secret underground tunnel.
Later, when Walker titled his 2013 book Unintimidated and bragged about how he “stood up to union thugs and protesters,” I thought back to how he regularly ducked in and out of the capitol via a tunnel, always escorted by a heavy security detail. Unintimidated is not exactly the word that comes to mind, but Republicans in Washington accepted Walker’s self-image and talked him up as a strong presidential contender.
And the more they talked, the worse life in Walker’s cabinet became. The technocrat I had respected vanished, replaced by a partisan who thought the White House was in reach.
After he won his recall election, Walker rarely attended cabinet meetings anymore, and radically reduced the number of one-on-one’s with cabinet secretaries. He took more far-right positions, probably because he thought they would play well with the Republican base. Funding for public education and our University of Wisconsin system was cut dramatically. Our infrastructure continued to deteriorate to the point that we ranked 49th in the nation in the quality of our roads and bridges.
The whole piece is worth the read. Right now, Walker is in a tight race for his political life against Superintendent Tony Evers (D. WI):
Democrats Tony Evers and Tammy Baldwin are leading their opponents in races for governor and U.S. Senate, according to a poll released Wednesday.
Evers has a 3-point lead over Gov. Scott Walker among likely voters, and Baldwin leads state Sen. Leah Vukmir by 15 points, according to results of a recent Ipsos poll conducted Oct. 12-18 on behalf of Thomson Reuters and the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
The online poll surveyed about 2,000 adults living in Wisconsin. The sample included 1,193 likely voters — with more Democratic likely voters surveyed than Republican or independents.
So Walker has resorted to going full Trump to distract voters:
A new ad highlights Democrat Tony Evers' support for giving illegal immigrants the ability to qualify for driver's permits and in-state tuition. It ends with the tagline, "Tony Evers: Special treatment for illegals, higher taxes for you."
The spot comes as Walker prepares to join a rally Wednesday in Mosinee with President Donald Trump, who of late has put a renewed focus on illegal immigration. The race between Walker and Evers, the state's schools superintendent, has been neck and neck, according to recent polling.
"It's following the path of the president," Barnes said. "He declared himself a nationalist. It's the same thing."
In a debate Friday, Evers said providing driving permits to illegal immigrants would be good for workers and businesses and make Wisconsin's roads safer. The Wisconsin Farm Bureau shares Evers' view on that issue, but the group has endorsed Walker.
Evers also called for allowing illegal immigrants who graduate from Wisconsin high schools to pay in-state tuition. The measure is aimed at helping those known as Dreamers who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Walker revoked a similar policy on in-state tuition in 2011.
Much of Walker's ad consists of footage of Evers talking during the debate about those issues.
"This is the kind of desperate, divide-and-conquer ad a career politician like Walker puts out because he's afraid he's going to lose," said Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa (D-Milwaukee).
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, called Walker's ad offensive but predicted it would backfire.
"Gov. Walker is trying to scapegoat young people who are working very, very hard to achieve their educational goals, to fulfill the dreams of their parents and teachers and friends to give back, often to Wisconsin," she said.
"What Gov. Walker is doing, it's very much like Trump," she said. "He's acting like a bully. He's picking on young people."
She called the term "illegals" a "very derogatory, offensive term because it doesn't treat immigrants as people."
Her group is backing Evers with ads that tout his support for driver's permits and in-state tuition. She said she believed the public is on her group's side on those issues and Walker's ad strategy would not work.
And Walker is banking on Trump to bail him out but even the conservative Weekly Standard thinks that’s a terrible idea:
Walker is a solid conservative who managed to win the governorship of Wisconsin in 2010 on the heels of a big Democratic presidential win and at a time when the conventional wisdom held that Wisconsin was Unchangeably Blue. Then he won a recall in 2012 and re-election in 2014. Election wonks (me included) thought Walker would have a serious shot at the GOP nomination in 2016. But money problems, some tough polls, and a desire to clear the field so that an ideological conservative could take on Trump one-on-one (rather than have Trump run the table on delegates while his opponents divided up the anti-Trump vote—which is what happened) drove him out of the field.
And Trump could cause Walker to lose yet another race. Because Scott Walker has a Trump problem. I’ll explain.
To understand Walker’s problem, we need start with Wisconsin’s Senate race. Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin looks like she’s going to win that race handily. My Senate model, SwingSeat, thinks that her win probability is somewhere around 98 percent based on a combination of polling and other data (such as Trump’s approval rating, incumbency, whether it’s a midterm, etc.). The polls alone are doing most of the work in this model—her opponent, Leah Vukmir, has never led in a public, non-partisan poll and the RealClearPolitics average currently puts Baldwin ahead by double digits. Vukmir could theoretically come back (through a massive movement in the polls combined with a favorable polling error) but the odds are very long.
Those numbers have a lot more to do with Trump and Baldwin than they do with Vukmir. I ran a Senate election model that only looks at the basics (presidential approval, past results in the state, etc.) and tried to figure out where the race should go without using head-to-head polling or highly-detailed information about the candidates. Basically the model found that an incumbent Democratis Wisconsin senator running with an unpopular Republican president is in the White House should have a roughly 94 percent probability of beating a replacement-level Republican this year.
So Wisconsin is largely off the Senate map simply because Baldwin is an incumbent from a swing state and Trump is unpopular. And this second factor—Trump’s unpopularity—is a big problem for Walker.
Walker can’t rely just on people who are voting straight-ticket Republican. He’ll have to win a substantial number of Baldwin voters—many of whom will be expressing their frustration with Trump via a Baldwin vote. I theorized that this might be a difficulty for Walker back in August. Now we have more data to back that theory up.
Poll |
Survey Dates |
Vukmir Margin |
Walker Margin |
Difference |
Ipsos |
Oct. 12 - Oct. 18 |
-15 |
-3 |
12 |
Marquette |
Oct. 3 - Oct. 7 |
-10 |
1 |
11 |
Marist |
Sept. 30 - Oct. 4 |
-14 |
-8 |
6 |
Ipsos |
Sept. 14 - Sept. 21 |
-13 |
-7 |
6 |
Marquette |
Sept. 12 - Sept. 16 |
-11 |
-5 |
6 |
Suffolk |
Aug. 18 - Aug. 24 |
-8 |
-2 |
6 |
Marquette |
Aug. 15 - Aug. 19 |
-8 |
0 |
8 |
Emerson |
Jul. 26 - Jul. 28 |
-14 |
-7 |
7 |
Marist |
Jul. 15 - Jul. 19 |
-17 |
-13 |
4 |
Marquette |
Jun. 13 - Jun. 17 |
-9 |
4 |
13 |
This table compares Walker’s margin and Vukmir’s margin in recent polls that took stock of both the Senate and governor races.
As you can see, Walker is consistently outperforming Vukmir. His margin is on average about 8 points higher than hers in any given poll. That’s good news for Walker—the math is a little fuzzy because of undecided and third-party voters, but it’s not a stretch to think that Walker is wining over some voters who are inclined towards Baldwin in the Senate race.
But Walker still trails Tony Evers, his Democratic opponent, by a single-digit margin in most polls. RealClearPolitics gives Evers a 3.6 point lead, and FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gives Evers a 60 percent chance of winning (Evers’ win probability is 72 percent in their more poll-reliant model). Basically Walker is outperforming Vukmir (which he needs to do), but still falling short.