Scott Walker's map of Wisconsin / DC Badger
Keep piling on the pressure--contribute $10 to the recall effort on Orange to Blue.
Fresh off a remarkable Supreme Court victory in Wisconsin, the pressure on conservatives in the Badger state goes up yet another notch. Democrats will file recall petition signatures against Republican state Senator Randy Hopper later today:
Union and Democratic Party supporters are expected to gather at rallies in Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and Waupun today before heading down to Madison to deliver the required signatures to force a recall election against Sen. Randy Hopper.(...)
Fond du Lac Democratic Party Chairman Rich Mantz said the official announcement will be made Thursday at rallies scheduled in Oshkosh at 11 a.m., at 12:30 p.m. at Veterans Park in Fond du Lac and on the front steps of Waupun City Hall at 2 p.m.
These rallies are a key part of closing out the signature gathering process. Last Friday, when Democrats held rallies before submitting the recall petition against Dan Kapanke, they gathered another 1,000 signatures.
Randy Hopper is believed to be one of the more vulnerable Senators. Polling shows him to be the second-weakest Republican (see here and here), trailing to a generic opponent outside the margin of error in two polls. His problems are exacerbated by a scandal with his mistress receiving a state job at a salary 35% higher than her predecessor. At Daily Kos, we ran online ads in Hopper's district to highlight the scandal, and those ads received 4,764,678 page views in one week.
Despite all this, recalling Hopper is not going to be easy. I'm still waiting on final numbers, but preliminary analysis suggests that David Prosser won Randy Hopper's district on Tuesday. If we are going to pull this off—and we have no choice but to pull this off, or else the energy behind the movement dispates and collective bargaining rights are lost—we have to keep piling on the pressure.
Please, contribute $10 to the recall effort on Orange to Blue. We won the Supreme Court race, and will can win the recall too, but only if we keep pushing.
Update: Greg Sargent reports that nearly 24,000 signatures are being filed against Hopper:
This time, Dems will file 23,946 signatures to recall state senator Hopper, even though only 15,629 are required, Wisconsin Democratic Party executive director Maggie Brick confirms to me.
That's even more than the number of signatures filed against Kapanke on Friday, and very likely more than the total number of votes cast for Prosser in Hopper's district.
We can do this. Hell, we are doing this. Please, contribute $10 to the recall effort.