Last Tuesday, Wisconsin was overrun with awkward high-fives as union organizers submitted over 1 million signatures in an attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker from office. Unions, upset with Walker’s plan to virtually eliminate public-sector collective bargaining and make government unionization optional, thought 1 million signatures was the show of strength they needed to gain momentum for the recall effort. After turning the signatures in, the always-understated state Democratic party chairman Mike Tate said Wisconsin was “bearing witness to a million-strong miracle of democracy,” and that petition signers had “lived up to the nation’s great promise, the quality that distinguishes us as a beacon to the world.”
Yet one week later, a poll conducted by the Marquette law school shows that unions may not have the wind at their backs. (Marquette, the Sorbonne of southeastern Wisconsin, is renowned for the quality of its alumni, including Chris Farley, Dwyane Wade, and yours truly.) In an extended City Journal piece this week, I argued that Walker’s reforms are working; it appears the Wisconsin public may already recognize that fact.
The poll, conducted between January 19 and January 22, surveyed 701 Wisconsinites. Of the respondents, 51 percent approved of the way Scott Walker was handling his job as governor, as opposed to 46 percent disapproval. This exceeds President Obama’s job-approval rating, which is split at 47 percent.
Wisconsinites are also beginning to move in favor of Walker’s union policies. Not surprisingly, 74 percent of respondents support requiring public employees to pay into their own pension accounts and pay a greater share of their health-insurance premiums. But 48 percent of respondents support Walker’s plan to limit collective bargaining on benefit and non-wage issues, while 47 percent oppose Walker’s plan. While the public is still evenly split, this marks a sizeable shift in Walker’s direction from polls taken late in 2011.
The news gets even better for Walker when he is pitted against several rumored recall-election challengers. As I mentioned back in November, while the state may be split on Walker’s union plan, they now have to run a flesh-and-blood candidate against him — a Democrat who is likely to be beset with problematic policy positions of their own.
Consequently, Walker leads all rumored potential opponents by between six and ten percentage points. The poll finds Walker ahead of Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett 50 percent to 44 percent. Walker leads the only announced Democratic candidate, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, 49 percent to 42 percent. He leads former congressman David Obey 49 percent to 43 percent and Janesville Democratic state senator Tim Cullen 50 percent to 40 percent.
Other interesting notes:
● Newt Gingrich’s favorable/unfavorable rating currently stands at 25/53 in Wisconsin, meaning Gingrich’s favorability is slightly below that of “psoriasis.”
● Mitt Romney’s favorables are slightly better, at 30 percent (42 percent unfavorable), although Obama still leads Romney 48 percent to 40 percent. Wisconsin has gone to a Democrat in every election since Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1984, although George W. Bush lost the state by extremely small margins in 2000 and 2004.
● Fifty-four percent of respondents believe Walker’s changes made Wisconsin better off in the long run, as opposed to 40 percent that believe Wisconsin will be worse off.
● By a two-to-one margin (66 percent to 32 percent), Wisconsinites favor requiring photo identification to vote.
● In the highly competitive U.S. Senate race to replace Democrat Herb Kohl, Tommy Thompson showed the highest favorability rating, 49 percent (31 percent unfavorable). If Thompson were to win the GOP primary (against former congressman Mark Neumann, speaker of the assembly Jeff Fitzgerald, and state senator Frank Lasee), he would face Democratic congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, who sits at 23 percent favorable, 21 percent unfavorable.
— Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and a co-author of the Campaign Manager Survey.
This is actually a pretty familiar pattern. John Engler endured something similar in Michigan with welfare reform, with his re-elect numbers dipping to 19% at the worst of it, and was re-elected handily. I'm guessing Tommy Thompson went through the same, I don't know. Ditto for Mitch Daniels 5 years ago.
Any time an entrenched liberal program or interest gets its ox gored, an apocalypse of low wages and starving kids while Daddy Warbucks in posh boardrooms suck on primo cigars, is predicted. When it doesn't materialize and people realize it was all the cries of piglets being pulled away from their teats, they just shrug their shoulders and move on with life.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUnfortunately for those of us here in Ohio, we didn't have the chance for our similar legislation to go into effect before the people of Ohio overturned the law.
I thought I read somewhere if Kasich would have waited 5 days to sign the legislation that the referendum wouldn't have been voted on for another year. I really think that would have made all the difference in the vote when the general population saw that the sky didn't end and teachers still taught and police continued to police.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseInteresting, that "1 million" figure. Interesting how the unionistas released fairly hard figures for all the other recallees, but for Walker, it was simply "over a million".
I suspect, like all good agitators, the unionistas know well the value of their propaganda (900,000 just doesn't have the same ring, does it?). And they know that the Journal-Sentinel and the rest of the sympathetic left-media in this state will not blast revised "less than 1 million" signatures on their front pages once the true counts are known.
As for the polls, I'm glad to see evidence of Walker's message getting out there. Maybe there's hope for this state yet.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI don't doubt the union stooges are still plenty fired up and motivated to go out gathering signatures. You can get college kids and street people to sign darn near anything, and the manpower makes the numbers.
But unionistas are a lot like Ron Paul people. They think just because they're cranked up to crystal-meth levels of outrage that their intensity translates into actual broad support among others. I really thought they would have learned that abstract disagreement on collective bargaining, which voters were able to express in the Ohio referendum, and support for actually recalling a sitting politician one might support for many other reasons is not the same. They spent historic millions to recall a grand total of TWO state senators who would likely have lost next time anyway, and they're back for more.
Let them, it will be less union money on hand for Obama.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you could say, given the majority of negatively tilted stories concerning the Governor, that this is optimistic news. If nothing else it should end up dispelling the notion that there is nothing but animosity directed towards Walker in the state.
Ultimately what this will shape out to be, is an election where the line is drawn by which political party you support. Of course the question you have to then ask, is if this is just about partisan politics, why is it being handled during a recall election? The legislation, while controversial in the sense that it sparked a vocal outcry, was hardly without precedent (External Link
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Should the recall movement prove successful, you send an interesting message throughout the state, essentially saying that any aggressive legislation will be grounds for a recall. You can’t help but see this leading to politicians and government in general becoming much more stagnant. It’s this stagnation that lead to a system where unions in the state were contributing next to nothing into their health care and pensions in the state, and why you were able to see a pension system rife with so many loopholes and exploits (External Link
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Furthermore this recall, motivated by partisan politics sets the stage for a wave of recalls, slowing any government progress to a standstill. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, but the future of the state seems very much up in the air.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell not surprising, as the Presidential candidate with the highest favorability/biggest lead in the polls here dropped out in early December. Folks around here weren't too pleased with the rest of the field overall.
That being said, watch the fraud fly folks. Watch the fraud fly. You are finally gonna see why WI is the testing ground for the Democrat Fraud Machine.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis poll doesn't tell us much of anything. The margin of error on potential match-ups is too high (7.0-7.2). While the article alludes to it here: "While Walker consistently leads his Democratic opponents, the size of the lead is within the poll’s margin of error for all but Cullen." - It’s very misleading. Statistically, outside of Cullen, Walker shows no measurable advantage over the other candidates.
Consider these responses: Out of 701 polled, 192 identified themselves as Democrats. Out of those 192, 17.4% approve of Scott Walker's job as Governor. That's nearly 1 in 5 Democrats. According to the poll, 17.4% of Democrats also reject Wisconsin's current Recall law. Regardless, I think most people in Wisconsin (and this nation) realize we're just about split down the middle. It would be nice if our leaders would govern as such.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDoes Dwayne Wade qualify as an alumnus? He didn't graduate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI bet they got a wicked case of writers cramp filling out those last 487,234 signatures!
51% is pretty darn good for a guy they've been calling Hitler. The defeats in 2011 on the other recalls took a lot of wind out of the opposition's sails, and gave Walker breathing room to let the reforms take root. Hard to reconcile "Hitler" with "makes people contribute to their retirement plan".
Good news!
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