Mequon, Wis.

As Alberta Darling takes a chair at the Wooden Goose Café, Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” softly plays on the kitchen stereo. The pony-tailed waitress, pen in hand, stands ready to take our order. But before Darling puts a napkin on her lap, an elderly man with ancient hands approaches, places a palm on her shoulder, and says, “You’re the strongest woman I know.” She thanks him. A second later, she scans the room and spies numerous retirees, early risers breaking their fast on over-easy eggs and black coffee. So she gets up and makes the rounds, moving from table to table in a bright blue T-shirt emblazoned with her name and Old Glory. Several minutes later, we settle back in. “It’s all about the ground game,” she says.

Unlike most of the patrons, Darling, a 67-year-old Republican state senator, will not be hitting the links or relaxing with a paperback after breakfast. Instead, she will be knocking on doors, striding purposefully up long driveways in this suburban Milwaukee district, with crisp, star-spangled pamphlets under her arm. Darling has been in close races before, but Tuesday’s recall elections in the Badger State are different from the usual political scrums. Labor activists have targeted her and five GOP colleagues, enraged at the senators’ support of first-term Republican governor Scott Walker, who famously curbed state spending and collective bargaining for public employees earlier this year. If Democrats can win three of the six contests, they will take control of the upper chamber, which currently has a 19–14 Republican majority.

The prospect has progressives salivating. In recent weeks, Darling has become their number-one target. Her socially moderate, fiscally conservative district is considered a wildcard by most political analysts and a must-win race for Democrats. As one GOP insider puts it, “If Darling wins, it will be very hard for them to find their way to three seats.” Mike Tate, the Democratic state-party chairman, recently called it the “crown jewel” of the recalls. Outside groups, from Organizing for America to Tea Party Express, have encouraged activists to make their way to Thiensville and Glendale, emphasizing that the fate of Walker’s agenda could be determined here. Over $8 million has poured in, making the race the state’s priciest campaign this summer.

Darling faces a tough challenger in Democrat Sandy Pasch, a nurse and two-term state representative. Pasch has ably made the race more than a referendum on Walker’s policies, tying Darling to every possible Republican bogeyman, most notably Rep. Paul Ryan, who represents Janesville to the south and authored the congressional GOP’s budget. Ryan’s Medicare reforms have become fodder for Democrats in House races across the country, and in Wisconsin, they are being used against Darling, a state lawmaker with no say over federal entitlements. Darling has fought back at this tack for months, swatting away the anti-Ryan chatter — she calls him a “hero” — and underscoring, not abandoning, her work with the unpopular governor.

Not that she had much of a choice. As the co-chair of the state senate’s budget-writing committee, Darling is the first to acknowledge that she, more than any of the other Republicans running, is directly responsible for many of the fiscal reforms coming out of Madison. While she is not a fan of every aspect of Walker’s budget, she is his most high-profile ally in the senate. All of this has made her campaign a testing ground for Walker’s political future and the keystone to the senate’s balance of power. If she falls, and the state-senate GOP’s majority collapses, the chances for Republicans to axe the capital’s entrenched, union-heavy bureaucracy will be jeopardized. Still, Darling tells me that she can handle the heat, and that she can win despite the Democrats’ brash tactics. She takes a bite of hearty bacon, almost to prove the point. “I have got to load up,” she says, talking about her busy schedule.

Polls back up her confidence: A July survey by Public Policy Polling showed her up by five points, 52 percent to 47 percent, against Pasch. Darling also hit the trail long before most recalled Republicans. She recognized early that she could be in trouble and enlisted Andrew Davis, the state party’s political director during Walker’s 2010 run, to run her operation. That early start could be a deciding factor. “You fight something like this with a plan,” she says. “As soon as we knew that we were going to have a recall, we invested in identifying voters and where they were since Wisconsin was very polarized. We knew that we had to get out and identify voters: who were with us, who were against us, and who were undecided.”

“There were not that many who were undecided,” Darling chuckles. Most voters have strong opinions about Walker’s performance. Her goal this summer has been to make the case for the benefits of the governor’s efforts, if not for Walker as a public figure. The governor’s approval ratings are in the basement, and he has kept a low profile throughout the contentious summer politicking. Yet Darling thinks that if she has a chance to explain why Republicans passed the budget-repair bill, she can win over voters to her side, even if they’re still wary about Walker. “It’s working,” she says in defense of the budget fix. “We balanced our budget without raising taxes and we gave the tools [to municipalities] to offset the cuts.”

Pasch has been relentless in blasting Darling for calling the budget a success. At almost every stop, she hammers Darling for the cuts to public schools. For Darling, a former high-school teacher who later became an art-museum marketing director in Milwaukee, the anti-education charges hurt. “The schools haven’t had massive layoffs or massive cuts to the classroom, unlike what we have seen in other states,” she says. Politically, however, Pasch seems to have struck a chord. If she wins, her focus on education — not on Walker — will be a big reason. In many ways, Pasch is casting herself as the better defender of education — a strategy that carries weight in these upwardly mobile suburbs, which are dotted with business parks and sharp-looking shopping malls.

Pasch lives near one of those busy retail centers in Whitefish Bay, an area that tends to vote for Democrats. Darling has housed one of her main campaign outposts in adjacent Glendale, in an old florist shop near a Cheesecake Factory and a Sports Authority, to push back at Pasch’s outreach to moderate Republicans in the area. The well-worn office, which is cluttered with signs and telephones, was used by local Republicans in April when Wisconsin was consumed by a rocky state-supreme-court election between conservative justice David Prosser, the incumbent, and liberal attorney JoAnne Kloppenburg. Prosser narrowly won the race and won Darling’s district — showing Republicans that, come August, they could motivate conservatives to come to the polls in force.

Kathy Hentzen, a retired mother and Darling friend going back decades, directs the office near Whitefish Bay. She also is deeply involved with the Ozaukee Patriots, a tea-party group in the district. Pasch has been effective in giving Republicans heartburn, Hentzen admits, but she believes that the district is still more conservative than Democrats are spinning. Prosser won here, and Walker, she argues, has pockets of die-hard supporters in the region. “Do you know how long we have been Walker people?” she asks. “I saw him cutting his lawn the other day by himself. We see him everywhere. People know him.”

Voters also know Darling quite well. In 2008, Barack Obama carried the district, but Darling was able to hold onto her seat. It was close — she won by about 1,000 votes — but she pulled it off. Darling thinks that turnout on Tuesday could be at near-presidential levels. She hears that absentee ballots are flowing into local election offices. Even if most of her constituents would rather be sipping a beer on the banks of Lake Winnebago, they appear to be engaged. But she is not ready to make any hard predictions. She says that voters, after enduring months of brutal partisan bickering, “are sick of this race.” When she gets on the phones, she takes care to tell people she is “sorry” to bother them and then quickly makes her case.

You can tell the hand-to-hand political combat has taken its toll. Tuesday’s outcome is sure to be close. Team Darling is ready for a recount, should one be necessary. “We’re ready to go,” she says. “We have poll watchers and volunteers.” The state party, for its part, has a legal team ready to be deployed. “We are concerned about the absentee ballots,” she says. As the unions have bussed in activists from Chicago and elsewhere, she worries that some non–Wisconsin residents may muddy the waters. “It’s been ribs for votes,” she says, shaking her head about pro-labor political barbeques. The state GOP has fired back on this front, filing a complaint against Pasch for allegedly colluding with Citizen Action of Wisconsin, a pro-union group.

In the final hours, though, such potshots will have little resonance beyond the press gallery in Madison. For Darling, all that matters is getting her base to the polls. As with most state-senate races, things get hyper-local at the last minute, with neighborhood issues and regional differences clouding what many outsiders view as a referendum on the governor. Darling is assuring parents that Walker’s budget has not ruined public education; she takes aside fellow grandparents and talks about Paul Ryan and his plans to save Medicare. It’s a little bit of everything. “It’s also a bit of a revolution,” she says, commenting on the state’s never-ending political drama. The consequence of a win or loss, she notes, would ripple across not only Wisconsin but also the nation. “The stakes are high,” she says. “I do have quite a lot going against me.” But as she showed in 2008, she has battled and emerged victorious in the past. By Tuesday evening, Walker and conservatives hope for a repeat performance.

— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.