No doubt, the latest CNN poll is bad news for Scott Walker. They put Walker at asterisk status.
He did get at least one supporter in the 444 Republican and Republican-leaning independent respondents; Walker is the preferred candidate of one percent of the respondents who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters. Two percent said Walker was their second choice.
But note that the margin for error for sample of GOP and GOP-leaning respondents is 4.5 percent. It’s not that surprising that after getting to speak for just eight minutes in a three-hour debate, Walker might slip from the forefront of GOP voters’ minds.
Walker isn’t a perfect comeback kid – he polled pretty tightly in his 2010, 2012, and 2014 gubernatorial races – but ended up performing better on Election Day than most of his final polls. We all remember the misplaced confidence of recall proponents and the MSNBC prime-time crew in 2012 and the last polls in the 2014 race had him only slightly ahead of Democrat Mary Burke but in the mid-40s. He finished with a solid 52 percent to 46 percent win.
He’s putting his chips into Iowa, where he led as recently as July.
We’ve already seen one governor with a solid record of reforms leave the race astonishingly early. It would be a mistake for the GOP to lose another one.