Wisconsin has a long tradition of ‘nice’ politics in which people can disagree but still (mostly) get along, so you had to assume that Scott Walker’s scorched earth hard-right campaign would cost him some support. How much support? 52 percent of Wisconsinites support recalling him, according a to a new poll. From Rasmussen.
To be fair the poll might have been biased by news of Walker aides pleading guilty left and right in a federal probe of his last job.
redshirt
GIVE DEM AIR!
Ben Franklin
Rasmussen tilts to the right, so this has some weight. It’s gonna be a tight fit, though.
Butch
I drove through Wisconsin yesterday coming back from a trip to see family and have to say I was discouraged by the number of pro-Walker signs I saw. I think it’s going to closer than anyone would like.
jwb
Saw another poll over the weekend that had 48% of WI voters approving of Walker’s job performance. This is likely to be a very tough fight.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Here in California we threw Gray Davis out for the heinous crime of being the victim of a conspiracy between the GOP, Darryl Issa, and Enron.
Surely the voters of Wisconsin will be willing to fire a jerk for going after their paychecks, for real.
Ha, I kill me. Scott Walker could fuck a baby boy a day on the balcony of the statehouse, the GOP would cheer him on while Democrats would insist that they take the high road and not bring any baby-raping into their recall advertising.
PolitiFact would insist that allegations that a Democrat, somewhere, fucked a baby boy in public are “mostly true” in spite of an utter lack of evidence of such.
Martin
Boy, I really hope this works. Not because Walker needs to be removed (he does) but because politicians really need to fear recall efforts. It’s the only mechanism that voters have when they’ve been lied to by an elected official (poorly implemented as it is.)
porter
Problem is that he is still ahead of all potential opponents.
Just proves the only things that are certain in life are death, taxes, and stupid voters.
Ajay
I cant him loosing. His numbers after all the overreach are pretty good. Obama has similar approval/disapproval numbers and he is beating his opposition.
Apprantely, WI wasnt really that mad at him. Only the ones who were mad, were really really mad.
Spaghetti Lee
So much negativity. Let’s wait till the Dems decide on a candidate and get behind him/her, at least, before we start drawing conclusions.
dollared
Wisconsin is very Catholic, and the entire Walker putsch has been focused on stealing from the public education system and giving about 5% of the spoils to the Catholic schools.
The whole place has turned into a highly polarized, Nixonian split between the true, honest, hard working people and the nig$*# in Milwaukee, the socialists in Madison, and the leeches who work in the public schools. This despite the fact that Wisconsin has the highest graduation rate in the country and is always in the top 5 in SAT scores. Great – great public education system.
All the major newspapers are behind Walker, although their support is more passive now that his toxicity is visible. Despite all their mewling about Walker being too agressive, not following goo-goo policies, they absolutely have refused to flip over to favoring the recall, and most still actively oppose the recall.
So we really won’t know until election day.
japa21
Talking to my brother and sister-in-law in Wisconsin, their major concern is turnout. They see where some of the passion evident last year has, if not entirely died down, has been reduced greatly. This whole thing will hinge on turnout.
pluege
To be fair the poll might have been biased by news of…
blah, blah, blah…why would you be fair to scott walker – the guy is scum-of-the-Earth (SOTE) par excellence.
kideni
It seems like there’s a new poll out every day with similar findings: sometimes a bare majority opposes Walker, sometimes a bare majority supports him. The state is highly polarized, and Walker, the Republican legislators, and their many supporters in the media all work hard to keep it that way. If the Rasmussen number holds up, that’s great. There may be a backlash against the McCarthyistic witch-hunts that have been unleashed in the past couple of weeks against people who signed the recall (a Texas organization created a searchable database of everyone who signed, so people and organizations — including newspapers wanting to punish their own employees — have been finding names and broadcasting them as if there’s something wrong with democracy). It may be partly because in tomorrow’s elections there will be a number of school referenda to raise funds in the wake of Walker’s “tools” gutting the education system. People may just be sick of seeing his face on TV (although in the last week it’s been mostly Romney and Santorum up there). Who knows what we’ll see in another week.
smith
Even if he beats the recall, I see him having a lot of difficulty in the main election if he has a halfway-decent opponent. What’s the Dem bench like in Wisconsin?
Tony J
Goldfish memory. When is the Recall vote?
kideni
@Tony J: Primary is May 8 (four declared candidates for governor; actual Dems vs. zombie challengers in the four state senate races); general is June 5.
pluege
@smith:
they have Russ Feingold who refuses to do anything useful.
Triassic Sands
That’s not bias, it’s smart.
The horrifying thing is that Wisconsin is so disconnected from its progressive roots that 48% could still support Walker.