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Wisconsin: Vote for Barrett, Mitchell, and Compas/Dexter/Lehman/Seidel on Tuesday!
alternate title: IJBM: the current governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker, his lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, and four of his legislative allies are still in office.
Election day is this Tuesday (that's basically tomorrow), June 5th, 7 am to 8 pm central time. Six recall elections: governor, lieutenant governor, and state senate seats for districts 13, 21, 23, and 29.
If you're a resident of the U.S. state of Wisconsin, please vote for Tom Barrett for governor, Mahlon Mitchell for lieutenant governor, and (if you're in one of those state senate districts with a recall) Lori Compas, John Lehman, Kristen Dexter, or Donna Seidel for your state senator.
If you're not a Wisconsin resident, please ask those of your friends who live in Wisconsin to do this.
(If you, or they, are not sure whether they have a state senate election, use this site and this map.)
Take this as a personal request from me. Alternatively, do it because Scott Walker is a consummate politician and not one bit a serious policymaker--he is using his office to push his ideological/political goals without regard for their consequences. And the other people are his allies.
I know, most of my politics threads are at least mildly amusing, and involve pointing and laughing at the idiocy of politicians. Sorry, this one isn't funny. That's because stupid political shit crossed over into the policymaking arena and is actually now wreaking havoc in real people's lives. You have a governor who:
- passed a tax cut bill, then said that the state had a huge budget deficit, then went union-busting because of it
- argued that the union-busting bill was a budgetary issue, until he couldn't pass it because the legislature didn't have quorum, so his legislative allies then took it out of the budget issue and passed it anyway
- appointed some out-of-state guy to come
manageprivatize deer herds and sell off state lands and comment that public land hunting is communism - is under investigation for corruption (I think this includes using government- (i.e. taxpayer-)paid staff for campaign purposes, among other things), as Milwaukee County Executive and as governor
- ran a very dirty student government campaign (and probably got kicked out of college because of it)
- has been following his self-described "divide and conquer" strategy for crushing his political opposition, smashing unions in order to weaken the Democrats
- is wrecking collective bargaining rights in the U.S. state that first implemented them
- changed the state tax code so that the wealthiest resident of the state now has to pay no taxes
- tried to push an environmentally unsafe (i.e. fucks up people's drinking water and stuff) mine in the state
Comments
Oh, I forgot one of the most important pieces.
Wisconsin is dead last in job creation compared to the rest of the United States.
So much for "the private sector will create jobs when I give them tax cuts and weaken unions."
Oh and cutting state healthcare and rejecting federal funding for an improved rail system on ideological grounds. And the fun of standard gerrymandering and statistic bsing antics. Yeah Glenn, this Walker guy is a real jerk.
I'd vote myself but I get back from estate work too late to go vote. I've tried to convince people to vote against Walker, but the whole bipartisan split is nasty and Walker has good spin doctors .
You didn't early-vote?
When do you need to get to work? Can you vote while on break?
Maybe I should have posted this earlier...
Sorry to hear that.
I bet Walker's new voter ID law is not going to do you any favors either.
At least you can still ask people you know to vote for Barrett, Mitchell, and Compas/Dexter/Lehman/Seidel.
Bumping for great notice.
Welp at this point all we can do is wait for the votes to be counted.
WOOHOO!
All my props, man. All my props.
Well that sucks, but I thought Walker only had twice the ad money from out of state donors primarily because lol campaign laws written by corporations. And the standard drek of democrats splitting hairs and not voting for the running candidate because of policy difference while republicans and tea party nuts just side with their candidate unilaterally. And of course their are rumors about robocalls to the people who signed the recall petition telling them they didn't need to vote.
All in all I chalk it up to bad timing for the recall vote and corporations loving to throw money at Walker. The Democrats picked a fucking stupid time to have the recall election because in June most college students( a huge liberal voter turnout base) have gone home, but haven't meet the 28 days residency requirements to vote. And again, Republicans having a lot more money to throw at ads tell people to VOTE and presumably that Berrett eats babies and rides a prius motorcycle powered by taxation while wielding a nunckuck made of puppies.
Overall I worry how much this is going to galvinize Walker and his base. Blah blah blah first governor to stay in office after a recall election. So of course he is going to be a rising star with conservatives and be pretty "fuck yeah" in regards to his policy. I don't buy the swill about him wanting to mend the Wisconsin divide for a second and start listening to the other side. The guy has so far been a bought off crook and he is going to stay a bought off crook.
Yeah, to be honest, I'm surprised they picked this time to do it. Especially if the legislature won't be in session until next January anyway.
But then again if not for the two recall rounds, they wouldn't have at least symbolically taken control of the state senate. And it's not even just symbolic when you consider that Walker could call the legislature into special session to pass more crap. Though I am pretty sure that they kinda saw this coming and shoved everything through early on. This article suggests that, should the Republicans succeed in overturning Lehman's victory, they might try to take another stab at the environmentally unsafe iron mine, but that's unlikely to happen. Especially since they're looking forward to legislative maps gerrymandered in their favor come the regular 2012 elections.
Come to think of it, I didn't hear of environmental groups contesting this race much. This needs fixing in future races.
I doubt that that many people have changed their minds about Walker since he was first voted in, in 2010. Or, at least, since the
I'm actually a bit surprised, looking back at all this, that the recalls themselves happened at all.
The union-busting bill happened in March 2010, and the mass protests that followed coinciding roughly with the Arab Spring. Of course, protests happen all the time when it comes to big policy issues, though these protests were pretty big. With the brazenly political tactics of Republican state senators, tactics discussions among labor activists and progressives shifted to either a general strike or a set of recall elections.
Right-winger talk show hosts have been correct about one thing--that the massive protests and subsequent recall elections spooked other Republican governors who were thinking of passing similar policies. That's the first good thing that happened.
The second was that we did win two recall elections. That itself was a big deal, since those victories, with the help of moderate Republican state senator Dale Schultz, began to put a lid on the craziness the bad guys could get away with.
After the first round of recalls, I kinda expected this to die down. I was rather surprised that people kept on putting effort into this, given that Walker and his cronies had accomplished most of their policy goals already, and I was even more surprised that recall elections against Walker, Kleefisch, and several other Republican state senators were actually possible. In retrospect, it's quite possible that NOT capturing the state senate the first round actually helped give steam to our efforts for the second round.
I think there might have been less steam behind initial efforts in this second round of recalls, as there are at least one or two more Republican state senators (even if I don't count Dale Schultz) who are in marginal districts and were elected in 2010 but were not subjected to recall elections.
While I had some hopes that the gubernatorial recall would be successful, mostly by expanding the electorate, I didn't see how the state senate recalls could really get much traction--they weren't as high profile as the gubernatorial/LG recall, so it would be harder to get our side engaged, while the other side would be going all out on defense and even had the "stop recalling everything" argument on their side even though we very clearly weren't recalling anywhere near everything.
In summary, with the amount of time between the initial offense and the action it motivated, I didn't expect back then that this movement would even get this far. But it has. And it looks like it was actually worth something--Lehman's victory (assuming it holds, which it ought to unless another Kathy Nickolaus discovers a bag of 1000 ballots from a Republican suburb somewhere in someone's trunk) does (1) deter Walker from calling a special session to try any more tricks, at least until January 2013, and (2) give us a positive narrative with which to walk away from this.
In the meantime, we should be focusing on three things:
1. Defending Holperin's seat, with either UW SP geography professor Lisa Theo or prosecutor Susan Sommer.
2. Building a narrative for our side, to tell people what we progressives have done and what we will do for the people of Wisconsin and more generally the people of the United States of America. I posted a comment on DKE about this:
If there's something that the other side has done damn well, it's messaging, and we need to match wits with that. We need to convince people that policies and politics are NOT a zero sum game, and there is no dichotomy between helping oneself and helping one's fellow citizens. We also need to break the conservative meme that "government" is a bunch of incompetent, inefficient fuckups and the private sector is always preferable, by showing that government is in fact a group of competent, effective people working for the public good, doing things that can't be accomplished by profit-focused entities. And other things.
I think it will be interesting to see whether politically involved people (in Wisconsin or elsewhere) will start using recall elections more often after the second round of them in Wisconsin or will avoid using recalls because of voter fatigue. I heard some people say that part of the reason why Gov. Walker won the recall election was because there were a group of voters who might not have agreed with his policies but were using their votes for him as votes as the recall on principle. If that is true, I wonder what it means for the future of recall elections in Wisconsin.
I am somewhat worried that the polarizing nature of the recall election for governor will make political discourse in Wisconsin even more toxic now, but I think that has more to do with how the recall election was run and came to be than with who won it.
I'm actually not certain there were a significant number of such people who would have voted anyway.
Here's my thinking: If you don't like recalls on principle, there are three things you can do:
1. Not vote in the recall. This is probably what most "principle-based recall opposers" (I guess I'll call them PBROs) would do. I mean, if you don't like, it, why participate in it at all?
2. Vote against the recall. The main motivation for this, beyond principle, if you're honestly a PBRO (i.e. not just saying that for the press while actually being more importantly opposed to the challenging candidate), would be to discourage further recalls. I think this would make sense in last year's recall elections because you would have known that people wanted to proceed with a recall against Walker himself but that just wasn't possible yet. It would also make more sense back then since there were recalls flying fast and furious against both sides.
3. Vote for the recall, against the incumbent. The main motivation for this, beyond principle, would be "okay, fine, let me help you dump the incumbent, will you be happy and stop recalling everything now that he's gone?".
All told, though, I think they had very little effect on the race, if any. I remember seeing somewhere a chart showing, based on exit polling, that Walker won or lost various demographic groups by about the same amount, and that this was largely a repeat of the 2010 race. I think it was on JSOnline. So it was just that more supporters showed up for both sides--about 0.2 million more each.
That said, this increase in participation wasn't uniform throughout the state; one of the beneficiaries of the increased turnout is probably former state senator and current state senate candidate John Lehman, who after the initial vote count has a 779-vote lead over state senator Van Wanggaard, who defeated Lehman in 2010.
As for the political polarization and general tension in the state, I think it'll gradually lessen after this, and though there are regularly-scheduled elections again in a few months, I don't think they'll rise to these levels again. Voter participation maybe, but not political tension.
I also think that, given how Scott Walker himself has been at the center of all this, his popularity might actually fall gradually, as people begin to realize how he started this whole political dramafest and was at the helm of it the whole time. I actually wonder, if it weren't for the recall election, whether Walker's popularity would have remained low the way Ohio governor John Kasich's and Florida governor Rick Scott's popularities have.
That's the story people will tell.
glennmagusharvey,
I'm actually not certain there were a significant number of such people who would have voted anyway.
You are probably right about that, from what I saw, speculation based on exit polls about the presidential race was most of what made some people think those "principle-based recall opposers" played a significant role in this election.
I think that option 2. makes the most sense if you dislike recall elections on principle or only want them to be used for seemingly non-policy related misbehavior (e.g., corruption or other crimes) since you help decrease the likelihood of them being used for policy stuff. I guess 1. makes some sense too, but if you think a unsuccessful recall effort will do the most to discourage future recall elections, voting for the incumbent would seem to be the most effective way to get what you want.
I would agree with 3. being a likely possibility if not for the fact that these past few contests was quite heated and polarizing while at the same time very unprecedented. Since as far as I know having so many recall elections within a relatively short period of time has not happened before, those opposed to what they see as inappropriate recalls might not know what to expect. They might think that if Mayor Barrett won the Republicans would use recalls later on to take him or other Democrats out of office.
Of course, this is mostly just conjecture on my part. Your guess is as good if not better than mine on this stuff.
Here's a big retrospective on these recall elections, as well as some comments on how the progressive movement handled them, and on progressives and progressivism in general.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/06/1097922/-How-far-we-ve-come-and-what-to-do-next