One-time frontrunner Scott Walker needs a breakout performance in tonight’s GOP presidential debate if he is to regain any of his early luster, two Wisconsin-focused pundits said about the Badger State’s governor on Wednesday.
“He can’t be Donald Trump; he can’t go to those lengths, but he’s got to find somewhere in between Donald Trump and where he is now, which ‘aggressively normal’ as he says,” said Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist Christian Schneider.
“If he’s aggressively normal in tonight’s debate he’s going to be aggressively out of the race,” Schneider said. “He needs to be strong; he needs to remind people why they liked him in the first place,” he said, adding that Walker’s plan to nationalize the union restrictions he implemented in the Dairy State is meant to do just that.
“He’s got to pick a fight with someone,” Schneider said. “He probably will pick a fight with like [Ohio Gov.] John Kasich; he’s kinda stealing [Walker’s] whole down-home Midwestern governor shtick … other than that, he’s gotta to show that he’s tough; show that he is the guy that people all liked in the beginning.”
Walker once had a strong lead on the crowded GOP field in neighboring Iowa but has fallen to 10th place in the latest polls. He sits in 8th place in the Washington Examiner’s latest power rankings.
As tonight’s debate on CNN only features the leading Republican candidates, with the rest relegated to a non-prime time event, John Nichols, “The Nation’s” Washington correspondent and associate editor of Madison, Wisconsin’s “Capital Times,” said all trailing candidates need to be mindful of being “demoted” to the “kids’ table” and remember that there is “no trampoline” in presidential politics, meaning that once a candidate drops, he almost never bounces back up.
“Think of nothing but the kids’ table,” Nichols advised Walker. “Think of nothing but that reality and understand that this is the critical debate of your presidential campaign maybe of your political life — so you better do the job,” he said.
“Scott Walker has to distinguish himself from Trump, and he has to do it well,” Nichols continued. “I don’t know … if he will have the guts to do that and the strength to do it, but that’s what he has to do. And he has to do it well enough to kind of shake the room.”
Nichols said Walker “has the capacity to do that” but “we will see if he goes there.”
