Public Policy Polling, the North Carolina-based Democratic firm, has been polling Wisconsin with considerable regularity, and its latest findings show a trend over the year toward Republican Governor Scott Walker and against the Democrats who attempted, unsuccessfully, to elect a pliant state Supreme Court justice and to recall enough state senators to overturn the Republican majority in that chamber. Walker’s numbers are not stellar—47% approval, 51% disapproval—and the electorate is deeply polarized, not surprisingly given the siege of the state Capitol last spring by opponents of Walker’s measures limiting the powers of public employee unions. Walker has predicted that his measures will become more popular as people see their beneficial effects and there clearly have been some: local government have saved a lot of money because the teachers union can no longer demand they purchase health insurance from a firm run by teacher union cronies.
Democrats still want to recall Walker, but PPP’s latest numbers show that he would run ahead of well-known Democrats who might be on the ballot as replacements. The exception is former Senator Russ Feingold, who has said he probably won’t run and who leads Walker by the statistically insignificant margin of 49%-46%.
Wisconsin has been one of the great battlegrounds in the fight to constrain the destructive powers of public employee unions. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger lost a battle in this fight in November 2005 when four referenda proposals were defeated after the public employee unions spent something in the vicinity of $100 million—all of it coming from taxpayers—against them. That result has been devastating for California, which faces fiscal disaster and can boast of one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, and it probably had an in terrorem effect on governors in other states over the next half-decade or so who might have launched similar initiatives. It’s looking like Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are going to win their fight, though the margins have been close.
