See Scott Run

In case you hadn’t noticed, Scott Walker is not from Washington. For over a month, the governor has been sitting atop the field of Republican presidential contenders because he is best known for spending the last four years fighting—and defeating—Democrats and Big Labor in Wisconsin. His chief GOP rivals, by contrast, have waged prominent political battles against large numbers of fellow Republicans—Jeb Bush on immigration and education, Rand Paul on national security, Ted Cruz on the 2013 government shutdown, and Marco Rubio on immigration. 

It’s very early, but according to two recent polls Walker now holds a double-digit lead in the Iowa caucuses. It’s still a wide-open race—the frontrunners are polling in the high teens—but Walker is neck-and-neck with Jeb Bush in national polls and in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina. If Walker is going to go all the way, he’ll need to overcome a number of obstacles (more on that later). But despite a barrage of media criticism over the past month, Walker remains well positioned to win the nomination. 

The most promising finding for Walker in recent polls is that his support is broad. According to a Quinnipiac poll of Iowans, he drew support evenly among Iowans who call themselves “very conservative” and “somewhat conservative,” with less support from “moderate or liberal” Republicans. And a national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 53 percent of Republicans could see themselves supporting Walker, while only 17 percent could not. The same poll found that 49 percent of Republicans say they could support Jeb Bush, while 42 percent said they could not. 

Walker shot to the top of the polls faster than anyone, including Walker, had expected. The immediate cause of his rapid rise was a speech delivered at the Iowa Freedom Forum on January 24, less than three months after Walker had won reelection. Going into the speech, many thought Walker might end up struggling, as Tim Pawlenty, another Midwestern governor said to lack charisma, had in 2011. Pawlenty tried to compensate by bashing brie-eating liberals before crowds of conservatives and mentioning Lady Gaga and Charlie Sheen to College Republicans. He dropped out of the 2012 race before a single vote was cast.

But Walker was able to thrill the crowd in Iowa simply by telling his story about fighting the labor unions in Wisconsin—about the 100,000 protesters who occupied Madison, the death threats he received, including one that vowed to “gut your wife like a deer,” and how the prayers of Iowans and other Americans helped him get through it. Walker’s speaking style was lively and personable, but there was nothing particularly exciting about it.

In his stump speech, Walker embraces the fact that he’s an ordinary guy. The son of a Baptist preacher and a part-time secretary, Walker was born in Colorado Springs and lived in Iowa during his early childhood before moving to Delavan, Wisconsin, a town of 7,000. Walker talks about growing up without much money and working the jobs that normal kids have, washing dishes at the Countryside restaurant and later flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s to pay for college. Like anyone living in a middle-class Milwaukee suburb, he shops at Kohl’s, a Wisconsin-based department store, and has a funny story about how his wife taught him to shop for deals. When Walker tells these stories in his stump speech, he’s usually wearing a blue shirt and red tie, the uniform of ordinary guys (at least Republican ones) in semiformal settings. 

Walker sometimes includes a line about how he loved reading about the Founding Fathers as a child. “To me they were like superheroes, bigger than life,” Walker said during his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C. But when Walker finally had a chance to visit Independence Hall in Philadelphia some years back with his wife, Tonette, it dawned on him that the Founders were just “ordinary people who did something quite extraordinary.”

Do you know who isn’t an ordinary person? Hillary Clinton. “Saying you’re broke when you’ve got two homes, or you’re making a quarter of a million dollars a speech, or you haven’t driven a car in 18 years, those are all things that I think further embolden that theory that someone like Hillary Clinton who is of Washington—who lives in Washington, who worked for the last term for President Obama in Washington, who served in the Senate in Washington, who lived in the White House in Washington, who spent the early days of her career in Washington—this is someone who embodies Washington,” Walker told me during our March 8 interview. (Like an ordinary guy, Walker sometimes says a word like “embolden” when he means “emphasize.”)

Walker has accomplished some extraordinary things over the past four years governing as a conservative and winning three gubernatorial elections in a swing state. But if he’s going to get a shot at challenging Clinton, he’ll need to develop a serious agenda that can carry him through the Republican primaries. One of the biggest question marks about a Walker presidential campaign is whether he’ll be knowledgeable and conversant in foreign affairs. When I asked Walker last August how he stayed informed on foreign policy, he said he mostly read about issues related to state policy but kept abreast of foreign affairs mainly by reading the Wall Street Journal cover-to-cover every day and the work of The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes. 

As he gears up for a presidential run, Walker has met with a number of foreign policy experts, including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, General Jack Keane, former senator Jim Talent, and former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams. Walker also said he holds frequent, soon-to-be daily, policy briefings with his recently hired foreign policy staffer Mike Gallagher, who worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served two tours in Iraq as a counterintelligence officer. “I used to, before about a month ago, get up at 6:00 and run for half an hour, so one of the things I talked to Gallagher about was maybe Skyping in or Facetiming in while I was running and just doing the briefings at that point,” he said. We’ll know during the primary debates, which begin in just five months, if Walker has devoted enough time to mastering foreign policy.

Bit by bit, Walker is becoming more confident taking positions on foreign affairs. In our interview he expressed support for the first time for arming Ukraine. “Putin is in a position where he is very much invoking Lenin’s old adage that you probe with bayonets, and if you find mush you advance, and if you find steel you withdraw,” Walker said. “That doesn’t mean we’re fighting the war for them, but there are significant things we can do beyond what we’re doing, and lethal aid has got to be a part of it.”

But he remains undecided on a number of issues. When I asked Walker if any laws governing the National Security Agency need to be changed—a question that divides libertarians from the rest of the GOP—he said, “I think we probably need some more time examining the various—or talking more to the experts out there. My instinct is I think a fair amount of the concern, which I think is highly warranted, has come not so much just from the legal authority of the NSA, but of the incompetence of this administration overall. .  .  . Remember that a lot of this came up about the time that the IRS/Tea Party stuff came out.”

When I asked Walker about tax reform, he brought up the plan recently introduced by Mike Lee and Marco Rubio (a potential 2016 rival) and praised it. “I’m intrigued by what Senators Lee and Rubio put out the other day. I think there’s some real traction to that package,” Walker said. “I don’t know if that’s exactly what we’ll embrace. I like the idea of a more fair and simple tax code.”

It’s not clear to what extent Walker hasn’t had time to develop concrete views on national policies and to what extent he’s simply trying to avoid taking positions that could be attacked by other Republican contenders. 

At the Iowa Agriculture Summit on March 7, Walker may have disappointed his conservative base for the first time by coming out in favor of continuing the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a mandate that boosts ethanol producers, but eventually phasing it out (without specifying a deadline). A gradual phaseout was widely praised by conservatives when Pawlenty embraced it in 2011, but when Walker took effectively the same position it shocked a number of conservatives, and not without reason. 

In 2006, Walker opposed a proposed state law that would require gas to contain 10 percent ethanol, calling it a “big-government mandate.” Walker told the Milwaukee Daily Reporter at the time: “The free-enterprise system must drive innovation to relieve our dependence on foreign oil, not mandates from the state or federal government.” Walker’s position now—that the federal RFS should be kept until technology at gas pumps allows consumers to choose gas with or without ethanol—was “definitely an evolution on his part,” says Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk radio host in Milwaukee.

Walker’s flip-flop on ethanol may have stung some of his admirers so badly because Walker’s battles with Big Labor had left many with the impression that he is a conservative purist. But Walker has always had a pragmatic side. His 2011 bill that pared back the collective bargaining power of public unions exempted police and firefighters. The exemption was defended as a public safety measure but widely seen as a political necessity. “That’s one where I think he was savvy. He knew if you’re going to take on something that big, you don’t take on first responders,” says Sykes, a keen observer of Wisconsin politics. In 2011, Ohio included police and firefighters in a law that limited collective bargaining. The Ohio law was repealed by a 23-point margin in a referendum before it even took effect. (Walker’s law was also unpopular in theory—a strong majority of Wisconsinites opposed it after passage—but it became popular following its implementation.)

Walker also triangulated against public sector unions by allying himself with private sector unions. “I have no interest in a right-to-work law in this state,” he said in 2012. “The reason is private-sector unions are my partner in economic development.” Walker never promised that he wouldn’t sign a right-to-work bill if it landed on his desk, but he did pledge during the 2012 debate that it would never make it to his desk. As late as October 2014, Walker told the New York Times, “No, we’re not going to do anything to do with right-to-work.” 

Walker’s decision to sign right-to-work legislation in March 2015 has been interpreted in the press as an effort by Walker to remind the Republican base why they love him. But that’s not what happened. “There was no question that he did not want to take this up. He dragged his feet quite a bit on all of this, constantly saying it was a distraction,” says Charlie Sykes. “The initiative for this came from the legislature.” Sykes added that Walker “was smart enough to recognize this thing was leaving the station. He wasn’t driving it but he got on.”

Walker may not be a conservative purist, but he is very conservative. Harry Enten of the numbers-crunching website FiveThirtyEight tried to quantify Walker’s conservatism with data from Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica. The answer: Walker’s about as conservative as he possibly could be. “Of all the Republican governors running for reelection in 2014, Walker is the most conservative compared with the type of governor you’d expect was elected based on the 2012 presidential vote,” writes Enten. “Based on Walker’s ideology and the ideology of the incumbents running in 2014, you’d expect him to have been a governor of a state that Romney won by about 13 percentage points (Montana, for example) instead of one [Romney] lost by about 7 percentage points.” 

Wisconsin hasn’t voted for a Republican for president in 30 years, but it’s a fairly swingy state in both presidential and midterm elections. George W. Bush lost it by less than 1 point in 2000 and 2004, but Barack Obama carried it by 13 points in 2008 and 7 points in 2012. Democrats took the governor’s mansion in 2002 (a good GOP year) and held it in 2006 (a good Democratic year) before it swung back to Walker. In his 2012 recall election, Walker held onto his seat by a 7-point margin even though, according to the exit poll, those who showed up to vote preferred Obama to Romney by a 7-point margin.

Walker says his theory is that swing voters are highly cynical and like candidates who will fight for big ideas. Walker proudly touts cutting income taxes and property taxes, expanding school choice, and passing pro-life legislation. But sooner or later he’s going to be challenged from the right, particularly in Iowa and primarily over his record on immigration and social issues. 

On amnesty for illegal immigrants, Walker says he’s had a conversion experience. “My view has changed. I’m flat out saying it. Candidates can say that. Sometimes they don’t,” Walker told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. But Walker doesn’t seem to be a very zealous convert. 

On March 8, I asked Walker if he thought the 2013 immigration bill that passed the Senate—the “Gang of 8” bill prominently backed by Marco Rubio at the time—amounted to amnesty and what parts of the bill he opposed. Walker didn’t criticize any specific provision and began talking about his support for border security and a national e-Verify system. But did he consider the bill amnesty? “Well, that’s a concern I’ve had. I said even then I didn’t support the Gang of 8 legislation,” he said.

Some social conservatives have been concerned by Walker’s statements that he’s focused on economic issues when he’s asked about social issues. But Walker says he’s been misunderstood. Last August, I asked him if he supported a so-called truce on social issues. “No,” he replied. “People shouldn’t misread my comments about focus as being that I don’t care about them. I think they’re important issues. I’m pro-life. I’ve been pro-life, I’ll continue to be pro-life. I don’t apologize or back away from that position. I voted for the constitutional [marriage] amendment in 2006, I haven’t changed my position on that. In fact, I’m in court with the attorney general upholding the constitution of the state of Wisconsin.”

When federal courts invalidated Wisconsin’s marriage amendment, Walker told reporters that “for us, it’s over in Wisconsin.” He added that “others will have to talk about the federal level.” When I asked Walker if he would support a constitutional amendment that would prevent the federal government including the courts from invalidating state marriage laws—legislation Senator Ted Cruz has called for but has not yet introduced—Walker replied with a smile: “If Ted Cruz is proposing that, then that would be a very compelling argument that we need a champion for that in the United States Senate to get that through. And that’s all the more reason why people should retain him in the Senate.” He emphasized that governors and presidents play no formal role in passing amendments. 

Would Walker work to rally public support behind such an amendment? “In terms of the constitutional amendment, I’d have to look at what he’s proposing,” Walker replied. “As governor, I haven’t gotten involved in constitutional amendments because I don’t sign them. In this case, I’d imagine we’d have our hands full with other issues. But I do believe the states are the place where that should be settled.”

Some of Walker’s critics have alleged that he went soft on his pro-life position during the 2014 election. New Jersey governor Chris Christie took a thinly veiled swipe at Walker to that effect during his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I don’t change my mind. I stick with where I’ve been,” Christie said. “So when you’re pro-life in 2009, you don’t cut a commercial four years later .  .  . [that says] that you’re less than that.” 

In Walker’s now-controversial TV ad, which was made in response to a big EMILY’s List television ad campaign claiming that he was trying to make all abortions illegal, he looks directly into the camera and says he’s pro-life, but describes the laws he’s passed as “legislation to increase safety and to provide more information for a woman considering her options. The bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.” Walker has been criticized for embracing pro-choice catchphrases. But what he said was true, and pro-life activists have long argued for health and safety regulations and ultrasound laws as the kind of commonsense proposals people should support regardless of their position on the legality of abortion. “We were very pleased to see that he had a response to the ads by pro-abortion groups,” Heather Weininger of Wisconsin Right to Life told me. “The people who are upset are not the audience he was speaking to.”

Walker caused some concern among activists when he was asked on Fox News Sunday if he supported any legal restrictions on abortion, and he didn’t reply with any specific examples. Two days later, Walker endorsed efforts to ban abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy, the point at which infants can feel pain and survive if born prematurely. “I think most Americans agree with me,” Walker told me. “That’s something strong that can be done. Some people want to talk about things in the hypothetical. We try to do or talk about things that can save peoples’ lives.”

Although he’s led the GOP presidential pack for over a month, Walker hasn’t yet been directly attacked by any of his likely rivals. And he may have one unexpected secret ally to thank for that: the mainstream media. Press coverage of Walker over the past six weeks has ranged from the merely hysterical to the completely bogus. 

Gail Collins of the New York Times wrote a column that claimed Walker was responsible for hundreds of teacher layoffs that occurred in June 2010. Walker didn’t take office until 2011. The Daily Beast ran an article claiming that “Scott Walker wants to stop colleges from reporting campus sexual assaults to the government.” The university had requested a redundant reporting program be canceled; the Daily Beast story was retracted. Liberal writer Katha Pollitt wrote on Twitter that Walker was a pro-life hypocrite because he fathered a love-child in college and pressured the woman to get an abortion. She linked to an obscure blog that made the allegation before the 2012 election. The claim had been refuted hours after it was posted.  

Many of the major stories that have dogged Walker have had the tone of an inquisition—entirely concerned with what went on in the heart and mind of Walker but divorced from any public policy question. Did Walker “believe in” evolution? Did he believe Obama loved America? Did he believe Obama was a Christian?

Walker said that these questions didn’t merit comment, so he didn’t answer them. And heads exploded. The mood was best captured by the New Yorker’s John Cassidy, who called Walker an “odious politician whose ascension to the Presidency would be a disaster.” What clearly made him most concerned was that for “all his awfulness, Walker is a serious contender.”

Throughout his career, Walker has been lucky in his enemies. In 2002, he was first elected Milwaukee County executive following a pension scandal by his Democratic predecessor. In 2011, union protesters might have killed the legislation at issue if they hadn’t behaved so outrageously. Now, over-the-top attacks from the press could help endear Walker to voters.

Hillary Clinton is leading Walker and the rest of the potential GOP field in head-to-head polling matchups. On the other hand, the latest Wall Street Journal poll asks voters if they think it’s more important to choose a president who is “more experienced and tested” or one who will “bring about greater changes” to current policies. “Change” beats “experience” 59 percent to 38 percent. 

If there’s ever a time for an “outsider” to defeat someone who “embodies Washington,” 2016 would seem to be it. Scott Walker certainly thinks so.

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.