Although it isn’t front page news any more, the fight in Wisconsin between the forces of the left and the right continues. This is, many believe, a bellwether for the 2012 elections. Certainly the left is treating it as just such a fight, and they’ve pulled out all the stops for a massive effort to defeat Republicans in the state government.
If you read the news reports, you get the impression that the left has all the momentum. They have held massive rallies, spent millions of dollars, and managed to turn negative polling around to their favor in the state. The latest battle was the Supreme Court election.
The left figured that with Judge Kloppenberg on the state’s supreme court, they could just challenge every single law and the majority leftist panel would just throw them out. All they needed was just one more friend on the court to swing things leftward.
So they spent millions, flooded the state with protesters and canvassers, got plenty of favorable press coverage, and even support from the President of the United States when Obama’s labor secretary sided with the unions. Over three million dollars was spent from sources outside the state on ads and get out the vote efforts. More money was spent on this election than any previous Supreme Court election in the state in what is normally a little-considered allegedly non-partisan election.
Despite all that work, all that money, and all that effort; despite the publicity that showed leftists energized, excited, and driven, Judge Kloppenberg lost. By all accounts in the news, she should have won comfortably, if not by a landslide. We were led to believe that the left was full of excitement and energy while the right was not very driven and was letting the left win. The election was close, but it was a clear victory where it should have been a humiliating defeat for Judge Prosser.
I can’t help but think of Bill Whittle’s analysis of the 2008 election at Big Hollywood:
If the left is all that excited and energized, if the state was for them and the majority of people supported their ideas as polling claims, then you would expect a big, clear, easy victory for their side. And they didn’t get it, not in 2008, not this last election.
Another piece of evidence that things aren’t as rosy for the left as the press sometimes leads us to believe is something that happened in the recall campaign. There are two recall movements in Wisconsin right now. One is an effort to recall key Republican legislators in what are viewed as areas where they have lost support. The other is to recall the Democratic state senators who fled the state to avoid voting on the public employee benefits bill.
One such recall campaign claimed they had enough petitions to get the recall vote on the next ballot. The day after this announcement, their office was broken into, all the petitions stolen, and the computers stolen as well. This effort was to recall State Senator Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay), one of the legislators who ran away and hid in Illinois.
If you’re winning and confident, that’s not the kind of thing you do. It hurts your cause and presents legal troubles. Who cares about the petitions for a recall if all the momentum and popular support is on your side? Your attitude should be “Recalls almost never work anyway, let them try!”
Lately, the conventional wisdom and usual methods of predicting political results have all failed, the old ways of reading the political winds simply aren’t working as well any longer. So who knows what will happen next? But so far, it doesn’t look good for the left, no matter how its spun in the press.
