The Wisconsin governor’s race was a nailbiter into the early morning hours on Wednesday, with incumbent Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Tony Evers trading leads of a few hundred or thousand votes several times. But around 1:00 a.m. local time a large batch of absentee votes from Milwaukee County provided Evers a slim but seemingly solid lead of 30,000 votes.
The Associated Press declared Evers the victor, as he held a 1.1-point lead over Walker with 99 percent of precincts reporting. But Walker has not yet conceded. “We need the official canvass and for military ballots to be counted before any decision can be made. Thousands of ballots were damaged and had to be recreated. Until there is a comparison of the original ballots to the recreated ballots, there is no way to judge their validity,” wrote Walker spokesman Brian Reisinger.
A transcription error in Wisconsin in 2011 led to a statewide candidate gaining 7,500 votes in the vote tally (and the lead), but errors like that are very rare.
Walker was first elected in 2010 and passed a sweeping public union reform law in 2011 that drew national attention and prompted a 2012 recall election. Walker easily defeated the recall effort largely because the union reform worked. He easily won a second term in 2014 but could not withstand the anti-Trump, anti-Republican tide that swept over Wisconsin in 2018. Assuming there were no huge errors in Tuesday’s vote count, Walker lost by 1 point, while the same Wisconsin electorate reelected Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin, a staunch liberal, by 11 points. (Baldwin won her first Senate term by 5 points in 2012.)
As TWS reported this fall, Walker faced a number of challenges this year, including the unpopularity of the president’s trade war:
Today he hedges and won’t say whether he’d like to see the tariffs rescinded. “The most important thing we could do is get to what the president himself said at the G7—that is to get to no tariffs,” Walker tells me. “I’ve talked to the president, the vice president, [Commerce secretary] Wilbur Ross, [Agriculture secretary] Sonny Perdue multiple times about some of the very unique challenges” steel and aluminum present in Wisconsin.
[…]
[Evers] suggests the worst thing about Walker’s collective bargaining reform is that it “demoralized” teachers, but he won’t discuss any particular school that had been hurt by Walker. “I don’t want to pick out one because I’d be eliminating 423 other schools around the state,” Evers said. “What it has done is demoralize the teaching staff,” making it difficult to recruit new teachers. Walker’s previous Democratic opponents—in the 2012 election to recall him because of the union law and his 2014 reelection—were similarly unable to cite specific schools that had been hurt by the law. There’s a reason for that: The law has worked to help schools avoid teacher layoffs and keep property taxes down.
In fact, the law may be working a little too well for Walker. When he took office, polls found that Wisconsin voters thought it was more important to cut taxes than provide extra money to public schools. Now 61 percent favor increased funding for schools. “That’s one of the more striking changes,” says Marquette’s Charles Franklin. “It’s an irony, maybe, of Walker’s success in holding down property taxes that it’s now a shoe that doesn’t pinch as much as it did in 2010 and 2011, and therefore voters can see other priorities as more important.”
