Liberals react to Walker’s win

The money and effort that [Democrats] DID NOT put into Wisconsin today would have gone to strengthening and shoring up that organization. You can be quite certain that the Republicans, who busted their asses on this election, built up their Wisconsin organization. That’s permanent asset-building. The Democratic Party saw no value in it. … That’s why they won. That’s why we lost. Koch brothers, Citizen United: all of them are less important than you really think. You can’t win if your party doesn’t think it’s important enough to really try.

So which lessons will Republican governors heed—the cautionary ones of Ohio or the bring-on-the-jihad message of Wisconsin? A number of Republican governors already steamed into office with radical programs last year and have paid the price of dwindling public support—Florida’s Rick Scott in particular. Labor has certainly made clear that a war on unions comes at a price. But labor, its defeats notwithstanding, still punches well above its weight at election time and remains the chief impediment to Republican rule in states with a union presence. Taking it down—either through right-to-work legislation that weakens private-sector unions or collective-bargaining restrictions that weaken their public-sector counterparts—has long-term rewards both for Republican politicians and for businesses that depend on keeping wages low and benefits lower, if not non-existent.

These are bad times for incumbents across the country and, frankly, around the world. A governor convincingly (we still don’t know the exact margin) winning a recall election is a big deal. Victory counts. There’s no getting around that. … This result in this state has to embolden Republican governors across the country to think you can go for game-changing attacks on key Democratic constituencies like labor and not pay a price at the polls. Public employees unions across the country have feel like they have crosshairs on their backs. And they do.

There’s no sugarcoating what this loss means for organized labor. Unions invested heavily in this battle in order to make an example of Walker. The goal was to show that Republican governors who attempt to roll back organizing rights will pay the ultimate political price. That effort failed, and the failure will have major repercussions for labor groups as they gear up for future fights over bargaining rights in states.
But Walker’s win also has major implications for Democratic elected officials across the country. It shows with crystal clarity that Republicans may very well be able to successfully use the new, post-Citizens United landscape to weaken the opposition in a structural way, and to eliminate major sources of support for that opposition.

At this point, the state looks to be a fringe fall target for Republicans. That is to say, Obama’s ’08 margin has been cut roughly in half, mirroring the erosion of his support nationally. This is what presiding over a stalled economy more than three years into your presidency will do. In fact, Obama’s slippage in Wisconsin may be slightly more pronounced than it is nationally, owing to the state’s large population of blue collar and middle class white voters, who are most likely to have turned on the president these past few years.