It’s been a rough month for Scott Walker. From February through July, the Wisconsin governor topped virtually every poll of likely GOP voters in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. But after a lackluster performance in the opening Republican presidential debate on August 6, Walker dropped nearly 10 points in an average of Iowa polls, sliding to third place behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson, with Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio close behind.
Is Walker’s dive a temporary blip or a sign of deeper problems with the candidate? The case for calm is fairly strong. There are five months and five more debates left until anyone must settle on a candidate. Trumpmania has overtaken the entire GOP field, not just Walker. When the “frontrunner” is only polling in the high teens or low twenties, the title doesn’t mean much—voters remain undecided. And Walker continues to lay the groundwork for long-term victory: On August 18, he introduced a plan to repeal Obamacare that Yuval Levin, a leading conservative reformer, called “the most substantively and politically serious conservative health care reform we have yet seen from a presidential candidate.” There’s still hope for Walker that when the dust settles he’ll be the candidate left standing who can unite a fractious party.
But signs of deeper trouble for Walker are also strong. The theory behind a Walker candidacy is that after two terms of Barack Obama, voters are ready for a workhorse, not a showhorse. The Trump phenomenon may indicate that’s not true, and voters still want a candidate with charisma—someone who can inspire or, in the case of Trump, at least entertain them.
Walker has always acknowledged he’s an ordinary guy who doesn’t give soaring speeches, but he believes that charisma is about much more than oratory. “I think there’s a certain appeal that people have for candidates who are authentic, people who have a passion for ideas and who believe in things,” Walker told me during his 2014 gubernatorial reelection campaign. “We say what we mean, we mean what we say. I think that’s certainly appealing.”
Lately, however, Walker himself seems intent on undermining his core appeal as an authentic, straight-talking conservative.
On Monday, August 17, Walker said in a Fox News interview that his position on immigration is “very similar” to Donald Trump’s. When asked by an MSNBC reporter later that day if he thinks birthright citizenship should be ended for the children of illegal immigrants, Walker replied, “yeah, absolutely, going forward.” But by Friday, after a week of negative headlines and criticism from some donors, Walker declared of birthright citizenship on CNBC, “I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other.”
Two days later, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Walker if he supported the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States.” Walker replied: “Well, I said the law is there, we need to enforce the laws, including those that are in the Constitution.” The satirical newspaper the Onion published a story the next day with the headline: “Out-of-Control Scott Walker Injured After Wildly Careening Between Stances on Immigration.”
Even when he isn’t trying to mimic Trump, Walker has had a difficult time delivering a clear and consistent message. The governor has a strong pro-life record, but during his 2014 reelection campaign he wouldn’t say if he’d sign legislation protecting unborn children after the fifth month of pregnancy. He again declined to specify any actions he’d take to protect the lives of unborn children in a March 1 interview on Fox News Sunday. Two days later, under pressure from pro-life leaders, Walker said he would sign the popular bill banning abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy. He made good on that promise in June.
But in the August 6 GOP debate, with 24 million people watching, Walker staked out a very unpopular position on the issue. When Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asked Walker if he’d “really let a mother die rather than have an abortion,” Walker replied, “that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that will also protect the life of that mother.” In a post-debate interview with Sean Hannity, Walker called the question a “false choice.”
“Medically, there’s always a better choice between choosing the life of an unborn baby and the life of the mother,” Walker told Hannity. “Medically, that’s just a nonissue.”
There were several problems with Walker’s statements, the first of which is that they just aren’t true. There are cases prior to viability when lifesaving treatment for a pregnant woman will necessarily result in the death of her unborn child. A Walker aide told me that Walker doesn’t consider such treatments to be abortion, but Walker’s public comments did not make that clear.
Ethicists may make such distinctions between a lifesaving treatment that results in the death of a child and a direct abortion, but American laws never have. “All states had at least a life of the mother exception before Roe v. Wade. Until 1967, almost all states prohibited abortion except to save the life of the mother, with a few that had ‘health’ in their law,” Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, told me in an email. “I don’t recall any states that specifically made the statutory distinction in the text between ‘direct’ abortions.”
Almost all voters, including Republican voters, support an exception to abortion laws when a mother’s life is endangered. That’s why Bill Burton, a Democratic operative who ran President Obama’s super-PAC in 2012, wrote on Twitter, “Megyn Kelly/Scott Walker exchange probably the most important of the night—it will live deep into the general if he’s the nominee.” Walker was hammered explicitly on the issue of abortion exceptions in 2010, 2012, and 2014, and he scored solid victories each time in a Democratic-leaning state. But he hadn’t provided opponents with the kind of fodder that he gave them in the August 6 debate.
After Walker publicly defended this deeply unpopular position, a donor told the Washington Post that Walker privately “has promised that he would not push a ‘social agenda’ as president and is simply expressing his personal beliefs when asked.”
That might be true enough with regard to the question posed to him at the debate. Republican-sponsored legislation to ban late-term abortion and tax-funded abortion includes the usual exceptions for extreme cases—and it’s such bills that would end up on a President Walker’s desk to be signed. The governor would be better off talking about these specific and popular policies, contrasting them with Hillary Clinton’s extreme position on the issue, than getting suckered into a theoretical debate only to dismiss his comments later as personal opinion.
The reason Walker became a strong contender in the first place is that he did the right thing, as far as conservatives are concerned, in facing down public unions even after being swarmed by protesters and the media. The polls had turned against him, but Walker signed the collective bargaining bill anyway. Only after the reforms took effect did they become popular. As Walker himself later acknowledged, he did a poor job of explaining them. “My problem was I fixed it, then I talked about it. Most politicians spend all their time talking about it but never fix it,” he said in a 2012 debate.
There’s still time for Walker to turn things around and win the GOP nomination. But if he’s going to succeed, he’ll need to do a better job of explaining his agenda—and convincing voters it’s clear in his own mind.
