Despite the hot and humid weather, a large crowd has gathered downtown on the last Sunday in August to celebrate the opening of the Milwaukee Bucks’ new arena. Sitting onstage are Bucks players old and new, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who in 1971 led the team to its only NBA championship, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Bucks’ current star. Republican governor Scott Walker is in the front row with the team’s owners, the NBA commissioner, and three other politicians (all Democrats). Everyone is taking credit for the “public-private partnership” that funded the arena.
When Walker, dressed in blue jeans and a Bucks T-shirt, takes the microphone, he says of the $80 million in state money that went into the arena: “For every dollar the state invests in making this happen, we get a return of almost three dollars—three-to-one return over the next 20 years. That’s a pretty good deal.”
Six years ago, Walker would have had a tough time showing his face in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. He’d become a hero to Republicans in the state for his staunch fiscal conservatism and for curbing the power of public unions, but had to beat back several efforts to undo his achievement. And he was the only Midwestern Republican governor who didn’t expand Medicaid under Obamacare. But he’s always had a pragmatic streak.
As he runs for his third term, the bill subsidizing the $500 million Bucks arena, which Walker signed in 2015, is just one of the things he is highlighting as the record of a bipartisan dealmaker. The $80 million for the arena looks like small potatoes compared with an agreement inked last year with Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which will receive up to $3 billion in state subsidies if it fulfills its promise to build a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin and create 13,000 jobs.
According to two public polls conducted in August, Walker is in a close race. A Marquette poll found him tied at 46 percent with Democrat Tony Evers, the state’s superintendent of public schools, while a Suffolk poll had him trailing Evers 44 percent to 46. Tight races are nothing unusual for Walker: The numbers are right about where they were in August 2014 when he went on to win a second term by 6 points.
What is different this time is the national political environment. In 2014, there was a Democratic president with an approval rating in the 40s; now there’s a Republican president with an approval rating in the 40s. In the last year, Republicans have lost two special elections in Wisconsin state senate districts that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and Walker in 2014. A conservative state supreme court candidate backed by Republicans lost a statewide election to a liberal candidate this spring by 12 points.
Walker has found it difficult at times to separate himself from Trump. Back in March, as the president moved toward imposing steel and aluminum tariffs, the governor spoke out strongly against them. “If the tariffs go into place, it will not only cause major disruption in the market and drive prices up, it will likely cause layoffs and plant closures,” Walker said in a radio address. “The practical application here of the tariff on steel and aluminum would likely lead to jobs being lost in Wisconsin and moved—not to other states—but to other countries. . . . My job is to fight for the people of Wisconsin. That is why I respectfully ask the president of the United States to reconsider this policy.”
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.
Asked again if he actually wants the tariffs gone, Walker replies: “Well, I’d like to see them work sooner” as a negotiating tactic to reduce or eliminate tariffs. When Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson moved some of its production to Europe in response to retaliatory tariffs, Trump lashed out at the company for its alleged disloyalty. Asked if he told Trump to stop criticizing the motorcycle company, Walker says, “We’ve talked about it before,” and points out that Harleys “sold in America are all made here in the United States.”
Walker’s hedging on tariffs stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of his Democratic opponent. Tony Evers says he “absolutely” wants the tariffs repealed. “The tariffs themselves are bad policy for many people in Wisconsin,” he tells me at the Pine Cone restaurant in Johnson Creek, a small town on the highway between Milwaukee and Madison. “I think it will help a handful of people in the country, but in Wisconsin we use steel to create things.” According to the Marquette poll, Wisconsin voters, by a 14-point margin, think the tariffs will hurt the economy.
It’s unclear whether Walker’s waffling on tariffs and his support for tax subsidies for big business is hurting him in the polls. Voters are divided on the Foxconn deal. But libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, who criticizes Walker for picking winners and losers, is at 6 percent in the Marquette poll. In the 2014 gubernatorial race, the libertarian candidate garnered only 0.8 percent on Election Day, and Marquette pollster Charles Franklin believes the libertarian vote will fall back by November. But he warns against making assumptions about which party these voters might head toward. “When we look at polling data,” Franklin says, “we find that generally they actually split not too far from even.” While fiscal conservatives might break for Walker, those who like the libertarian because of marijuana legalization might break for Evers.
The race is proving a challenge for Evers, too. As I follow him around the Pine Cone, it’s clear that he is not a natural politician. When he approaches diners, he seems uncomfortable engaging in banter and backslapping. He’s soft-spoken, and his barely audible conversations consist of saying hello and asking voters where they’re from. “Are you Mr. McEvers?” one woman asks, bungling his name. “I am Mr. Evers, yep,” he replies. “You have my vote,” she says.
Evers could have a particularly difficult time winning over moderates. He tells me Democrats need to be a “big tent” party that welcomes pro-lifers if it wants to win in November. But he then proceeds to compare abortions to tonsillectomies and advocate for taxpayer funding for abortions: “We need to have the Medicaid money be available for all people and restricting it because of a certain procedure, whether it’s a tonsillectomy or any other procedure, seems to me a foolhardy thing to do.” Wisconsin, like most states, banned Medicaid funding of elective abortion decades ago.
And Evers could be accurately portrayed as too closely aligned with the teachers’ unions. He 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.”
As Walker heads into the stretch run of the campaign, he’s promising more money for schools and more new tax credits—to keep college graduates in the state, to help parents pay for child care, and to assist senior citizens with property taxes. Whether there is revenue to fulfill all these promises remains to be seen. But Walker touts the rollicking economy and a state unemployment rate that’s below 3 percent—lower even than it was during the 1990s boom.
Despite the economic good news, Republicans in Wisconsin and nationally face a tough political environment that has more to do with the president’s character and temperament than it does with any policy. Walker tries to draw a sharp contrast with Trump. At a campaign event in Elkhorn, he tells supporters that the “best way to counter the anger and the hatred of the left is not to do more of the same. It’s through just the opposite: It’s through optimism and organization.”
After he is done speaking, Walker spots Ben Jacobs, the reporter for London’s Guardian newspaper who last year was body-slammed by a Republican candidate in Montana. Walker jokes that he couldn’t body-slam anybody because he is so tired from filling sandbags the day before in an effort to combat a flood outside Madison. Just to make sure Jacobs knows he’s joking, Walker says, “When I saw that, I was like, ‘What the hell?’ ” He mouths the last three words silently even though kids are out of earshot.
At a press gaggle, Walker notes that a majority of voters think the state is on the right track. “I have to convince people that didn’t happen by accident,” he says. “If Aaron Rodgers is taking you to the Super Bowl, you don’t want to pull him right before you go to the game.” Jacobs then asks Walker if he’s sure that in this scenario he isn’t Brett Favre, the former quarterback who was denied a request to play one more season with the Packers and was later involved in a sexting scandal when he played for the New York Jets. Walker laughs: “I don’t have any pictures that I’m afraid of.”
