The director of Wisconsin’s most respected statewide political poll described the sudden, drastic decline in approval for Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative priorities as “breathtaking.”
Walker’s disappearance from his state to campaign almost full-time for the Republican presidential nomination seems to be taking an enormous toll on his political popularity at home even as Walker brags to Republicans elsewhere about winning in a blue state.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School poll, found Walker’s statewide job approval had dropped to 41% with 56% of voters disapproving. It was the governor’s lowest approval rating since Franklin began polling in January 2012.
A majority statewide, 53%, now believe Wisconsin is on the wrong track and only 43% believe the state is headed in the right direction.
Not only that, but many of Walker’s most extreme budget proposals aren’t just unpopular statewide, but overwhelmingly unpopular.
Walker’s proposals for more massive cuts to public education at every level—$127 million from state aid for K-12 schools and another $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System—are opposed by 78% and 70% of state respondents, respectively.
Many of us knew something was up when Republican legislative leaders suddenly started talking about defying their governor and restoring some of Walker’s ugliest cuts.
The Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, controlled by Republicans, already has killed Walker’s brazen political attempt to gut the policy-making powers over environmental protection of the citizen board of the Department of Natural Resources.
Apparently, legislators already had heard from their constituents how strongly Wisconsinites oppose many of Walker’s extreme actions.
Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, a much more admirable Republican, was right when he warned that some politicians may be able to fool some of the people all of the time and even all of the people some of the time, but no politician can ever fool all of the people all of the time.
Of course, Walker, one of the nation’s most divisive politicians, has never come close to fooling all the people in Wisconsin. Until his recent plunge, the highest state approval rating Walker was ever able to achieve in the Marquette poll was 51%.
Walker’s current 41% approval rating is down from 49% in the poll last October, just before he managed to win re-election. Walker’s election success in Wisconsin is distorted by the fact he runs in low-turnout, midterm, non-presidential years when Democrats have a harder time getting to the polls some of their strongest constituencies, including racial minorities, lower-income voters and younger voters.
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That makes Walker’s boasting about putting blue-state Wisconsin in play in 2016 highly doubtful. Wisconsin hasn’t voted Republican in a high-turnout presidential year since Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.
Sorry to break it to Republicans, but presidential elections are always held in presidential years.
Walker Trails Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin
Franklin’s poll confirms the difficulty Republicans would have winning Wisconsin even if Walker were the candidate. At this point, given a choice between Walker and Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, state voters would choose Clinton over Walker 52% to 40%.
There’s no question running for president is a full-time job. That’s why Walker’s most passionate political opponents in the state—also known as approximately half the state population—may feel torn over his candidacy.
As patriotic Americans, they shudder to think some disastrous, unforeseen turn of events could ever give Walker an opportunity to do to the nation what he’s done to Wisconsin by rolling back decades of progress-expanding democracy, education and economic fairness.
On the other hand, the less attention Walker pays to the state, the better.
Let Walker revel in his presidential travels to scenic Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other backwaters to hang out with the sort of nasty, small-minded people who gather at various hate fests around the country to try to decide who among the angry swarm of Republican candidates is sufficiently vile, but still presentable enough to nominate for president.
Four years ago, when Mitt Romney was the obvious candidate, every absurd alternative including Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain led in the polls at one time or another before Republicans finally accepted the arrogant multimillionaire who hated 47% of Americans.
This time Republicans will once again run through every embarrassing alternative they can imagine—and probably some completely unimaginable ones—before giving up and nominating Bush III: The Phantom Menace.
So far, the less Republicans around the country know about Walker, the more popular he is.
But that fresh, boyish face that makes such a good first impression is already starting to wear on those in Wisconsin who see firsthand how far their state’s economic recovery trails behind the rest of the nation as a result of their governor’s destructive policies.
In ways the governor probably never imagined, Wisconsin has already seen Scott Walker’s political future and it’s looking worse to them all the time.
