As Wisconsin Governor's Poll Numbers Tank, GOP Moves to 'Rig' Recall
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s support has collapsed, according to
a new poll that shows that 58 percent of voters favor recalling the Republican whose anti-labor initiatives provoked the mass demonstrations that anticipated the Occupy Wall Street movement.
According to a new
St. Norbert College/Wisconsin Public Radio survey of Wisconsin voters, only 38 percent of voters now support retaining Walker as governor. That represents a ten-point drop in support for the governor since last spring, when it was presumed that he had bottomed out. In fact, they have continued to decline, with significant movement of previously undecided voters into the anti-Walker camp. Thirty-seven percent of Wisconsinites now “strongly disapprove” of Walker’s governorship, while 21 percent merely disapprove. Among the most engaged (and presumably likely) voters, the figire rises to a remarkable 61 percent overall disapproval number for the governor. Significantly, while attitudes toward President Obama and the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, have remained relatively steady, Walker’s numbers have tanked. That’s a serious problem for the governor, as it suggests that voters are crossing partisan and even ideological lines to oppose him.
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The Republican-led
Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules has ordered the state’s Government Accountability Board—an independent agency that oversees elections in Wisconsin—to submit decisions regarding key voting-rights issues to a formal rule-making process that gives Governor Walker and Republican legislative leaders the ability to reject rule changes made by the GAB.
Critics warn that this gives Walker the power to dictate how the GAB runs elections—including a new election that would be scheduled if opponents of the governor succeed in filing 540,000 valid signatures on recall petitions. That’s because, under an executive order the governor recently issued, he now has the authority to veto newly created administrative rules—if they are formally promulgated. The decision by the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules, which was made in a party-line vote Tuesday, requires the formalizing of the rules in a manner that gives the final say to the governor, as opposed to the independent board that is supposed to set election rules and oversee voting.
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The governor and his backers have been fiercely critical of the recall drive and they have taken dramatic steps to avert it:
1. The Republican co-chair of the legislative Joint Finance Committee has proposed to amend the state constitution to severely restrict circumstances in which recall elections can be sought.
2. A Republican state senator who is closed allied with the governor sought to tighten requirements for notarizing recall petitions in a way that would have made it much harder for citizens to circulate and certify petitions.
3. Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by billionaire conservative donors David and Charles Koch, began airing pro-Walker television ads in the weeks before the recall campaign’s November 15 launch.
4. The governor’s campaign committee this week launched a $300,000 advertising campaign to defend his policies—especially the attack on collective-bargaining rights that inspired mass demonstrations last February and March.
5. The Republican Party of Wisconsin has launched a so-called “Recall Integrity Center,” which seems to encourage intimidation of Wisconsinites gathering recall petition signatures.
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But Walker was not always opposed to recall elections, and he did not always want to control and constrain them.
Walker was elected Milwaukee County Executive in a 2002 recall election.
In 2010, when he was running for governor, he hailed the process as democracy in action.
“You know the folks that were angry about this started a recall and they were told they needed to collect 73,000 signatures in sixty days,”
said Walker. “Well, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing. They stood up and took their government back. In less than thirty days they collected more than 150,000 signatures. It was at that moment I realized the real emotion on display in my county wasn’t just about anger. You see, if it had been about anger, it would have been about people checking out and moving out or giving up. But instead what happened was really amazing. You saw people standing up shoulder to shoulder, neighbor to neighbor and saying we want our government back. And in doing so the real emotion on display was about hope. Today I see a lot of the same emotions on display here in Wisconsin and all across our great country. Obviously, there are a lot of reasons to be angry.”
Once again, not hundreds, not thousands but tens of thousands of ordinary people are doing an extraordinary thing in Wisconsin. They are standing up and trying to take their government back.
It’s just that, now, Governor Walker appears to be trying to make it harder for others to do launch the sort of movement—and wage the sort of election fight—that he once celebrated.
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