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Wisconsin: Failed Recall

Daniel Berman on the Recall elections in Wisconsin - The Democrats Bat a Second, Scott Walker scores a Home Run

By Daniel Berman

23 Aug 2011, 23:23

While coverage was dwarfed by the ongoing Presidential campaign, last Tuesday featured a pair of elections of an altogether different sort. The last two in a series of nine recall elections were held to determine the fate of two of the Democrats who left Wisconsin this Spring in an effort to prevent a vote on Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill which limited the ability of public employees to collectively bargain for benefits other than wages.

For a campaign that was launched amidst some of the largest grassroots organizing on both sides in recent American history, the recall campaigns more or less ended with a whimper. On July 19th, Democratic David Hansen, his leading Republican opponent having failed to make the ballot due to a lack of signatures, easily beat off his D-list opponent with 66% of the vote. The main event came three weeks later. Six Republican Senators had been targeted by Democratic and Labor Union activists in retaliation for their votes in favor of Governor Walker’s Bill. The Democrats needed to defeat three of them in order to retake the State Senate. In the end they got two, defeating Senator Dan Kapanke in a district where Obama had received 62% of the vote in 2008, along with Randy Hopper who had deserted his wife to marry a 25 year old staffer who subsequently acquired a state job under suspicious circumstances. In the rest they came up short.

The following week two Democrats faced the voters, and there was some talk that a depressed turnout among Democrats following their failure to retake the Senate would allow one or both to lose. In the end such concerns proved unfounded. Jim Holperin sitting in a highly Republican district easily dispatched his foe 55-45, while Bob Wirch, in safer district won by a larger 58-42 margin.

Both sides have complained victory – the Democrats because they gained two seats, the Republicans because they held the Senate. As to who actually won, that is a more complicated question.

The Democrats are right to note the impressiveness of what they achieved. All but Kapanke’s districts were won by George Bush in 2004, all of the targeted Republicans had won in 2008 when Barack Obama  was on top of the ballot.  As such, the Democratic effort was an uphill climb from the beginning. And in a sense they are right to note that their performance was a major improvement over 2010. Wheras in 2010 they lost a number of districts John Kerry won, in the seats fought on August 9th, seats that in 2004 went 53-46 Bush voted 52-48 for Democratic candidates.

That said, whatever their glee that it was no longer 2010, it was still far away from 2008. As badly as Kerry did in these areas in 2004, and Feingold did in 2010, Barack Obama won all six of the targeted Republican seats in 2008. The real results therefore looked a lot like the mid-point of the 2004 and 2008 elections, which Obama can work with in 2012, though less than happily.

That said, the electoral success fell far short of Democratic expectations. While they protected their own incumbents, they failed to send a message of dire consequences to Republican legislators sitting in swing seats about the dangers of voting for austerity. Dan Kapanke’s defeat is certainly a warning to Republican legislators sitting in heavily Democratic seats of the dangers of excessive partisanship, and Randy Hopper’s fall is a warning to Republican legislators thinking of leaving their wives for twenty-something lobbyists, but all of the other Republicans sitting in Bush/Obama districts won, three of them comfortably. It is of little benefit for Democrats to prove that a Republican sitting in a 62% Obama cannot get away with voting against Unions when three of them can win comfortably after doing so in 53% Obama seats.

Even more problematically for the Democrats, and especially for their allies in the public sector Unions, the goal of this exercise was not win a moral victory but to win a real one. And if there may have been a moral success for the Democrats in the results, the policy consequences are disastrous. The GOP retains control of the State Senate, and while there is some talk of Dale Schultz, the lone Republican to vote against Walker’s budget bill, holding the balance of power, that bill along with a have dozen other measures of vital interest to Democrats, have already passed. Voter ID, modifications to the residency requirements for student voters, and most prominently redistricting have already made it through both houses.

The latter in particular is problematic for Democrats, as the new maps, signed into law on August 9th at the same time voters went to the polls to pass judgment on the six Republicans, make it exceedingly unlikely that the Republicans will lose control of the State Assembly in 2012. And with the Democrats unlikely to pick up in 2012 any of the seats they failed to win in a perfect storm on August 5th, they face the prospect of falling back in the Senate rather than advancing, especially given the likelihood they will lose one of their recent gains against any Republican not named Randy Hopper.

This in a sense is why Democrats are talking more openly of trying to recall Scott Walker during the 2012 general election, or targeting Republican Senators from the class of 2010, even as the results this month make it clear exactly how much of a long-shot such efforts are likely to be. They need a seat at the table in Wisconsin, and they understand that they did not win one in the Senate no matter how great their moral victory.

The truth is, even taking the Senate would probably not have gotten them very far. Even had they won it in July, before the redistricting maps were passed, they still would have been hard-pressed to reverse Walker’s policies. The battle for Wisconsin policy-wise was likely lost along with the Supreme Court race on April 5th, given that the Court was likely the only avenue that could have stopped the bill once passed.  
In reality therefore, Wisconsin represents a serious defeat for the Unions and their Democratic allies, albeit one that was largely foretold from the start. Having failed to take the senate after attempting to turn Scott Walker into a national symbol of Republican austerity, its hard to see how they can force other Governors like Michigan’s Rick Snyder to fear the threat of far more distant recalls.