Landslide! It looks like Waterloo in Wisconsin for government unions
By JAMES TARANTO 4/8/2011
online.wsj.com
"The candidate on the losing end of Wisconsin's hotly contested state Supreme Court race has started raising money for a recount," the Associated Press reports in a dispatch this morning that could have been written any time in the past 2½ days. The AP buries the lead in a shallow grave, the second paragraph:JoAnne Kloppenburg's campaign manager, Melissa Mulliken, said Friday that fundraising efforts for a recount have begun, but she stopped short of saying the candidate would request one.Huh? Didn't Kloppenburg declare victory Wednesday, sitting atop a lead of more than 200 votes (out of some 1.5 million)? Didn't MoveOn.org's Steve Hughes confirm this in an email yesterday? Yes, he did:We just had a HUGE win!!I'm literally breathless. I'm witnessing history. Incumbent candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court generally get re-elected in a landslide. But in the general election yesterday, progressive JoAnne Kloppenburg closed the gap and, with 100% of precincts reporting, has beating [sic] conservative justice David Prosser!We'll bet Hughes has taking a HUGE breath now. Literally!!Associated PressDewey defeats Prosser..So has, or is, Mark Miller, minority leader of the Wisconsin Senate, who yesterday sent out an email, forwarded to us by reader Tom Werlein, peddling T-shirts in honor of--we're not making this up--the "14 brave Senators from Wisconsin [who] left the state" in a "heroic effort" (albeit an unsuccessful one) to thwart Gov. Scott Walker's plan to reform state government by precluding a legislative quorum."Two nights ago," Miller crows, "Walker's good friend Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was defeated in his re-election effort--despite leading in initial polls by over 30%! Clearly the people of Wisconsin are standing up and rejecting Scott Walker's
"The candidate on the losing end of Wisconsin's hotly contested state Supreme Court race has started raising money for a recount," the Associated Press reports in a dispatch this morning that could have been written any time in the past 2½ days. The AP buries the lead in a shallow grave, the second paragraph:
JoAnne Kloppenburg's campaign manager, Melissa Mulliken, said Friday that fundraising efforts for a recount have begun, but she stopped short of saying the candidate would request one.
Huh? Didn't Kloppenburg declare victory Wednesday, sitting atop a lead of more than 200 votes (out of some 1.5 million)? Didn't MoveOn.org's Steve Hughes confirm this in an email yesterday? Yes, he did:
We just had a HUGE win!!
I'm literally breathless. I'm witnessing history. Incumbent candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court generally get re-elected in a landslide. But in the general election yesterday, progressive JoAnne Kloppenburg closed the gap and, with 100% of precincts reporting, has beating [sic] conservative justice David Prosser!
We'll bet Hughes has taking a HUGE breath now. Literally!!
Associated Press
Dewey defeats Prosser.
.So has, or is, Mark Miller, minority leader of the Wisconsin Senate, who yesterday sent out an email, forwarded to us by reader Tom Werlein, peddling T-shirts in honor of--we're not making this up--the "14 brave Senators from Wisconsin [who] left the state" in a "heroic effort" (albeit an unsuccessful one) to thwart Gov. Scott Walker's plan to reform state government by precluding a legislative quorum.
"Two nights ago," Miller crows, "Walker's good friend Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was defeated in his re-election effort--despite leading in initial polls by over 30%! Clearly the people of Wisconsin are standing up and rejecting Scott Walker's agenda."
Clearly! Well, that is, if by "the people of Wisconsin" you mean all of them except the 40,000 or so who live in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the Waukesha County clerk announced yesterday that she had erroneously omitted the Brookfield results from the unofficial returns she reported to the media Tuesday night. She caught the error during canvassing, a routine double-checking of vote totals. "The new totals give 10,859 more votes to Prosser and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg," the paper reports.
There were also some minor adjustments in other counties, but the bottom line is that Prosser now leads by some 7,500 votes, or roughly 0.5%. Our headline exaggerates slightly, but assuming there isn't a comparable gain for Kloppenburg in Milwaukee, where canvassing is still under way, such a margin should be easily recount-proof.
"Scott Walker Struggles to Downplay Wisconsin Election That His Allies Built Up as a Referendum" reads the headline of a Puffington Host post yesterday. But today's Puffington Host Daily Brief, an email newsletter, carries the neutral headline "New Twists in Wisconsin Supreme Court Election" on a story by the same blogress (though the headline on the site reveals that it's about Prosser taking the lead).
In truth, it was Wisconsin's government employee unions, whose privileges are endangered by Gov. Walker's reforms, that built the election up as a referendum, aided by their allies in the Democratic Party, the media and the liberal left. Assuming that Prosser has indeed won, this is a crushing defeat for them.
There were two reasons to think they might succeed in defeating Prosser. First, they were organized and motivated, providing a big advantage in what is typically a low-turnout election. (In the Feb. 15 jungle primary, in which Prosser bested Kloppenburg by 55% to 25%, only 420,000 people voted. That was approximately 48 hours before the debate over the Walker reforms reached the boiling point.)
Second, public opinion had supposedly shifted decisively against Walker and the GOP as the result of what even some conservatives feared was an ObamaCare-style overreach. "The recent fight has cost Republicans support, strengthened unions, polarized the issue, and swung critical independents, who were essential to the Republicans' 2010 electoral victory, toward sympathizing with the unions," wrote Heather Higgins of the Independent Women's Forum two weeks ago, reporting on an IWF-commissioned Wisconsin poll. "As it stands now, Republicans could not only lose, but lose badly," she warned, referring not only to the Prosser-Kloppenburg tilt but also recall efforts against GOP senators that aim to flip control of the chamber.
It must be acknowledged that the pro-union left succeeded in making this campaign into a referendum on Walker. Had it not, it's likely that turnout would have been much lower and Prosser's margin of victory much wider, as in the primary. But they lost the referendum. With Prosser proffered as a proxy for Walker (we dare you to say that 10 times fast), the justice's approximately 50.5% of the vote is a swing of less than 2% away from Walker, elected last November with 52.3%.
"What does this change in Wisconsin?" asks Slate's Dave Weigel, who answers:
It's now likely that conservatives will retain their advantage on the court. Democrats can turn their guns on the recall efforts, with new vigor that's going to be informed by a sense--spread pretty widely on Twitter--that Kloppenburg was robbed.
Weigel certainly gives new meaning to the word "informed." But whereas we thought Kloppenburg had a real chance of beating Prosser, we've always been skeptical to the point of incredulity about the prospects for recalling Republican senators. That's because under Wisconsin law, an official has to have served for a year before being subject to recall. That shields both Walker and all Republican lawmakers who replaced Democrats in last year's election. As Wisconsin senators serve four-year terms, only those who survived the Democratic sweep of 2006 or 2008 can be recalled.
It only gets worse for Wisconsin Democrats. Kloppenburg's campaign implied--though in her "victory" press conference she robotically denied--that she would provide the deciding vote on the court to overturn Walker's reforms. Her defeat means that those reforms will soon take effect unless they have an actual legal defect.
One of the most important reforms is that union dues will become voluntary. State and local government will no longer take money out of their employees' paychecks and hand it over to the unions. This is likely to be the last Wisconsin election in which the Democrats have the advantage of support from organizations with the power to raise campaign funds coercively.
The unions' show of muscle in this week's election was not unimpressive, even though it was insufficient to the task at hand. Starved of the nourishment of forcibly collected dues, they may look like a 98-pound weakling by 2012.
For That Matter, When Will Big Kloppenburg?
"David Prosser: When Will Big Tobacco Give Up?"--headline, Independent (London), April 8
Warm Salami
"New Warning on Arctic Sea Ice Melt" reads a headline on the BBC website. Ho hum, another global-warming alarm, right? But it turns out it's even less alarming than you think. The "new warning" is the same as the old warning, only less urgent:
Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer sea ice will probably be gone in this decade.
The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski's team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model--compiled partly in response to those criticisms--that produces a "best guess" date of 2016.
Well, our best guess is that in 2015 they'll have a new best guess of 2020; in 2019 it'll be 2024, etc. This is what's known, in another discipline, as "salami economics," in which economists make repeated minor revisions to their estimates and hope you won't notice that when added up they are a major revision.
Or let's try this another way. Our best guess is that Wieslaw Maslowski will die before the end of the year. If he's still alive in December, we'll modify that and guess he'll die in 2012. We can keep changing our guess every year. The difference between our guesses and his is that one of ours is bound to be right sooner or later.
Can 'Diversity' Save Obama?
National Journal's Ronald Brownstein reports that a new Pew Research Center poll "underscores how slender a beachhead President Obama has established among whites more than two years into his presidency":
In his 2008 election, Obama ran well only among two groups of whites--young people and white women with at least a four year college education, two groups that are generally receptive to government activism. In the 2010 GOP landslide, those groups stuck with Democrats relatively more loyally than the rest of the white electorate, but the party's support tumbled even among them.
Aside from schooled women, "the rest of the white electorate remains deeply cool to Obama." (We were deeply cool to Obama before being deeply cool to Obama was cool.) "Almost as troubling for Obama is his showing among Hispanics in the poll," Brownstein notes:
Just 54 percent of Hispanics in the Pew survey said they approved of his performance, a finding that echoes the results in recent Gallup polls. Given Obama's persistent difficulties in the white community, he can't afford much softening among Hispanics, who gave him two-thirds of their votes last time.
We noted the Gallup poll yesterday, which also found a drop-off in black support, to 85% from over 90%, although that may be an outlier.
Despite the poor Hispanic showing, Brownstein predicts that "Obama will benefit from a wave of diversity that has increased the minority share of the population in every state since 2000, according to recently released results from the 2010 Census." To elaborate this claim, Brownstein links to a week-old article of his:
Last week's release of national totals from the 2010 census showed that the minority share of the population increased over the past decade in every state, reaching levels higher than demographers anticipated almost everywhere, and in the nation as a whole. If President Obama and Democrats can convert that growth into new voters in 2012, they can get a critical boost in many of the most hotly contested states and also seriously compete for some highly diverse states such as Arizona and Georgia that until now have been reliably red.
Do you see the problem with this logic? Obama was elected not in 2000 but in 2008, when most of the prospective "new voters" were already available. The census is a leading indicator for the allocation of electoral votes and congressional seats, but a lagging indicator of voter demographics. It's surprising that a pro like Brownstein would miss such an elementary point. |
