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August 09, 2011 07:13 PM UTC

Wisconsin Recall, Biggest in U.S. History, May End Tonight

  • 64 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo reports Wednesday morning–Democrats take two Wisconsin Senate seats via recall, one short of the three they needed to flip the chamber:

Wisconsin Democrats have fallen just narrowly short of an ambitious goal – the attempt to pick up three state Senate seats through recall elections and take a majority in the chamber. As of early Wednesday morning, with six incumbent Republicans on the ballot, Democrats have defeated two — but narrowly missed out in two others.

Democrats defeated Republican state Sen. Dan Kapanke, who represented the most Dem-leaning seat of any Republican in the chamber, by a 55%-45% margin. They also won a 51%-49% victory over state Sen. Randy Hopper, whose campaign was also damaged by a messy divorce, and allegations by his estranged wife that he “now lives mostly in Madison” after having an affair.

This would get Democrats from their previous 19-14 minority, following the 2010 Republican wave, to a 17-16 margin.

—–

Our friends at “The Fix” report on today’s recall elections in Wisconsin, which have been both expensive and symbolic:

Wisconsin Republicans are in real danger of losing control of the state Senate in tonight’s recall elections, as it looks more and more possible that they will lose at least three of the six seats that are on the ballot.

The losses would be cast by Democrats as a severe rebuke of Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) policies. And wins by Republicans would be cast by them as validation for Walker’s tough-love budgeting style…

…these recall elections have have such unusual turnout and have received such inordinate attention from national third-party groups trying to influence the races and send a message. In fact, the recalls have essentially been special elections on steroids, with spending reaching nearly $30 million.

As of a couple weeks ago, about two-thirds of that has gone to benefit Democrats, and Republicans acknowledge that they were essentially caught flat-footed by the whole thing. And because of that, they’ve been fighting from behind in recent weeks.

“This is a referendum on Walker, and the Democrats have everything to lose, and the Republicans did not have a plan for what they started,” said one Republican monitoring the recalls. “And the national folks never saw it for what it was, which is a proxy fight.”

The proxy fight is between organized labor and the new coalitions of GOP governors and state legislative majorities. In the end, Walker’s gambit to cut collective bargaining rights through a legislative maneuver so badly irritated organized labor – and Wisconsin’s laws made it so easy to recall a member of the state legislature – that here we are amidst the biggest mass recall in United States history.

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64 thoughts on “Wisconsin Recall, Biggest in U.S. History, May End Tonight”

  1. recall for the 6 Repubs happens today but there are 2 Dems in another circus next Tuesday.  

    WI Districts #12 & #22 are both being contested.  It’s quite possible that gains made today could be negated next week so you might best hold off popping any fizzy ’til the count ups are complete.

     

      1. Don’t forget, they already defended two of their own in a recall.  Yes, a three vote gain could be negated by loss of even one of the two dems up next week.  But recalls are usually reserved for extreme cases like bribery, etc., not policy differences.  And yes, a defeat of three GOPers tonight would fire up progressive forces all across the country.  So which Wisconsin will we hear from tonight?  Bob LaFollette’s?  Or Joe McCarthy’s?

           

          1. that is an appalling amount regardless of the outcome.  

            If WI Senate is taken back will Koch bros write it off or will they realize they’re overreaching into the ballot boxes?

            Also how much damage can be repaired?  I know a Dem Senate can stop Walker’s agenda but not sure if they can return collective bargaining or revisit the state budget & education.  

            Don’t get me wrong, I’m hoping for a major  ass whupping by the Dems but not much is going our way these days.  

            Aug 9, 2011 = Walker’s Waterloo?

            1. sets a precedent that a lot of money should be spent on changing the outcome of regularly scheduled elections if you disagree.

              That’s what Labor, et. al. did here.  They had the opportunity to beat these guys at the polls during the previous regular election cycle and they can go after them again during their next regularly scheduled election.

              Per Voyageur’s comment, these recalls are usually reserved for gross negligence, criminal activity, etc.  But thanks to Labor, we’re now looking at mutually assured destruction after each cycle.

                1. Though I stand by my comments, Labor in this case is not setting an historical precedent.

                  Though I worry that, unlike after Arnie’s win, a MAD policy will actually take effect this time.

                  1. Republicans in WI are a true case of over-reach. they could have enacted a great deal of fiscal change without the need to vindictively screw the unions the way they did.

                    More generally, red districts elect R’s and blue district elect D’s, so it’s hard to overturn an election. The only reason they’ll succeed in WI is because some R’s got elected to blue districts.

  3. ever been recalled so this is an almost impossible feat to pull off.

    The three most vulnerable seats are in districts 8, 14 and 18, currently held by Republicans Alberta Darling, Luther Olsen and Randy Hopper.

    Democrats need to win 5 out of 6 races today to take the Senate, which is not expected to happen. At best, they are hoping to pick up 3. Which makes next Tuesday even more important because next week’s special election will ultimately determine who controls the Senate.

    1. where Republican Senator Dan Kapanke has been running neck and neck and in some polls, behind his Dem challenger Jennifer Shilling.  

    2. Maybe if parents got off their lazy asses (you perhaps?!?!? ) and actually raised the children they brought into this world teachers would have more time to do their job.

      Instead of teaching kids how to think teachers get stuck being a foster parent, because mommy and daddy are to self absorbed in their own pathetic lives to be concerned about raising their children right.  

      1. A nation of dependents. Cradle to grave nannyism.  No teacher, regardless of per pupil spending, can overcome this hurdle.

        BTW I taught my boy preschool and K. He exceeds expectations. I will give your peeps a chance this year. I will let you know how they do. Hopefully one year of brick and mortar public education does not destroy him for life.

          1. Things Mark G hates:

            1) democracy

            2) public education

            3) grammatical use of America’s prevailing language

            Anything about America you DON’T hate?

      2. You mean within their strictly defined working perameters. Unions (not necessarily teachers individually) fight tooth and nail to ensure their members don’t have to work a minute longer than they are contractually obligated.

        I’m not sure why everyone here argues in black & white.  Obviously, parents are an important factor in their kid’s education.  But so are teachers.  Even more so.

        Today, there are thousands of examples of kids who succeed in school though coming from shitty circumstances (e.g. poverty and/or apathetic parents http://www.huffingtonpost.com/… ).

        And there are scores of examples of unions who fight like hell to prevent that from being the norm http://thelotteryfilm.com/ .

        If public schools in poorer areas adapted appropriately to the circumstances, parents wouldn’t be a default excuse for poor performance and these students would succeed.

        Indeed, bad parents in suburban (for example) schools are a much bigger problem area because those schools shouldn’t necessarily be expected to do a wholesale makeover.  It’s in these situations where I think you have a legitimate argument about blaming the parents.

        1. and not so much because of the teacher-bashing (I don’t expect any better from you), but because of this:

          Unions (not necessarily teachers individually) fight tooth and nail to ensure their members don’t have to work a minute longer than they are contractually obligated.

          If you think teachers don’t work hard enough and should spend more time doing this or that, why don’t you just put it in the contract? But yes, once it’s in the contract, teachers shouldn’t have to do more than what they signed up for. (Almost all of them do anyway because they care, but that’s not my point.)

          This has nothing to do with your views on teachers, it’s to do with your views on contracts. You just don’t seem to understand what they’re for. If I hire a person to fix my refrigerator, and he fixes it, but then he doesn’t clean my toilet, should I post bad reviews? If he really cared, he’d do both!

          2. I didn’t.  Though there are some that cannot be legally fired so they are sent to the inner-city schools, that don’t.

            It’s always tiring arguing with you b/c everything has to be in duplicate for you to understand.

            The vast majority of teachers have good intentions and work hard.  The unions don’t.

            They are only concerned with guaranteed jobs to guarantee the dues coming in.  Period.

            You must live in the suburbs or a country club – the repairman doesn’t fix much in the ‘hood (but he still gets paid thanks to his union).

            1. That’s what I do with a person who listens to reason and doesn’t just repeat the same few sentences over and over again. I’m just informing you that your comment was dumb. What you do with that tidbit of knowledge is entirely up to you.

              As for your last paragraph… I don’t even know where to start.  

          3. Is we view this job as a professional one, not an hourly job. And as such, we expect, like in all other professional jobs, that people put in the time required to get the job done.

            And many teachers do put in that additional time to get the job done. But as 20th Maine says, the union makes a bad impression because it is fighting to minimize the required time each day.

            1. Have you ever asked a mechanic to fix your car, without knowing exactly how long the job would take, and then had to deal with the hourly labor rate? It’s kind of common. We don’t pay a mechanic to fix our broken engine in 17.5 minutes, because sometimes it takes that long and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s how professionals work.

              If you want to talk about professionals, we can do that. But teachers are in a strange position. If you compare them to professionals like lawyers, doctors, etc., well what do we ask them to do? Do we pay doctors for saving lives? Do we pay lawyers for winning cases? No, we pay them for doing everything they can to accomplish what we want, while realizing that nobody is perfect. Sometimes a fantastic doctor can’t cure a patient, and sometimes a fantastic lawyer loses a case. With teachers our standards seem different. I don’t know of any other profession where we say, “We will pay you a small salary and you must accomplish these things which may or may not be possible, we haven’t thought too hard about it.”

              The union is NOT fighting to minimize anything. The union exists to enforce the contract. If you want teachers to work longer hours, put it in the fucking contract. How is this difficult? Do you understand how contracts work? If you want something else, FUCKING SAY SO. Teachers aren’t assholes. If you discovered that giving an extra one-hour study session after school would make every student successful, ALL TEACHERS WOULD LOVE TO DO IT. And then we’d put it in the contract, and we’d all be happy. But teachers can’t compel students to stay after school, and “magic bullet solutions” don’t work as well in real life as they do in the movies, and so this hasn’t been proposed. But propose it! We can negotiate it!

              But you and 20th Maine have the same irritating habit of saying, whenever you’re asked what the fuck you actually want, “I don’t know! Just not this! Maybe something else! Or maybe not! Gosh it’s so hard to think of practical solutions, but gosh it’s fun to trash people I’ve never met!”

              So all anyone can conclude is that you want the union crushed just for its own sake. And the only effect of crushing the union for the sake of crushing the union will be to lower pay for teachers and reduce their job security, resulting in even fewer talented people trying to teach kids. And maybe that’s exactly what you want, but it’s not what you claim to want.

              If maybe you could start with, “I want THIS,” and then try to figure out what will lead to THIS, maybe we could find a way to agree. Until then you’re just rearranging the goalposts to accord with your own little sense of Feng Shui for goalposts.

              1. Teachers who educate kids.

                As to not understanding how professional jobs work – I think you may not understand that. Because professional jobs are not work X hours, they’re accomplish the following goals.

              2. You are a genius when it comes to making suburban and upper-class students successful.  Congratulations.  You and teachers and unions get all the credit.

                But when it comes to teaching kids from poor and lower-middle class neighborhoods, it’s all the parents’ fault.

                You are one fucked up rich white dude.

  5. and visited the Capital. Mon-Fri every day from noon to 1 there was a Solidarity Sing-a-Long. The songs were often remakes of popular songs like Simon and Garfunkels “Hello Darkness my old friend” sung as “Hello recall my old friend”. It was a hoot and can be seen here:

  7.  I predict a 6 seat swing.

    D response will be – see, we told you the people of WI were behind us.

    R response will be three part – 1) lawyers and activist courts  2) It’s temporary – remember 2010 US House and wait until next week  and 3) D’s only won because they’re cheating lying cheaters with gobs of public and corporate money to spend (union workers workers who work for the gov’t are really using public money and union workers who work for corp America are really using corporate money.)  

      1. District 8 Dem, Sandy Pasch, is up but with less than half of the precincts reporting. What the hell is the hang up there?

        District 18 is going to be tight, tight, tight. King is leading Hopper by about 130 votes with 87% of precincts reporting.

        AP’s doing a pretty good job of updating as precincts roll in.  

        1. with 97% reporting, it looks likely that King won.  Last 3% would have to overwhelming to overcome the lead, or even to put it with a percent or so.  Pasch keeps the same narrow lead with 63% reporting.

        2. it’s 52/48 for Pasch now, but a narrow margin of remaining uncounted votes are in counties where Darling is running stronger.  King, though, will probably only increase her lead further, as all uncounted votes are in counties where she leads… only a matter of time until that one is called for the dem side.

  9. For all the feigned outrage, the threats to Walker, the weeks spent making a mockery out of your state capital, the failed attempt to replace Prosser, the union big bucks, the countless hours spent organizing, it all comes down to this? Pretty pathetic. You might as well give up on 2012.

    1. “feigned outrage”

      “threats to Walker”

      “Pathetic”

      Why do you hate American workers, the middle class, and the American family, and hold such disgusting positions?

      What are you for again?

      1. choking your capitol with the equivalent of Woodstock in order to prevent it from doing the people’s business looks kind of silly to most rational Americans. Especially given all the caterwauling about how the Tea Party was supposedly “holding America hostage” or something. (I say they were holding out of control spender accountable.)

        I love American workers, the middle class, and the American family. That is why I hate it when the government usurps control of their lives, leaving them out of work, out of money, and dependent on a cadre of out of touch bureaucrats in D.C. rather than their family.

  11. Dems are packing it in, no more statements tonight.

    Results are in for 5 of the 6 seats with GOP retaining 3 and Dems taking 2.

    The last seat’s results will have to wait until morning.

    1. As soon as there was talk that Dems could score a major victory, I knew they’d fuck it up. This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given.

  14. Unfortunately, only two dems won in WI yesterday.  What, one might ask, should we expect, when the Koch bros, and their ilk, Rove, et al, pour some $40mm into a state race?

    And, of course, there are some questions, which will apparently not be pursued, regarding the county clerk in Milwaukee,and why it took so long for her office to report the results in the Darling contest.  You know, the same county clerk who ‘found’ 10k of ballots in June, that turned the Supreme court recall race around?

    1. I’m proud of Wisconsin.

      I think you should check your math.

      [All emphasis mine]

      The first is that, as with special elections, these recall elections have have such unusual turnout and have received such inordinate attention from national third-party groups trying to influence the races and send a message. In fact, the recalls have essentially been special elections on steroids, with spending reaching nearly $30 million.

      As of a couple weeks ago, about two-thirds of that has gone to benefit Democrats, and Republicans acknowledge that they were essentially caught flat-footed by the whole thing.

      So, your boogieman simply doesn’t exist in this case.  The voters of Wisconsin didn’t dig the whole “Stick it to the man!  Let’s take over the Capitol and skip work!  Yeaaahhh!”.  

      Or, at least not as much as reality:

      But the news is good for many. The latest example is Milwaukee, where the most recent estimates show the city with a net gain of at least $11 million for its 2012 budget. That will take a slice out of the city’s structural deficit, which is created by costs rising faster than revenue, and will reduce cuts that Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council must impose.

      The city projects it will save at least $25 million a year – the figure could be as high as $36 million in 2012 – from health care benefit and pension changes it didn’t have to negotiate with unions because of the changes wrought by the new law that ended most collective bargaining for most public employees.

      That certainly will help the city deal with the $14 million in cuts in state aid in the 2011-’13 state budget.

      Here is the crux of the problem.  The collective bargaining agreement was too constrictive in many more ways than just talking about how many hours per day or per week a teacher works, or their salaries.  Those things are not the cause of the budget issues in WI.  It’s the side restrictions in the agreement with PEUs that forced Walker to act so decisively (and successfully, eh?).  

      Here’s a good example of what I mean:

      In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.

      Of course, Wisconsin unions had offered to make benefit concessions during the budget fight. Wouldn’t Kaukauna’s money problems have been solved if Walker had just accepted those concessions and not demanded cutbacks in collective bargaining powers?

      “The monetary part of it is not the entire issue,” says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna’s outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

      In the past, Kaukauna’s agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust — a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. “It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says Arnoldussen. “Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.” This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

      Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. “With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, ‘We can match the lowest bid,'”

      says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

      So, don’t feel too bad.  Dems outspent R’s 2-1, picked off an R in a D district, one other (barely) was a scandal-ridden R, and got smoked in many of the counties that they had massive door-knocking and GOTV operations.  Next week, they might just give back the two seats they picked up last night, when two of the “Fleebaggers” have recalls of their own.  So, Prosser?  No.  Senate?  No.  Walker?

      Riiiiight.

      Nate Silver seems to sum up exactly how the landscape has changed for the unions and perhaps the Dems in WI.

      In total, GOP leads 52-48 among all votes counted so far tonight in Wisconsin. Walker won those districts 56-43, Obama won them 53-46.

      2012 is going to be very interesting in WI.  Looks like Schrager knew what he was doing when the rest of us were saying “Wisconsin?  Why the hell would a political reporter want to move to Wisconsin?!?”

    1. But from the headlined article PRIOR to the election:

      Wisconsin Republicans are in real danger of losing control of the state Senate in tonight’s recall elections, as it looks more and more possible that they will lose at least three of the six seats that are on the ballot.

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