David Michael Miller
Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, the standard expectation when you lose an election is to make a speech that congratulates the victor and acknowledges the will of the people. It’s the classy thing to do. But Scott Walker never appeared at his election night gathering, never spoke to his supporters, never gave a concession speech. He released a statement congratulating winning Democrat Tony Evers and disappeared from view.
And when he finally made his first public appearance, more than a week later, it was clear Walker couldn’t accept the voters judgement — that they wanted change.
“In no way did I see it as a rejection,” Walker said, “but rather just a larger electorate than we’ve ever seen in the past.”
Indeed, Walker made it clear that as far as he was concerned, there wouldn’t be any changes. “The state of Wisconsin isn’t going to go backwards,” he said, in an obvious slap at the Democrats, who foolishly imagine the voters want them to lead the way, after having won all four statewide offices — including attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer — for the first since 1982.
This “backwards” move away from Republican doctrine, Walker noted, wouldn’t be possible because his party still held a majority in both houses of the Legislature — an echo of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ claim that the GOP’s legislative wins showed the election wasn’t “any kind of mandate for change.”
In fact, Republicans actually won just 1.1 million or slightly less than 46 percent of the statewide vote for the Assembly seats. They won 63 of 99 seats, 64 percent of the Assembly, because of Republican gerrymandering that packs Democratic voters into a minority of districts so hundreds of thousands of their votes are wasted.
So yes, the majority of voters in Wisconsin wanted change. But as they did with their gerrymandering, Walker, Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald now want to figure out sneaky ways to frustrate the will of the people.
They are discussing a lame-duck session of the Legislature that would pass laws giving the Legislature more power and the governor less power over appointments to various state boards.
Walker, of course, would have to sign any such bills and former Gov. Jim Doyle urged Walker to consider carefully. “There’s some obligation on a governor in that situation to not just be a partisan player anymore and be a protector of the office, and I hope the governor does that,” Doyle said. “I think that’s how many governors would see it.”
But not Walker. The changes discussed by Vos and Fitzgerald “are all things we’re open to,” Walker said.
After all, he chided, these proposals won’t “come anywhere close” to changes in state employee contracts Democrats schemed to do in the lame-duck session before Walker first took office in 2011. Except they never passed, because two Democrats voted against them.
But the most outrageous scheme the three Republicans are plotting would be to change the date of the 2020 presidential primary from April to March of that year. This would add a third election that year, sandwiched between the February primary and April general election.
It would cost taxpayers about $6.8 million for this extra election and would require voters to show up for three straight months at the polls. Hardly an idea likely to thrill the public.
Walker offered the thin rationale that this would separate the partisan presidential election from nonpartisan spring elections. But voters have somehow managed to handle a ballot mixing partisan and nonpartisan races going back forever. Besides, Walker had eight years to make this change and never did.
In fact, Walker was adamantly opposed to adding any elections: He refused to call special elections for two seats that became vacant when former state Sen. Frank Lasee and former state Rep. Keith Ripp left the Legislature in December 2017 to take jobs in Walker’s administration. He was willing to let these seats remain vacant for more than a year, until he was forced to relent and hold the elections after a group affiliated with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder filed suit to force the special elections and judges required Walker to act last March.
So why add a new election now? Because his 2016 appointee to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Daniel Kelly, might just lose in a high turnout election. Kelly is a graduate of a Christian law school who is famous for out-of-the-mainstream views, for instance, comparing affirmative action to slavery.
So Walker and the Republicans want to protect Kelly from facing what the governor just faced, “a larger electorate than we’ve seen in the past.”
Because, you see, the voters who count wanted Walker to continue as governor, which is why no concession speech was needed, and no state policies need change. And those same voters will no doubt want Kelly to win election as Supreme Court justice. It’s just a matter of arranging things to make sure that dreaded “larger electorate” doesn’t show up to demand a little too much democracy.
Bruce Murphy is editor of UrbanMilwaukee.
