No Slam Dunk in Wisconsin

We don’t know the outcome of Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Wisconsin, of course, but we do know this: Even if labor somehow manages to oust Republican Governor Scott Walker, the result will be nothing like the resounding repudiation that Ohio voters delivered last year in repealing that state’s anti-collective bargaining law pushed by an equally controversial GOP governor, John Kasich. So what gives? One key difference, I suspect, is that the Ohio election was a referendum, in which voters gave a thumbs-up or –down to the law itself, while Wisconsin’s election is a recall, in which voters choose between Walker and a Democrat, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who ran against Walker in 2010 and lost by roughly the same margin that polls show him trailing Walker today. The irony here is that in Wisconsin, birthplace of American progressivism, there are no referendums or initiatives.