Real Clear Politics:
Scott Walker beat the spread.
Sometime politics is like betting on football. It's not just about whether your team wins. It's about whether you beat the spread. The rough calculation going into Tuesday's recall election in Wisconsin was that if Governor Scott Walker won by less than five percentage points, the race would not have any clear national-level implications, but if he won by five points or more, it would. The final result, 53.2% to 46.3%, is a margin of 6.9 percentage points. He beat the spread.
It's not that simple, of course. There are an awful lot of folks on the left who are suddenly trying to tell us that the election wasn't really important and that it says nothing about the presidential race.
They have a few points on their side. They complain, for example, that Walker outspent his opponent by a good margin, something that is not likely to happen on the national level, where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are likely to be pretty evenly matched in fund-raising. The left's point on this is insidious, of course, because they are claiming that Walker "bought" the election and that the private donations of his supporters somehow constitutes the "death of democracy." Let me translate: when unions spend money to support politicians, that's democracy; when businessmen spend money to support politicians, that's an attack on democracy. It is clear who is really attacking political freedom and representative government: the side that thinks political activity is only legitimate when it puts them in power. It's no wonder they tend to admire Hugo Chavez.
But back to the national implications. The fact that one candidate raised more money than the other is not just a fact of nature. You have to ask why Walker raised more. After all, there are plenty of rich and upper-middle-class Democrats, not just in Wisconsin but around the country, and this race got lots of national attention. The unions still have millions in dues money to spend—though they're getting a lot less, now that workers actually have a choice in the matter. They also have the benefit of an extensive network of grass-roots advocates and volunteers, which can do a lot to make up for a gap in spending. Then, of course, there is the national Democratic Party.
Ah, but there's the rub. In the weeks leading up to the recall, the national party pretty much abandoned Wisconsin. Money and organization didn't flow into the state, and President Obama's contribution amounted to exactly one "tweet" the day before the vote.
Why? The national party declined to give its support because it started to become clear that Walker was going to win. Why throw good money into a lost cause, when you're going to need every penny for November? The same calculation is behind Obama's distance from this race. Why put the president's full support into this race, making it seem even more like a referendum on his presidency, if that referendum is likely to go against him? So Walker's funding advantage is not a cause but an effect. He was able to raise money because he was already winning the battle to convince the voters, and his opponent couldn't raise money because he was already losing.
A more compelling case against the national significance of Tuesday's vote is the fact that exit polls still show Obama with a strong lead among the state's voters. In other words, there were many people who voted for Walker on Tuesday who said they planned to vote for Obama in November. So support for Walker doesn't necessarily translate into support for Mitt Romney.
And yet, this seems over-optimistic on the part of Obama's supporters and too narrowly focused on the concretes of one dubious poll. To begin with, Obama's lead in the Wisconsin exit poll was seven percentage points, which sounds formidable until you realize that this is about half his 2008 margin of victory in that state. Then consider that it is still early in the general election, with Mitt Romney just starting to make his case to swing voters—and people who voted for Walker but plan to vote for Obama are the very definition of "swing voters." So you can see that Obama's current lead in Wisconsin is up for grabs.
More broadly, the issue in the Wisconsin recall was not about Walker personally. He was not recalled because he was guilty of corruption, nor was his personality or competence the central issue of the campaign. The central issue was whether the government should limit the power of unions and rein in the state's budget. Some on the left have pointed to the fact that this was not widely debated during the campaign. Instead, the big battles were over a corruption case involving some of Walker's associates, or a case in which his opponent took credit for falling crime in Milwaukee, but it turned out that the crime statistics had been fudged. So the left concludes that the battle over the unions was really irrelevant to the recall.
But this actually makes it worse for the left. Walker's limitation of union power was not bitterly contested, because it is popular. It is popular because it has been a success, moving the state government from a deficit to a surplus and helping many local governments and school boards avoid mass layoffs.
That is the wider significance that the left is trying to avoid. The Wisconsin vote reflects a national shift in favor of controlling government spending.
Jay Cost has an interesting piece in which he points out that the slowdown in growth during the Great Recession has led to a "politics of loss." The idea is that for most of the post-World-War-II era, economic growth allowed politicians to avoid difficult choices. The level of taxation stayed relatively stable as a proportion of the economy, but because the economy grew so quickly and so steadily, those taxes could keep paying for an ever more generous welfare state. So we could have an economy in which everyone seemed to gain, in which Republicans could promise to reduce taxes without slashing welfare benefits, and Democrats could keep expanding the welfare state without jacking up taxes very much.
Now that the economy has essentially stopped growing, that has been exposed as unsustainable. Every dollar paid out to public employees or to middle-class entitlements has to be taken out of the hide of taxpayers, one way or another—or if the taxpayers aren't fleeced, then the unions are going to be forced to scale back their benefits and entitlements are going to have to be reduced. It is now a zero-sum game.
I think there's something to this, except I would say that Cost is missing the bigger picture. There was always a trade-off between financing a giant welfare state and letting producers keep their money—and low growth is the product of that trade-off. I have argued elsewhere that the crisis in Europe shows that the fiscal half-life of the welfare state is about 30 years. In America, where the economy is more dynamic and the welfare state isn't as big, it took a little longer. But we are finally reaching the Thatcher Line: the point at which the government runs out of other people's money. Europe has gone over that line already—Greece maxed out Germany's credit card—and now we are approaching it.
But we still have time to turn back, and the result in Wisconsin indicates that we also have the will to turn back. Bear in mind that despite the reticence of the national party, Wisconsin Democrats put everything they had into knocking Walker out of office. Turnout on Tuesday night was exceptionally heavy, including in left-leaning strongholds like Dane County, the area surrounding the university-town enclave of Madison. Yet even with the left at full strength, the people of Wisconsin turned out to support Walker by a decisive margin. It is clear that a large segment of the political center has decided that runaway government spending and debt is the crucial problem of the day and that it has to be reined in, and they are willing to support any political leader who attempts to do so.
Wisconsin is the bellwether for that cultural-political shift, but it is not the only example. Two less-heralded votes on Tuesday were held in California, where voters in San Diego and San Jose—hardly bastions of conservatism—approved referendums cutting back on benefits for government employees. In San Jose, the measure was approved by a 70%-30% margin.
Back when Democrats took control of the House of Representative in 2006, as the public turned against President Bush, I predicted that the Democrats were nonetheless facing an eventual day of reckoning. They had won their majorities in the House and Senate largely by recruiting scores of conservative "blue dog" Democrats. But these conservative Democrats were merely used as cannon fodder to support far-left legislation like Obamacare. As we faced a crisis of mounting government debt, these congressmen had to go back to their constituents and explain why they were still in favor of fiscal restraint, even as they support a president who keeps running trillion-dollar deficits. The result is that the Blue Dog Caucus in the House has been reduced from 54 members after the 2008 election to 26 after the 2010 election, and after November, it may be winnowed down to as few as 10 congressmen.
Paul Ryan summed up the trend after the 2010 election, and events are bearing him out: "Reagan Democrats are becoming Reagan Democrats again." Democrats who are not adherents of the socialist hard left are becoming appalled at the out-of-control growth of government, and they will support any politician who has the will and the courage to rein it in.
You tell me if Barack Obama qualifies. And since he doesn't, that is why the result in Wisconsin is very bad news for his re-election prospects.
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