According to recently released polling data, Gov. Scott Walker would only barely survive a special election where recall petitions filed against him.
The study, commissioned by Wisconsin Public Radio and conducted by St. Norbert College, interviewed 400 adults by phone between April 5 and April 18. Part of the interview concerned recall elections and whether Wisconsinites supported removing the governor and senators from office if a recall election is held.
Just under half – 48 percent – of respondents said they would vote to keep Walker in office, while 47 percent would remove him from his gubernatorial responsibilities.
The same 400 interviewees felt less strongly about removing senators from office in a recall election. Just more than half of those surveyed said they would keep Republican senators in office and 35 percent would remove them. There was a larger number of respondents that said they would keep Democrats in office – 57 percent.
University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden said the poll results show less citizens in favor of recalling the senators because they see Walker as the most responsible for the political upheaval that has taken place in Wisconsin throughout the past three months.
“Only about a third of a public is willing to vote against state legislators,” Burden said in an email to The Badger Herald. “This might reflect lower levels of information about what individual state senators have been doing, but it’s also that Walker’s role is more deserving of sanction.”
Wisconsin’s rules allow for the recall of any elected official that has been in office for at least one year, meaning a recall petition signature drive for Walker could not begin until January. Around 533,000 signatures would be required to trigger a recall election against the governor, which is 25 percent of the total number of votes cast for governor in the November 2010 primary.
Another poll conducted by St. Norbert asked respondents to agree or disagree with certain provisions in Walker’s proposed biennial budget.
Of the cuts to state programs contained in the budget, a majority of interviewees disapproved of the $834 million cut to public K-12 schools, $250 million cut to the UW System and cuts and changes to SeniorCare prescription drug benefits.
