Count, challenge, vet, count, challenge, vet, count… Across the state, in gymnasiums and courtrooms, the process is the same. The battles are different, with the gym crowd recounting by hand the votes cast in the recent Supreme Court election under the careful eyes of journalists, police officers and groups of observers from each campaign. In the courts, lawyers have taken up the fight that started between protesters and our beloved Gov. Scott Walker and then spilled over into a history-making grassroots effort to recall the senators who fled the state, and also those who stayed and approved the measures.
Should be a fun next couple of months – a recall election every week, updates on the Prosser vs. Kloppenburg race and all that good stuff. But seriously, I’m already looking forward to the main event. In a recent poll jointly undertaken by Wisconsin Public Radio and St. Norbert College, pollsters found a majority of Wisconsinites are opposed to the recall of state senators. 57 percent oppose recalling Democrats and 53 percent oppose recalling Republicans – perhaps even more telling is only 33 and 35 percent respectively support these efforts. With the efforts to gather recall signatures going historically well, these contradictory numbers show a more accurate depiction of the state’s feelings about the senators. Namely, that they are not the root cause, or necessarily deserving of the blame, but there is a need to fix what has happened by all available means.
In the same vein, the highly politicized race between two “non-partisan” judicial candidates has now resulted in a statewide recall effort as the Democrats continue to hope for an alternative to the official results of that election. Again, however, the problem that created such huge turnouts in that election certainly wasn’t Justice David Prosser, and those who voted against him certainly couldn’t give you an in-depth view of the case history of JoAnne Kloppenburg. People had such a lack of knowledge about Kloppenburg that individuals were able to run a pro-Prosser advertisement focused around an out-of-context two-second sound bite: “I never said I was tough on crime.” A prosecutor was accused of being soft on criminals and it ended up being an effective-enough advertisement because it was only designed to give people pause before voting on a relative unknown to take a stand on an issue. So even hand-sorting through every vote in this election won’t change anything, because that certainly wasn’t the root cause.
No, the root cause is always going to come back to our once-rising GOP star, Walker. Poll numbers show Walker losing a do-over election with Mayor Barrett, with Walker only getting 45 percent of the vote, and a dead heat in a hypothetical election with progressive favorite Russ Feingold. The more interesting of the two is the data pointing towards the idea that nearly 10 percent of people who elected Walker in the first place wish they had decided otherwise. That’s a pretty blatant rejection of the idea that Walker ran a campaign on cutting out unions and defunding education. And maybe the poll is completely wrong – it did have a 5 percent error rate – and maybe the majority of people are satisfied, but I would like to find out.
In the end, all the counting and challenging and vetting and senatorial recall electing we are going to do over the next few months is great. It’s an awesome show of civic activism and an entertaining political backdrop for those hot summer months. But in the end, the verdict on how the state views the events surrounding the budget repair bill and the budget bill itself won’t be settled with anything short of a Walker recall election. Every other race or recount may have been triggered by those events, but they will all ultimately contain extra elements that will necessarily change them. None of the results will end the division in this state, until we get back to the root of that division.
These are all just April baseball games; sure, we’ve missed the competition and it’s important to see who looks good early, but it’s not the World Series. That’s what this state is waiting for, some patiently, some exceptionally actively, to know once and for all whether the people of this state approve of the disillusion of union rights and the overall direction of Wisconsin in 2011 or not. I know I do.
John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.
