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What Happened to Scott Walker?
If you look back to the spring and early summer (a period before, it should be noted, he was even an officially declared candidate), there was a fair bit of talk about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as the “frontrunner” for the Republican presidential nomination. Fast forward to September, and we’ve got a new CNN poll that shows Walker as little more than a rounding error. He’s actually trailing Rick Santorum, who’s yet to make it to a prime-time debate.
Writing at Bloomberg Politics, John McCormick paints a grim picture of the current state of the Walker campaign:
The signs of his precipitous fall were all too vivid Sunday afternoon inside Serena’s Coffee Café in Amana, Iowa, where about 40 stoic supporters showed up for his first retail campaign event in the state since Wednesday’s debate.
Gone were most of the network television cameras that had followed Walker much of the summer. Just one network was on hand, along with one reporter-photographer from a nearby station in Cedar Rapids. A second event at a Pizza Ranch in Vinton, Iowa, brought out another small crowd, along with one local TV camera.
Walker lingered at both events, shaking virtually every hand. He’d woken Sunday morning to news that he’d fallen below 1 percent in the most recent national CNN poll, a new all-time low for his candidacy that could further rattle donors.
You can play out what happens next as you like. Maybe Walker is Rudy Giuliani, learning the hard way that being an early frontrunner only gives you more time to be knocked off your pedestal. Or maybe he’s John McCain, and being on the cusp of annihilation will inject a newfound sense of urgency into his campaign. In a race with dynamics this strange, I wouldn’t be willing to put down money on either proposition.
What I’m genuinely curious about is what exactly has happened to the governor over the past several months. There has been plenty of media speculation on the matter (including by me), but we’re all making, at best, educated guesses.
That’s why I’d like to turn the matter over to Ricochet members, who also seem to have cooled to the idea of Walker as the GOP nominee, albeit not at the same rate as the broader primary electorate. In our April poll, 68 percent of you identified Walker as either your first or second choice for the nomination, easily the largest number for any candidate. By the time we wrapped up the August polling, that number had dropped to 35 percent, with Walker trailing Carly Fiorina and tied with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio on the cumulative first choice-second choice total. (Walker tied Fiorina in the first choice poll, led Cruz by three points, and bested Rubio by five).
So here’s my question: for those of you who have gotten off the Walker bandwagon, what caused your defection? And are there circumstances under which you might be tempted to get back on? If so, what are they?
Published in Politics
He walked where he should’ve run.
Scott Walker = this cycle’s Tim Pawlenty.
Tommy Thompson before him.
I thought Pawlenty was likely to make the best president of the 2012 field, too. The primary electorate didn’t even look. The fact that locally successful upper Midwestern candidates seem to go this way should tell us that there’s a cultural factor at play.
That’s how this will probably get remembered, but Walker had a lot more advantages in terms of national attention and truly impressive conservative accomplishments to run on. I also think he is a better politician. So in a lot of ways Walker’s failure is more disappointing and less understandable than Pawlenty’s.
Their records are not comparable, but this is apparently not a cycle in which people are interested in records. I think that this is true to a degree unique in the modern (post 1972) primary system.
One comfort I take is that those who wanted him to run as a demagogue have not been proven right. Perry and Jindal are, like Walker, successful Governors with a substantial bank of policy achievements. Both were persuaded by their campaign managers to run a red meat campaign. Neither achieved Walker’s level of success. Similarly, the voters prefer Carson to Huckabee, who is mostly trying to pretend to be like Carson.
If either of the first two debates had focused on policy, he’d be in there. If either of them had been competently run, with similar amounts of time per candidate, he’d be there. If Trump had not drowned out policy news and debates…. etc. etc. etc. The race goes not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
Thankfully, although no candidate remains with Walker’s talent, we have a pretty amazing Congress, and any President willing to sign what it gives him will accomplish big things.
I just finally watched that speech announcing his withdrawal. Politician though he is, this is not a man who can play the demagogue.
And, James, that last debate and Walker’s announcement tonight did something else to me. I’ve been repeatedly struck and somewhat surprised by how much you dislike Cruz. I don’t know how much of that is because of history I haven’t studied. I have been hesitant from Day 1 and unimpressed by his approach to Trump. But the last few days have taken it beyond mistrust to a loss of any respect or trust I might have had. He knows better — you and I know that — and he is playing with fire for votes — for personal ambition.
Compare that to Governor Walker tonight, straightforward and clearly from the heart: he was fairly explicit, and his seriousness and absolute clarity about the threat he obviously sees to conservatism and the country puts the games Cruz is playing in a very stark light.
I can still create scenarios in which I vote for him… but I also pray they don’t happen.
Scott Walker is too boring and Trump lacks gravitas, but that Marco Rubio, he’s just so dreamy!
You sound like Donald Trump. :-P
Good observation. Could it be that the country has developed an anti midwest bias? When was the last time someone from the midwest won on a national level?
I initially picked Walker on the first Ricochet poll with Florina second. Walker had not even announced as I recall. Meanwhile Trump blew up, and Walker’s eventual kickoff was anti-climactic. Ricochetti are far more wonkish than the public, so the vanilla candidate was lost in the pink bubblegum, and rum raisin flavors on offer. I still think Walker would have made a fine President, but there are still solid electable candidates to support.
I probably wasn’t paying attention. Got a link to what you’re referring to regarding Cruz? I’ve seen a couple of pieces speculating that Cruz is a natural to pick up Trump’s voters after he flames out, but that’s it.
I don’t know if the country has an anti midwest bias. What’s not to like?
However, we are at least 2, if not more, different countries in style if not substance.
I saw Scott Walker in his role as governor, both during the Act 10 battle and since as an unflinching general. He kept the battle standard in view and it never came down. He wasn’t sleepwalking through anything, and he wasn’t carried by some tide. He steered the state through a vicious storm largely by just standing firm and always communicating what remained constant. I’m not sure that style of leadership conduct would be recognized everywhere else in the country.
Not handy — it’s something I’ve observed for myself over time more than anyone else’s analysis. But I’ll try to look up a couple links.
I don’t know where you are on Trump, so maybe it won’t strike you as harshly as it does me.
I don’t think it’s that, or not to any conscious extent. I don’t think people look at a candidate like Pawlenty or Walker and think “I don’t want to elect a Midwesterner.” But I do think they listened to Walker and Pawlenty and so on and thought “meh.” And I think that’s partly because, well, at the risk of greatly over-generalizing, people in Wisconsin — at least in my experience — are nice, all the time. So if they’re twisting the knife, they’ll be nice. And when you’re looking for a knife-twister, and you don’t have that perspective, you don’t necessarily expect niceness.
And broadly, these states are pretty liberal — Pawlenty’s Minnesota and Walker’s Milwaukee decidedly so. When you’ve developed your political skills to succeed in that environment, you can’t necessarily turn overnight into the kind of rhetorician Republican primary voters expect.
Having kept one’s principles in that environment should outweigh that. But this party’s not serious.
I did suddenly notice Walker’s accent strongly in that first debate, and it is possible that did not help him in this field of cosmopolitans.
Well, the idea of Trump getting the nomination makes me throw up a little, even though I broadly agree with him on the few topics I’ve heard him remark on concretely: campaign finance, immigration, and Carly come to mind. The man is as patently untrustworthy as Bill Clinton and as incoherent as GWB on meth.
Trump is a walking example of the Dunning-Krueger effect. “I’m going to hire smart people to take care of that, really smart ones.” Right. And the idea that the trouble with the Iran (not-a-)treaty is a matter of unskilled negotiation. Gods, this man with the strange hair helmet is stupid, no matter his business successes.
But now that Walker’s gone (how the devil did that happen?) and Perry never came out of his stupor, Cruz is all I’ve got left between me and Trump.
@Barfly — I’ve pulled together a few links on Cruz and Trump. Like I said I was going more by what I had observed in general over quite a few weeks, so it’s not like there is one particular quote.
But he has, for weeks, steadfastly refused to criticize Trump on anything. This started with Trump’s line about liking people “who weren’t captured.” He is the only candidate to do so. If that were Cruz’s usual style and he simply chose to be “above the fray” that would be one thing. But it’s not. If any other Republican had said the things Trump has about socialized medicine, for one, Cruz would have been all over them. What I didn’t realize until looking it up for you was that he was making a talking point out of his refusal to do so (that one’s from July).
This is from August. I take much of it with a grain of salt, especially from the Trump “campaign insider.” But I’ve seen other similar stories/rumors and there seems to be something there.
And here he is rallying against the Iran deal with Trump and thus treating credibly his foreign policy… insight? I don’t have a word to describe Trump on FP. That whole rally, of course, was only showboating to begin with. A day late and many dollars short. (I think those made it clear, but Cruz invited Trump.)
Oh, and he wanted to do a border patrol thing with Trump too.
Here’s one from earlier this month in which a Cruz adviser says clearly enough (in campaign spin language) that it’s political calculation.
Yes, nearly everyone took a cautious tone towards Trump at first. (Walker included, though he certainly criticized him on some things. But that was wearing thin and he wanted to let it rip — at least that’s my sense. He should’ve. In retrospect, it could have done no harm.)
On that debate stage last week, it seemed to me as though the field in general — being to varying degrees at least somewhat conservative (even the ones I’d never vote for) — decided it was past time to call out this clown show for what it was. They didn’t all get a direct chance, but one after another, in varying tones and styles, to varying effect, Paul, Bush, Walker, Fiorina, Christie, Carson, Rubio took him on directly. Cruz did not. He did name-drop Trump once for free, positively, in answer to a question about Carson.
Have to run or would add a few more thoughts.
Leigh, thanks for the roundup. There were a couple of those I hadn’t seen.
So, yeah, Cruz is taking it easy on Trump. I choose to think that he’s actually taking it easy on Trump’s supporters, tho’.
Speaking for myself, I’m conflicted on Trump. Yeah, he’s astonishingly incoherent, too ignorant to know when he’s out of his depth, a bully when he thinks he can get away with it, and a smarmy loudmouth all the time. He’d be a disaster in any office of responsibility. I swear, he’s the least coherent politician around, now that Ted Kennedy’s where he belongs.
But Trump has also tossed up several opinions I totally agree with: 2A (including the extra penalties for using a gun in a crime), campaign finance (anyone can give anyone else any money they want to for any reason, and it all has to be made public immediately), immigration (ok, maybe you can’t deport eleventy million, but nobody’s tried yet. They’ll self-deport anyway (h/t Romney) once we put the screws to the employers), and Carly (a record of failing upwards.) I can’t think of any of Trump’s domestic positions I disagree with.
continued …
… continued
So I’m in the position of despising Mr. Loathsome Combover but liking most of the policy ideas I’ve heard him blather about. If you’re bashing Cruz for not going after Trump, then it has to be your dislike for the man, not his policies, right?
Seems like Cruz is playing it very smart if he hopes to pick up Trump’s voters, who evidently would be natural Cruz supporters were it not for the media’s shiny-distracting-loudmouth factor. “Doesn’t bash Trump enough” isn’t much to hold against Cruz.
OK, back.
Cruz has built his whole career on attacking his party leadership for failing to fight for conservative principle and the Constitution.
Now on the one hand he has valid points, and his pre-political career leads one to believe he’s genuinely conservative. On the other hand, if you want to build a political career with a Texas base just now, that’s obviously the way to go. (That’s why as a rule I trust purple-state conservatives more even if they have a few more compromises on record — you can get a firmer sense of true conviction.) He’s used that to draw a lot of attention to himself for a freshman and done it in a way his base loves, without taking any risks that might affect his chosen career path. If he means it, that’s fine.
But then Trump becomes the frontrunner. Cruz is more than intelligent enough to see right through him, OK? He’s utterly untrustworthy, blatantly insincere, or outright wrong about every single issue Cruz supposedly cares about, from immigration to abortion to the courts to healthcare/spending to national security. And Cruz, who attacks Republicans at every opportunity and calls his own majority leader a liar, won’t say a word except in praise and boasts about it.
It’s one thing to admit Trump has a point or two. It’s one thing for a politician to pander a little or spin a little. (cont.)
But by standing with Trump as a conservative Cruz in effect promotes the dangerous lie that Trump is any kind of conservative or a legitimate option for those angered by the Republican leadership Cruz has built his reputation attacking. At this point, I can no longer read that as anything other than a cynical, calculating choice by an ambitious politician, one that violates every supposed principle and is vastly more damaging and serious than, say, supporting ethanol subsidies for a couple more years.
So can he be trusted on any principle whatever if it conflicts with ambition?
Contrast that to Walker. He’s out, personal ambition off the table. He was restrained, but clearly deadly serious in that press conference: When “positive conservative” leadership is “fundamentally important… to the future of our country,” the “current frontrunner” is neither positive nor conservative nor a leader. Unable at this point to provide that leadership in a way that reaches voters, he defers to others who perhaps can, and goes back to the job his state elected him to do.
Because, despite being a politician capable of maneuvering and spin, Scott Walker is ultimately conservative, principled, and serious. That sunk in again watching that press conference. Afterwards, so did the extent to which I regard Cruz’s semi-alliance with Trump. I will not say I will never vote for him, because politics offers us strange choices. But I will say he has lost my trust and my respect.
We cross-posted. Last two weren’t a response to your response, though maybe relevant.
Past my bedtime. If you want links I’ll find them. But I’ve evidently read things you haven’t. I don’t believe Trump on anything whatsoever (so even if immigration were the one issue, what’s the good of voting for him over Rubio or even Bush who is actually reliable on at least some things?). But it’s beyond that.
It’s that for someone who wants to be president he’s so unserious on life-and-death national security issues that I find it immoral. That when the Senate debated defunding Planned Parenthood, he backed the status quo. That he thinks his pro-choice sister would be a great Supreme Court pick. That he supports the abuse of eminent domain. That his actual position on immigration is incoherent unexplained nonsense. And more.
Including two that I’ll admit I take more personally than most. That he attacked Walker from the Left — specific talking points straight from the WI Democratic playbook. And that he stood on a Republican debate stage and said single-payer and socialized medicine work in Canada and “incredibly well” in Scotland. I expect politicians to be politicians, I expect RINOs and compromise. But never in my worst nightmares did I expect any Republican frontrunner to say that. It hit me right in the gut.
That he still leading the polls and Walker is out… I have no words.
Leigh, we agree Trump is untrustworthy, probably dangerous and certainly a disaster for this year’s primary. It sounds like you extend his aura of awful to cover Cruz, on the basis that Cruz didn’t go after Trump as strongly as some of the other candidates. Is that correct?
No, it is not that. It is not that Cruz did not criticize him “as strongly.” That is no way of putting what Cruz is doing. This is what I said:
Cruz’s whole rationale is that he is the true principled conservative, the one who stands against the fake unprincipled establishment leaders. But when the fake doesn’t come in the hated establishment guise, he’s quite happy to cheer on the fake, and treat the fake as real, and stand side by side with him. To refuse to criticize him at all (not criticize him less strongly), and to boast explicitly that he’s the only one refusing to do so
Which indicates that the whole anti-establishment thing is just political posturing to begin with.
Since he outright says that in his book (he discovered that it polled well, so he started doing it), I don’t think one needs a lot of circumstantial evidence to support the theory.
Haven’t read the book. Do you happen to have the quote? Somehow I doubt he puts it quite that bluntly…
His book isn’t searchable through Amazon (I think he’s the only candidate who made that choice), but he talks about the polling he did before his Senate campaign. He discovered that “a willingness to stand up to the ruling political class in both parties” polled best, so they made that the central message of his campaign.
His book is ceaselessly polite about the ruling political class as individuals, making only two criticisms of named Senators; Paul when Paul disagreed with him (when Paul agrees with him, he’s being courageous), and McConnell. Every other long term political figure he mentions by name, from Pat Roberts to John Roberts to Paul Clement to Orrin Hatch, he’s kind about. He’s not even mean about Boehner, whose lawyer he was for a while.
Every other mention is about the party as a whole, or of the establishment, or of the leadership, in general. This also tends to be true of his speeches, which is why when I knock on doors for Ron Freaking Johnson, I am constantly told that people will not vote for him because he’s a coward who craves on the issues. If Cruz picked fights exclusively with named people, it would do far, far, less damage, but my understanding is that the polling is correct. His more cowardly approach is also superior from the perspective of personal benefit.
In addition to his general preference being to suck up to those in power around him, he had no record of attacking the party before he started his senate campaign polling and focus grouping.