Madison, Wis.
On Monday, local party officials began complaining bitterly about the lack of resources national Democratic groups are committing to the recall effort in Wisconsin. “We are frustrated by the lack of support from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association,” a top Wisconsin Democratic Party official told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
Back in January, the complaints were coming from the other end: National Democrats were irked that labor unions and others planned to spend tens of millions of dollars to recall Gov. Scott Walker — leaving less for President Obama’s re-election drive and congressional contests.
But amid increasingly poor polling numbers for Walker’s challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Democrats and their allies at the national level seem to be re-thinking their commitment to the Wisconsin race. NBC’s Chuck Todd asked recently if the DNC would be sending more cash to help Barrett; the answer from Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, was strongly noncommittal: “I don’t know the answer to that question, on the money.”
A new Public Policy Polling poll shows Walker up on Barrett by 50 percent to 45 percent, the same margin PPP found a month ago, and similar to other recent polls.
In a recent Marquette University poll, Walker was beating Barrett by a 47 percent to 35 percent margin among independents — 60 percent of whom thought the state was better off due to Walker’s changes in collective bargaining with government unions last year.
Walker has been campaigning furiously in an attempt to convince Wisconsin’s voters that his reforms are working. Barrett, meanwhile, has been trying to make the election about everything but public-sector collective bargaining — though that issue is the overriding reason the recall election was instigated in the first place.
Barrett has hammered Walker on jobs, frequently citing a Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report that ranked Wisconsin last in the nation in job growth over the past year, with a loss of more than 23,000 jobs. But Walker’s chief economist has pointed to problems in the BLS’s methodology, a change in benchmarking that caused a “bad call” on the jobs data.
And Walker’s administration just released figures that show the state gained 23,321 jobs between December 2010 and December 2011, his first year in office.
Barrett has also tried to paint Walker as corrupt, questioning the governor’s formation of a legal-defense fund stemming from a “John Doe” investigation of several former staffers who worked under him as executive of Milwaukee County. But Walker has said repeatedly that he has been told he is not the target of any investigation, and Wisconsin law allows such defense funds to cover staff.
None of Barrett’s attacks seem to be moving the electorate. While Walker’s lead has fluctuated slightly, no poll over the past several months has shown him losing among likely voters.
Presumably, national groups writing the checks are seeing the same numbers. If Wisconsin Democrats want the DNC to turn on the money hose, they’ll need to start a fire pretty quickly.
Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and contributor to National Review Online.