God has, apparently, spoken. Gov. Scott Walker has said that he has been waiting for the Almighty — and the Joint Finance Committee — to tell him if and when he should run for president.
Last week Walker filed papers with the Federal Elections Commission indicating his intention to take the plunge, with a formal announcement planned for Monday. It’s not clear whether God has totally decided or if He might change His mind in the next few days. If you pray, you might want to put in a word with Him before it’s too late.
In a sense it doesn’t matter. There is no chance that Scott Walker will be the next president of the United States and, in fact, little chance that the eventual GOP nominee (I’ll bet on Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio) can win. The big demographic glacier moves inexorably to make the nation blue in presidential years, and the Republicans have sealed their fate with their treatment of Hispanic Americans. Thank you, Donald Trump.
If you’re a Democrat, don’t get too smug about this. The party gets pasted in the off-years because its voters just don’t bother to show up when there’s no presidential race. That’s why the GOP controls Congress and a record number of statehouses.
Back to Walker. It looks to me like he’s not running for president at all, but for the second spot on the ticket. By remaking himself into the candidate of the far right he hopes to force the ultimate nominee to take him on the ticket in order to placate the base and increase enthusiasm.
But that means he has to win Iowa to establish himself as the real thing, and I would not put my money on him. He peaked too soon and made a heavy bet on that state, dominated by very conservative Evangelical Christian caucus goers. In order to capture those votes he moved too far to the right to make him electable in a general election, and the big-money GOP establishment recognizes that.
Moreover, in doing whatever it takes to win Iowa, he changed his positions on too many hot button issues. People who are against gay marriage and immigration want their candidates to have been against them always and forever, not just since the guy won his last gubernatorial election. Walker’s Republican opponents have been pointing out his flips and flops on issues that you would think should be part of the man’s core values, and they’ll continue to do so.
With everything wagered on Iowa, Walker has to win there. If he doesn’t, he’ll be gone immediately thereafter.
So what do you do with a governor after he stops being a viable national figure? The man displays no interest in actually being governor of Wisconsin. To make matters worse, his approval ratings are worse than ever, and he’s burned every bridge he ever had with the Republican majorities in the Legislature. Among many other things, they resent the fact that he put them in a terrible box on the transportation budget and then refused to offer them any way out.
What the Democrats need to be thinking about right now is how to navigate the post-Walker era. He’ll either resign before his term ends in order to cash out at Fox News and on the speaker circuit or he just won’t run for a third term in 2018. He has left so much damage in his wake — with the lowest job growth in the Midwest, we are among the top 10 states people are moving out of — that it shouldn’t be hard for a Democrat to win back the governor’s office then. But it will be.
Back in the late 1960s, Democrats joined Republicans in deciding to place the gubernatorial election in between presidential years. They did it for a noble reason — they wanted the public to focus on Wisconsin, not who the next national leader would be. But that has proved a fatefully bad deal for the Democrats. Liberal voters just vanish in the off-years, leaving the election to an older, whiter and more conservative electorate. That’s how a blue state votes twice for Barack Obama and yet elects Scott Walker and an overwhelmingly conservative Legislature.
So the great project for the Democratic Party is not so much winning the presidency. That will happen and her name will be Hillary Clinton. No, the big task for Democrats is to figure out how to get their voters to the polls in every election and how to win back some white male voters whose economic interests align with the party’s policies.
I have no doubt that God has a wonderful plan for Walker, but it involves getting rich on the lecture circuit, not leading the free world. The more interesting question is if the Democrats can find a way to win his office back and start rebuilding the state he has all but destroyed.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison.
