Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) reacted Wednesday afternoon to the super-close state Supreme Court race — in which liberal-backed challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg now leads incumbent conservative Justice David Prosser, thanks to popular reaction against Walker’s anti-public employee union legislation. Walker’s response: Blame it on Madison — which he said is in a “very different world” from the majority of the state.
WisPolitics reports:
Gov. Scott Walker said this afternoon that the spring election results show there are “two very different worlds in this state.”
“You’ve got a world driven by Madison, and a world driven by everybody else out across the majority of the rest of the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said at a press conference in the Capitol.
“For those who believe it’s a referendum, while it might have a statewide impact that we may lean one way or the other, it’s largely driven by Madison, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee,” he also added. “But those Senate recall elections on both the Democrat and Republican side aren’t being held in Madison, they aren’t being held in Milwaukee.”
The state capital city of Madison, a liberal college town and Democratic stronghold, has been the site of massive protests against Walker for the past month and a half, often numbering in the tens of thousands.
Out of Kloppenburg’s roughly 740,000 votes, about 133,000 came from Dane County, and another 128,000 from Milwaukee County. She now leads by just over 200 votes in the current count. In those two counties, Prosser won about 48,000 and 99,000 votes, respectively, out of his 740,000 total. This in turn leaves about 479,000 Kloppenburg voters, and 593,000 Prosser voters, in the rest of the state.
So perhaps Walker has a point: If the state’s two largest Democratic strongholds didn’t count, perhaps he could get a majority.
Though even here, Walker’s point on the district counts is not quite true — for example, Kloppenburg won a 60%-40% margin in the western Wisconsin district of state Sen. Dan Kapanke, one of the Republicans who has been targeted for recall.
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