Why Walker Won

Last night, National Review Online posted an article stating their opinion of the reasons Governor Walker won in Wisconsin. The recall election was a very expensive race–nearly $62 million spent by the end of May.

The article reports:

Walker won because his reform program is popular, and because it is working. The governor’s personal approval numbers in Wisconsin hover around 50 percent — not bad for a man whom most Wisconsinites have seen Photoshopped into a Hitler mustache and Nazi regalia at least once in the last year. But more telling is the popularity of Walker’s reforms. According to one recent Reason-Rupe poll, 72 percent of Wisconsinites favor the requirement that public-sector workers increase their pension contributions to 6 percent of their salaries. And 71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent instead of 6 percent of their health-care premiums.

These are actually modest reforms that did nothing more than bring the public sector employees more into line with what private sector employees receive as benefits. The savings on reforms like this can make the difference between a state having a balanced budget or sliding deeper into debt. Governor Walker brought fiscal sanity to the state budget.

The article at The Hill commented on the amount of money spent and where it came from:

Walker won because he represented the taxpayer, while his opponent represented the groups whose livelihoods depend on bilking the taxpayer. Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett served as less of an alternative than a vessel for Big Labor’s unmoored wrath. Barrett raised a mere $4 million on his own, while outside PACs did the heavy lifting — We Are Wisconsin raised more than $5.5 million in the last month alone, including seven-figure donations from AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, six-figure donations from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, and a mere $720 from its three (that’s three) individual donors. The Left will complain that Walker outspent Barrett handily, but this is no vice considering Walker also handily outraised Barrett in individual donations, about three-quarters of which were for less than $50. It was Walker’s strength, after all, that convinced national Democrats to stop spending on a race they didn’t think they could win.

It was a very good night for conservatives, but this was just one battle in a very long war. We need to understand that bringing sanity back to public employee benefits is going to be a long, hard road.

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