by Scott Walker
They would not stand strong very long. By May 2012, Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent reported that “top Wisconsin Democrats are furious with the national party—and the Democratic National Committee in particular—for refusing their request for a major investment in the battle to recall Scott Walker.”7 He quoted a top Wisconsin Democrat as saying, “We are frustrated by the lack of support from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association. Scott Walker has the full support and backing of the Republican Party and all its tentacles. We are not getting similar support.”
Wisconsin Democrats had apparently asked the DNC for $500,000 to help with their massive field operation, but the money never came.
Finally, with a month to go before the vote, President Obama broke his silence sending out an e-mail to his supporters that read:
The next election here in Wisconsin is coming up on June 5th—and it’s important to make sure your voice is heard. For the last year and a half, Governor Walker has divided Wisconsin—siding with big corporations and the super-rich at the expense of working, middle-class families. He’s broken our trust in state government: Too many Wisconsin families are out of work, students face crowded classrooms, and working men and women will be hurt by cuts to health care funding.8
Like Mayor Barrett, he failed to mention Act 10 or collective bargaining. And the fact is, the president never set foot in Wisconsin to deliver that message in person. After his January 2011 visit, the month of my inauguration, President Obama made only one other pre-recall visit to Wisconsin—an official visit to Master Lock in Milwaukee in February 2012. He didn’t return again to the state until Labor Day—three months after the recall election.
Making the snub hard to miss, on June 3, 2012, the president attended three fund-raisers in Minnesota and then traveled to nearby Chicago to attend three more fund-raisers in his home state. He was a short helicopter ride away from Wisconsin but could not find the time to visit us. In fact, he actually flew over Wisconsin not once, but twice—on his way from Washington to Minnesota, and then on his way from Minnesota back to Chicago—but didn’t bother to stop.
Before President Obama arrived in the region, my opponent, Tom Barrett, almost pleaded for the president to make a pit stop. “We’d love to have him zip over to western Wisconsin. I’m happy to meet him for a fish fry,” Barrett said hopefully.9
But when the president came and went without stopping in Wisconsin, Barrett was left to say that he wasn’t concerned. “We understand that he’s got a lot going on.”10
For her part, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter explained the president’s failure to campaign for Barrett this way: “This is a gubernatorial race with a guy who was recalled and a, you know, a challenger trying to get him out of office. It has nothing to do with President Obama.”11
Translation: You’re on your own.
According to a Marquette University Law School poll, the president enjoyed a 52 percent approval rating in Wisconsin, and led Mitt Romney 51-43 among likely voters at the time of the recall—a comfortable eight-point margin.12 Yet he was unwilling to spend any of that political capital to help defeat me.
When he ran for office in 2008, Senator Obama had promised to stand with the unions in no uncertain terms. “If American workers are being denied their right to organize when I’m in the White House,” candidate Obama declared, “I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes and I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States.”13 So if he truly believed that we were engaged in an “attack on unions,” why didn’t he put on some comfortable shoes and show up in Wisconsin?
It was the ultimate validation that our reforms had worked, that we had turned the debate around. The president of the United States was unwilling to campaign against us.
I believe the reason that President Obama failed to campaign against us in Wisconsin is simple: He knew a significant number of his supporters were also backing me in the recall, and he did not want to alienate them before the presidential election. It was a smart decision. If he stayed out of it, these Obama-Walker voters were free to support both of us. But if he came to Wisconsin to campaign against me, he would be effectively asking them to choose. And if they chose me, it could have been a major blow to his aspirations for a second term.
After the recall, exit polls showed that roughly one in six of those who voted for me on June 5 also planned to vote for President Obama on November 6.14 These Obama-Walker voters constituted about 9 percent of the overall electorate. Since then, their ranks have expanded. In May 2013, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote: “Remember those confounding Obama-Walker voters of 2012? They’re still with us. In Marquette [Law School’s] two 2013 polls, 11% approve of both politzians.”15
The Marquette poll found that President Obama and I enjoyed almost identical approval ratings: 51 percent approval and 45 percent disapproval. The Journal Sentinel explained the phenomenon this way: “Walker and Obama occupy a similar niche in Wisconsin. They are loved in their own party, loathed in the other party and performing just well enough with independents to come out even or slightly ahead in the overall court of public opinion.”
In the recall, we had done more than simply mobilize the conservative base. We had persuaded at least some of President Obama’s supporters to support us. We took our message to the persuadable segment of the electorate, and persuaded them.
If Mitt Romney had done the same thing, he might well be sitting in the Oval Office today.
CHAPTER 21
What Wisconsin Looks Like if We Lose
With just six weeks to go before the recall election, on April 17, 2012, I campaigned in a place where no one could vote for me: Springfield, Illinois.
It might have seemed like an odd decision at the time. Polls showed that the race in Wisconsin was neck and neck, too close to call. So why was I wasting precious time traveling out of state a few weeks before voters went to the polls?
The answer was simple: Illinois was central to our plan for winning the recall.
Our strategy was to frame the recall election as a choice between going forward and going backward. We could go backward to the days of billion-dollar budget deficits, double-digit tax increases, and record job losses. Or we could keep moving Wisconsin forward—balancing our budget without raising taxes or massive layoffs while creating tens of thousands of new jobs for the people of our state.
Well, just across the border in Illinois was a real-time example of what moving backward looked like. By highlighting the failures of the politicians in Springfield, we would show voters in Wisconsin what would become of our state if I lost the recall election.
That’s why, when I was invited by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, I jumped at the opportunity to highlight our record in Wisconsin and compare it with the dismal record of the politicians in a state the Wall Street Journal had dubbed “The Greece Next Door.”1 Like everywhere else I went, union bosses sent protesters to greet me in Springfield.2 Several thousand people showed up to picket my speech. They brought the same giant rat that had graced the Capitol Square in Madison, and signs with my picture on them that read, “Don’t Badger us!”
Inside, the reception from business leaders was much warmer. “Members of my fan club are outside, many of whom were bused into Wisconsin last year,” I told the crowd. “If voters in our state want to know the difference between going forward or backward, they need only look at the mess that you have in state government here in Springfield to know what it would be like if the recall ultimately prevails.”3
The contrast between our states was stark indeed: In 2010, the citizens of Illinois already paid the ninth-highest state and local taxes in the nation according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.4 Then, in 2011, Governor Pat Quinn announced the largest state income tax increase in Illinois history, raising taxes on individuals by 67 percent and taxes on businesses by 46 percent.
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Quinn had explicitly declared that he was not going to do what Wisconsin was doing. A year later, it was clear that he had not. In Madison we made the tough choices that allowed us to avoid massive layoffs, tax increases, and cuts to programs like Medicaid. In Springfield, by contrast, Governor Quinn had proposed shutting down fourteen state facilities, raising taxes more, cutting Medicaid by $2.7 billion, and laying off thousands of public employees.
According to the New York Times,5 Illinois’s pension system is the worst-funded in the country, underfunded by an estimated $96 billion. In January 2012, Moody’s downgraded Illinois’s bond rating to the lowest in the nation (even worse than California’s), declaring that “the state took no steps to implement lasting solutions to its severe pension underfunding or its chronic bill payment delays.”6 Worse still, in March 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Illinois with securities fraud for shortchanging the state pension system. In contrast Wisconsin’s is the only pension system in the country that is essentially fully funded. At this writing, Wisconsin is running a budget surplus, while Illinois’ debt is $9 billion and growing.
To put the Illinois fiscal disaster in context, Fox News reported earlier this year that Illinois owed $165,462 to a company called Seville Staffing for “third-party debt collection.”7 As correspondent Steve Brown explained, that meant that “Illinois owes money to a company it hired to collect money owed to the state of Illinois.”
That is how bad it is in the Land of Lincoln: Illinois is so broke, it can’t even afford to pay its own debt collectors.
One Illinois official who desperately needs the tools in Act 10 is Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. In 2011, thanks to rising salaries, pensions, and health care costs, the Chicago public school system was facing an immediate $700 million deficit. According to the Wall Street Journal,8 the average Chicago teacher was making $71,000 a year in salary, plus pensions and benefits worth $15,000 or more a year.9 By contrast, the median household income for a Chicago worker in the private economy was $47,000—and that private worker contributed much more to his or her pension and health care (if he or she had them at all).
No matter, the teachers were about to get a 4 percent annual pay raise that would have added another $100 million to the Chicago school district’s $700 million deficit.
The situation was unfair and unsustainable. So Mayor Emanuel canceled the teachers’ pay raise. “I can’t, in good conscience, continue an implicit understanding between parties that left our children on the side of the road,” Emanuel declared. “I will not accept our children continuing to get the shaft.”10
Not only did Emanuel cancel the pay raise, he also demanded a series of reforms, such as lengthening the school day (at five hours and forty-five minutes, Chicago’s elementary schools had the shortest day of any urban district in the country), modest changes in health care, an expansion of charter schools, merit pay, and a principal assessment system in which student test scores make up half of an educator’s evaluation.
Local reporters dubbed Emanuel “The Democrats’ Scott Walker.”11 For President Obama’s former chief of staff, that was not a compliment. But the fact is, Emanuel’s proposed reforms were much more modest than those we had enacted in Madison. During his campaign for mayor he had even assured Chicagoans that he would “totally . . . reject the approach the Governor of Wisconsin has taken.”12
But that did not prevent union leaders from responding as if he had taken on collective bargaining itself.
They called a strike that kept 350,000 students out of school for seven days. When the dust settled Emanuel ended up with a few concessions, such as extending the school day. But according to local press accounts, the union came out ahead on most other issues. Teachers got a raise of 17.6 percent over four years—an increase that the Chicago Sun-Times reports “drained every last penny of reserves” from the school district’s budget, thus requiring “four years of up-to-the-limit property tax increases.”13
The results were unfortunate, but entirely predictable. On March 22, 2013, Emanuel announced he was shuttering sixty-one school buildings—closings that would affect some thirty thousand students, almost all in African-American neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
Chicago schools were closing to pay for the new teachers’ contract. Thanks to collective bargaining, Chicago’s kids are “continuing to get the shaft.”
The school closings did not solve the mayor’s fiscal problems. Soon after the closures were announced, the Wall Street Journal reported that the mayor was about to face “a showdown with labor unions” over the city’s municipal pension shortfalls.14 Chicago’s retirement system for teachers and city workers is underfunded by almost $24 billion, the Journal reported. Within three years, annual pension costs for city workers will more than double, from less than $500 million today to $1.1 billion. Covering these costs would require a 150 percent increase in property taxes to cover the costs—which Emanuel has ruled out.
So what are his options? “Mr. Emanuel could try to reach agreements on benefits cuts with individual unions, though such efforts so far have fallen flat,” the Journal wrote. “Or he could bypass unions by persuading the Illinois legislature to trim pension benefits for city employees and current retirees or give the city the power to do it.”15
In other words, if the unions’ intransigence continues, Emanuel will have no choice but to seek authority from the Illinois legislature to impose the changes on the unions.
Maybe he will be the “Democrats’ Scott Walker” after all.
In Wisconsin, we don’t have any of these problems. We made the structural changes and the tough decisions necessary, to balance our budget without mass layoffs, school closures, or protracted negotiations with public sector union bosses who put their interests ahead of students and their state.
This wisdom of our approach became even clearer when, in March 2013, the state of Illinois struck a new collective bargaining agreement with its public employees union, AFSCME 31. Behind the scenes, Governor Quinn apparently decided to follow Wisconsin’s lead after all by demanding significantly higher health care contributions from state workers. But because he did not reform collective bargaining, as we had, the unions were able to resist his entreaties.
In a secret memo to his members, AFSCME executive director Henry Bayer boasted that while the governor had “cited the state’s dire fiscal straits, high health care costs, and soaring deficits in pressing for lower compensation for state workers,” the union “resisted a barrage of attacks on the rights and benefits of union members” and made clear “we would not be made scapegoats for fiscal problems we didn’t cause.”16
In the end, AFSCME agreed to a modest 1 percent increase in employee contributions to health care premiums. But, the union declared, that increase will be “more than offset” by a 4 percent general pay increase during the contract period. As the union boasted to its members, “The Bargaining Committee fought for more than a year against these excessive increases—and beat them back!”
When people ask why I insisted on ending collective bargaining for everything but wages, the answer is simple: because this is precisely the kind of inflexibility we would have seen from public sector unions in Wisconsin. It is the same inflexibility I saw from the union bosses when I was Milwaukee County executive. Now, because of our actions, they cannot stand in the way of commonsense reforms in Wisconsin the way they still do in Illinois.
The results are there for all to see. In 2009, before I took office, a survey by the statewide chamber of commerce found that just 4 percent of the employers in Wisconsin thought the state was headed in the right direction. Today, 94 percent of those employers said Wisconsin is heading in the right direction. (I’m a competitive guy, so I won’t be satisfied till we win over that last 6 percent.)
In the Chief Executive Magazine annual survey on the best and worst states for business, Wisconsin made the bigg
est jump of any state following our reforms, and one of the largest in the history of the survey, rising seventeen points in one year—from forty-first in the nation in 2010 to twenty-fourth in 2011.17 (By 2013, we had risen even further, to seventeenth—a twenty-four-point upswing since we took office.18) By contrast, that same ranking saw Illinois drop forty spots in five years. The Land of Lincoln, Chief Executive Magazine declared, “is now in a death spiral.”19 That’s because politicians in Springfield failed to make the same kinds of tough decisions we made in Madison.
In my speech to the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, I noted that there was an old Wisconsin tourism slogan we once used to lure visitors across the border from Illinois: “Escape to Wisconsin.” It still works, I told them, only now we use it to lure Illinois businesses.
The message was received loud and clear back home in Wisconsin. As the recall approached, I told folks every chance I got that if they wanted to see what going backward looked like, all they had to do was take a look across the border at the fiscal disaster in Illinois.
That was what was at stake in the recall election.
CHAPTER 22
“You Can’t Recall Courage”
The final stretch before the recall election was extremely stressful. We had pulled slightly ahead of Mayor Barrett but not by a wide enough margin to provide us with any real comfort. I was conscious of the fact that no governor had ever survived a recall in our country before. To win, we would have to do more than simply defeat my opponent—we would have to defy history.
Tonette was nervous as well. This wasn’t like our race in 2010, when we could just feel the victory coming. Moreover, the protesters had been right about one thing: The whole world was watching. Everything we stood for was on the line. In the final weeks, we campaigned across the state together as a family. Tonette and the kids had endured so much—the protesters outside our home, the hecklers, and the death threats. After everything they had been through, I wanted to win it for the three of them.