In Wisconsin, two of yesterday’s races were being touted as a referendum on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) rather extremist anti-worker, anti-middle class agenda. Now it is mostly all over but for the recounts.
The second most important race is for Gov. Walker’s former position as Milwaukee County executive, a post he held from 2002 to 2010. The Republican candidate state Rep. Jeff Stone (R-Greendale), who is portrayed in the liberal blogosphere as a Scott Walker clone. The opponent is philanthropist and political newcomer, Chris Abele (D).
The result? A +22% landslide for Abele:
Abele had 61% of the vote to 39% for Stone, according to unofficial results with all votes counted
The voters of Milwaukee county have spoken: “Walker clone sucks,” or maybe, “We don’t trust no Republicans no more,” or, perhaps, “We dislike Gov. Walker’s extremism and won’t elect his cronies.” It’s hard to adjudicate amongst these options without additional information.
The most important election is for state Supreme Court, where Justice David Prosser (the incumbent) is up against Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg. Kloppenburg is the liberal and Prosser is the semi-crazy conservative in this non-partisan race. Where’d I get the “semi-crazy” from? Well…let’s politely overlook the fact that Sarah Palin has endorsed him (perhaps against his will!). Let’s ask former Gov. Patrick Lucey (D) who, until early April, was the honorary co-chairman of Prosser’s campaign:
“I have followed with increasing dismay and now alarm the campaign of Justice David Prosser, whom I endorsed at the outset of his campaign and in whose campaign I serve as the honorary co-chairman,” Lucey said in the statement. “I can no longer in good conscience lend my name and support to Justice Prosser’s candidacy. Too much has come to light that Justice Prosser has lost that most crucial of characteristics for a Supreme Court Justice — as for any judge — even-handed impartiality. Along with that failing has come a disturbing distemper and lack of civility that does not bode well for the High Court in the face of demands that are sure to be placed on it in these times of great political and legal volatility.”
With no prior information we would might expect the incumbent to prevail.
The election is too close to call. The last numbers I could find have Prosser leading by 585 votes with 34 of 3,596 precincts left to report. As it happens most of the 34 precincts are from pro-Kloppenburg counties.
Starting with the table found here, I project (using ONLY the county-wide percentages and estimate of the number of votes remaining) that there will be 6,546 additional votes for Kloppenburg and 4,871 additional votes for Prosser. After we take into account Prosser’s 585 lead this evening, Kloppenburg should have a final lead of about 1,091 votes. The wrench in the calculations is that I have no idea how many absentee ballots and provisional ballots will be counted and how they will break.
The losing candidate will, no doubt, request a recount (which, under Wisconsin law is not automatic). My hunch is that the recount will favor Kloppenburg a bit (keep in mind what happened in Cantwell–Gorton, 2000; Gregoire–Rossi, 2004; Franken–Coleman, 2008). But watch out for those absentee ballots and provisional ballots…they add considerable uncertainty to any projections.
So, who really wins…Workers or Walker? Given the closeness of this race, it will be hard for either side to make too much over the eventual winner. That said, the expectation that a incumbent should win such a race means that a Kloppenburg win, and maybe even a very close loss, provides modest evidence that Wisconsin voters have joined with their Milwaukee county brethren to give Gov. Walker a collective thumbs down.
Update: With three precincts left to report, it looks like Kloppenburg will lead with about 260 votes. Wisconsin absentee voter law requires ballots to arrive by the 8 pm poll-closing time on election night. There is a limited postmark exception for some overseas military personnel, but the exception doesn’t apply to this election.
There should be a hand full of provisional ballots to count. This 2008 memo points out that provisional ballots must be “dealt with” by 4:00 pm today:
A provisional ballot is used when a person attempts to vote who is required to provide proof of residency but who does not have such proof with them. […]
The person is to be offered the opportunity to vote a provisional ballot and if they agree, are to be provided with envelope marked “ballot under s. 6.97 stats.” The person shall be required to sign written affirmation on envelope that they are qualified elector in that ward or district and is eligible to vote. The ballot shall be noted with “s. 6.97” and person’s name placed on separate list. The person then has until 4 pm the day after the election to provide identification in order for vote to be counted.
For the most part, individuals required to provide proof of residency are those who register to vote on election day. There won’t be many, and as a group they should be younger (new voters), more transient (new state residents), and angrier (formerly inactive) than the general population. I suspect the provisionals will add to Kloppenburg’s lead.
Update II: Now there is one outstanding precinct and Kloppenburg has a 224 vote lead. The remaining county, Jefferson, went for Prosser 58% to 42%. Hence, if the precinct follows the overall county proportions, and is an average sized precinct for the county, Kloppenburg’s lead should be about 139 votes!
Last night I told Goldy last night I wanted Kloppenburg to come out 129 votes ahead (remember 2004?)…I may well get my wish!
Update III: Hmmm…I’ve been using the AP for election results, and they still have one precinct to go in Jefferson county. So I go to the Jefferson county web site and find updated numbers. Assuming none of the other numbers have changed, Prosser gains 2 votes when that last precinct is tallied.
Update IV: The AP has finally gotten that last precinct nailed. Some other numbers have changed a bit, probably as provisional ballots are resolved before the 4:00 pm CDT deadline (2:00 pm PDT).
The current tally has Kloppenburg leading Prosser by 204 votes.
Canvassing must be complete and reported by April 15th. The recount request from Prosser will come a few days later.
Update V: Too funny! Via WisPolitics:
“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,” the governor said.
Here is a beautiful map. Gosh…Madison has sure grown since I’ve lived there….it’s, like, one quarter of the state now! And who knew it had that “suburb” way up north along Lake Superior?
Of course, Walker was elected County Executive in Milwaukee county just a few years ago. And yesterday the county went 61% to 39% in favor of Democrat Chris Abele for the same position. And Milwaukee county went 57% to 43% in favor of Kloppenburg over incumbent Justice Prosser. (Ten years ago Prosser ran unopposed, so we cannot fairly compare the past results.)
I saw the Democratic county executive candidate ad played on Maddow last night, and it showed at least one voter saying, they can’t afford 4 more years of Walker in the county courthouse. Must have been a clincher. Reminds me of in California, the clincher ad for Jerry Brown last year. Whitman had said she moved to California 30 years ago because it was a great place, Brown took it and ran with it, going “…and who was Governor 30 years ago?” He won that race, and I wonder if it could be called them “San Francisco” values the GOP trash, although Jerry Brown is not from there, more like Oakland, and he commutes to Sacramento, since when he was Governor the first time, he sold the new mansion his predecessors(Reagan, and Reagan’s predecessor, Brown’s dad) had planned to replace the original one with.
As for the judicial race, still looks too close to call, and I heard that in some places, they ran out of ballots!
Something off topic, the Southwest Flight that made an emergency landing near Yuma last week, after the hole formed in the fuselage. I wonder if the Flight Attendants will get the Lansing Award? It’s an honor given to flight crew that go above and beyond the call of duty, but it is rarely awarded, only when a situation arises where it happens, not every year. One of the most recent awardees were the flight attendants aboard US Airways 1549, and as a side note, the co-pilot on that flight spoke at one of the Madison protests. I brought that up, because the Lansing award is named after the Flight Attendant that died on Aloha Airways Flight 243, when the front part of the passenger cabin fell apart due to fatigue. The C.B. Lansing award is not awarded by the FAA, or the Air Transport Association(the industry lobbying group), but the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America. The world’s largest flight attendants union. The GOP in the US Senate are after them, trying to undo Obama’s National Mediation Board’s decision to change the part of the Railway Labor Act(which also governs aviation unions) that counts those who did not vote, as no Votes. The act, passed when Coolidge was President, was designed to keep the nation moving during a labor dispute, although strikes have happened, both in the railroads, and in the airlines. FDR amended it to cover airlines during the 1930s.
http://www.afacwa.org/default.asp?id=1298
The unions rights that have been diminished, that everyone and the articles are talking about are for the local governments and school boards to use in balancing their budgets. Without this the local governments and school boards are at the mercy of the very large state unions. So if you were to read and wait to react you may be able to understand why this is happening!
How come this is good “Without this (The unions rights that have been diminished) the local governments and school boards are at the mercy of the very large state unions.”
but anything that diminishes the power of wealth and privilege like billionaires and large corporations that also pressure local governments and school boards is bad, very bad.
I believe that the Milwaukee County Executive seat has been traditionally held by a Democrat, has it not? So reversion to the norm means, what, exactly? Walker was elected after a scandal that harmed the Democrat before him.
Regarding the statewide WI supreme court vote, all that union support, all that union money, all that union organization, no competing elections elsewhere so the unions could focus on just WI. And they only reached a virtual tie? What happens next year, when the union has to support Obama and can’t focus on one WI election? The WI judicial outcome, whatever it may finally be, does not bode well for union strength going in to 2012.
There’s no more money. Time to cut spending. Game over.
There is more money (but it was given away as a payback gift to Walker’s business supporters in the form of a tax break, aka corruption; quid pro quo).
Time to raise taxes on the blood sucking beau monde.
Game on.
Bob @ 4: You are forgetting a couple of things about the WI Supreme Court race. First, it is incredibly hard for a challenger to win against an incumbent in those races. I don’t know the exact statistics, but I would be surprised if the percentage of successful challenges was in the lower single digits. The restrictions on what a candidate can say and do usually make it near-impossible for a challenger to even get a notice in the newspapers, unless (as the old saw goes) the incumbent was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
Secondly, with this in mind, it is incredibly hard for a challenger to raise money to win such a race. Not only are the percentages working so far against them, but the names of their donars are going to be publically available, and every lawyer or judge who might potentially have a case before the state Supreme Court has to think long and hard about whether they want to publically support the challenger.
So the result in this case was that the challenger chose to select public financing for her campaign, which under Wisconsin law put a very low limit on the amount of money she could raise. Long before Walker’s campaign to kill the unions became news, she had already reached that limit, and could not accept donations, or even in-kind contributions.
This meant that the only thing the unions could do was to campaign on her behalf the old-fashioned way – door-to-door and workplace organizing. You could argue that is better than money, but remember that the Wisconsin state airwaves were full of ads by the incumbent right up to the election (he seemed to be well-financed), with counter ad campaign by the challenger. If someone didn’t watch the news regularly (a “low-information voter”), or wasn’t in a family with a union member, they might not have known anything about the challenger at all, or that race’s impact on the Walker/Union issue.
The fact that Kloppenberger has got a real chance at winning is a pretty encouraging sign that democracy can still win without big money.
Kloppenburg back in the lead with 5 precincts to count. 3 in counties that went to her and 2 in counties that went to Prosser.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/f.....N=POLITICS
Once the wingnut vision is manifest and Wisconcin’s once proud work force loses it’s rights and sees their wages lowered, when they see Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and welfare gone, Social Security gone, the old social contract broken, well, they can all just turn to wingnut charity to get by.
Speaking of wingnut charity, Bristol Palin pulled in a sweet $262,500 from a wingnut non-profit for all the important independent contract work she did for them. In fact, she was their highest paid contractor. Alas, once all the wingnuts received their just due for all that they do, there was only $35,000 left over to give to teen pregenancy prevention centers.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/.....pregnancy/
heh- Fuck the nation’s social contract.
Ivory Coast Dictator Clings To Bunker
His army and power gone, Laurent Gbagbo is still clinging to the only thing he has left: His bunker, which is now surrounded by troops loyal to the country’s new, duly-elected, president. A French official calls the ex-dictator’s stubborn refusal to surrender “absurb.” A military operation to flush him out not only could kill him, but also his wife and children; it appears he doesn’t care if he takes them with him.
WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee’s largest television news station, has Kloppenburg’s lead at 447 votes, with parts of West Allis (a working-class Milwaukee suburb) and several outlying counties still to report. The TV station says the race is “too close to call” and says a recount is likely.
Back in 2004, Gov. Gregoire’s 8-vote lead after the hand recount, but before the King County Canvassing Board tallied disputed ballots, proved insurmountable. The canvassing board added 121 more votes to her lead, and the GOP’s hand-picked Republican judge in a hand-picked Republican county added 4 more (by subtracting 4 fraudulent votes from Dino Rossi’s total). Compared to these numbers, soon-to-be-ex-judge Prosser’s 447 (or 585) vote deficit looks like Mount Everest. Wisconsin is comparable to Washington in population and electorate size.
A Kloppenburg election victory, as now seems probable, doesn’t automatically mean the Wisconsin supreme court will strike down Walker’s union-stripping bill, of course. Judges, even Republican judges, generally adhere to the rules of the judicial game. Meaning, you wait until hearing all the evidence and arguments before making a decision, and you base that decision on a reasoned application of law. Thus, it’s possible a Justice Kloppenburg might vote to uphold the bill. Or, that all three remaining Republican judges might vote to strike it down, handing Walker and the two Fitzgeralds a unanimous decision that the legislature passed the bill with illegal procedures. Given my admittedly limited knowledge of what the legal issues and Wisconsin laws are, my best guess is that Walker and his RNC puppet-masters have failed in their bid to disembowel Wisconsin’s Democratic Party and its public-union supporters. And, in all likelihood, have hardened resistance against Republican playbook fascism throughout the United States and spawned a new guerrilla resistance against their attempted seizure of absolute power by parliamentary trickery.
@2 Let’s get real here. Those unions have been around for many years, and the school boards and local governments didn’t collapse. And public union workers still aren’t living in McMansions or driving Porsches. Today’s fiscal problems resulted from Republican economic policies that led to a depression, and Republican fiscal policies of cutting taxes for businesses in the midst of a revenue downturn, not because public workers have made exorbitant demands or make a cushy living.
Even before Wisconsin public unions gave Walker the $137 million in pension and health care benefit cuts he asked for, he and his GOP cronies had already passed $117 million of new tax breaks for out-of-state businesses. As this shows, any argument that the union-stripping bill is necessary because of fiscal problems is sheer bullshit. Like the GOP bill to strip students, the elderly, and the poor of their voting rights, the GOP bill to strip workers of their collective bargaining rights is a Machiavellian power play designed to weaken the Democratic Party and turn Wisconsin into a one-party state run by an elite minority bent on manipulating government for their own financial enrichment. Wisconsin voters aren’t stupid and have seen through this naked scheme.
Wow that’s a myth. How about a lie. In fact there’s so much money sloshing about in the world it’s almost impossible for it to find a reasonable rate of return.
http://www.thisamericanlife.or.....l-of-money
Of the american portion of that pool, all you gotta do is tax it and spend it on reasonable stuff that’ll give people jobs – like keeping bridges from falling, teachers, stuff like that?
@4 Keep telling yourself it’s a “tie” the day Kloppenburg is sworn in … she needs to win by only 1 vote, Ace, and she’s got it (and a few hundred extras). And considering that conservatives outspent liberals by $800,000 in this race, and given the fact that incumbent judges normally are a slam-dunk for re-election, the fact Prosser is trailing isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of his popularity with voters. Yeah, Wisconsin has enough head-up-their-asses wingnut voters to make it a horse race — after all, this is the state that sent Joe McCarthy to the U.S. Senate — but after all the votes are counted, in all probability, the game is up for the fascist wing of Wisconsin’s fascist party. Wisconsin, at rock bottom, is a working-class state; and the Trotskyites’ belief that they could seize power by infiltrating the courts there with hard-core chekists is now shown to be a miscalculation.
Oh, and don’t forget, this is only the first of several de-Walkerization elections coming up in Wisconsin; next up, recall elections for GOP senators that could deliver control of the state senate to Democrats, which if it happens, as appears likely, would torpedo Walker’s entire legislative agenda. And then, next year, Walker’s own recall election; which, polls show, if it were held today would result in a crushing Walker defeat.
Wisconsin Republicans have damned little to look forward to in the days ahead.
@7 Yeah, this sure looks like it’ll go for Kloppenburg, with Prosser’s hopes clinging to one unreported precinct in a slightly-Prosser-leaning small-population county, while Kloppenburg still has a mass of uncounted ballots in heavily Democratic-leaning, heavily populated, working-class West Allis in Milwaukee County. Kloppenburg’s margin should grow from here on out.
This is the beginning of the end for the GOP-Rove Fascist Juggernaut. The people have risen up and dictators are falling.
The Truth About GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s Budget
1. It doesn’t balance the budget and requires continued government borrowing until 2030.
2. Privatizing Medicare won’t save money or lower the deficit for several decades.
3. It leaves Congress with only two choices: Raise taxes, or raise the debt ceiling.
With tax rates on the rich at an all-time low, and two-thirds of corporations paying no taxes, this one should be a no-brainer.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/st...../19904522/
Even if you swallow the argument that investment by the rich creates all the jobs (this isn’t true; plenty of non-rich entrepreneurs start or own small businesses, which account for most new-job creation), there’s no need to give the rich or corporations new tax breaks to stimulate job creation, nor would making this extremely undertaxed group pay more taxes hurt employment, because they already have vastly more cash than they can productively put to work.
The problem in the economy is not lack of capital — there is too much capital n the system, so much capital is sloshing around that it’s difficult to get rates of return equal to inflation, with the result that today’s capital-soaked economy is producing negative real returns — but lack of demand.
The lack of demand in our economy came about through destruction of consumers’ purchasing power by putting downward pressure on workers’ incomes. There has been a massive shift of the nation’s economic output from workers to the capital-owning class, with the result that money has been moved from consumption to investment — in an economic climate where there’s too little consumption and more money available for investment than capital markets can absorb.
These misguided economic policies were brought to you by thirty years of Republican idiocy.
Now, with three precincts left to count—one in a red county, two in a blue county—a straightforward projection has Kloppenburg up by about 261.
@18 It’s going to be a nail-biter for sure, but to keep things in perspective, Kloppenburg goes into the recount ahead by double Gregoire’s final margin. Which means that, right now, Prosser is even farther away from retaining his seat on Wisconsin’s supreme court than Rossi was (and still is) from the governor’s mansion in Olympia.
The closest Rossi will ever get to seeing the inside of the governor’s mansion is as a tourist. And Prosser, henceforth, will have a view of the Wisconsin supreme court from the spectator’s gallery.
This election demonstrates, once again, the importance of turning out every single vote; and also underscores why Republicans work so hard to keep students, the elderly, the poor, and soldiers from voting.
The union-stripping bills in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and other states obviously are part of a coordinated nationwide strategy, as are GOP efforts to game the redistricting process and GOP vote-stripping bills.
We’re fortunate that Republican politicians aren’t nearly as smart as the GOP’s strategists. Some of them are downright stupid, like New Hampshire’s GOP state house speaker, who said college students shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they lack judgment as shown by the fact they tend to vote “liberal.” Apart from the incredible arrogance and hubris of this statement, it’s just plain stupid to display your real motives like that, when you’re trying to take over the political system by stealth tactics.
And for all the vast wealth that Republicans spend on their political operations, they’re not very smart about how they spend their billions, either — often lavishing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on quixotic, losing, ineffective campaigns.
So perhaps there is a measure of justice in the universe, after all. Greed has endowed Republicans with an enormous financial warchest; but God has endowed them with the brains of gnats. It seems to even out in the end.
Roger Rabbit @ 19,
“The closest Rossi will ever get to seeing the inside of the governor’s mansion is as a tourist.”
As I recall from 2004, Rossi did triumphantly go on a pre-certification tour of the governor’s mansion while the count still had him in the lead.
Don’t forget that just a couple short months ago Prosser was a landslide shoe-in.
@22 In early 2005, I got the same tour from Governor Gregoire, as an invited guest to her exclusive victory party.
rhp @ 6:
I think there is ample evidence of influence originating outside WI in this election. All those SEIU purple buses, Jesse Jackson and Susan Sarandon, some legislator from Maine driving in, etc. Testament to superior short-term organizing skills of unions vs. conservatives, sure. But don’t make it too grass-roots. An awful lot of it was astroturfed. Just think what would happen to unions if the states didn’t collect their dues for them. Or look at Indiana and what happened to dues payments after it stopped being a required payroll deduction.
Regarding the difficulty in deposing a sitting supreme court justice, WI did it in a different judicial election two years ago. I would suggest it is not as hard as you think for a challenge to be successful. A certain WA supreme court (former) justice might agree with me.
KLOPPY WINS!
This is Great News!
Republicans everywhere are shitting their pants with the realization that Scott Walker’s fascist power grabs have totally backfired. Not only have they lost their ideological control of the State’s highest court, they will soon lose the legislature. Come January, Walker himself will get to face the electorate as well.
Nice work guys!
I think someone spotted Dean Logan in Wisconsin…
Those Republicans fascist in the WI Senate will be recalled and Walker will be sent home early next year. I suspect his next job will be languishing at some obscure right wing stink tank.
The Rove crowd overreached big time, as they always do (nothing ventured, nothing gained?) They’ll pull back a bit and try to wait it out – before trying it again.
25, 27 – Heh. Awww doncha luv the fantasies of silly right wing tools?
At the rate they’re going, all those teabagging politicians in Wisconsin are going to be shit-canned before they ever even get a whiff of 2012. Way to go, fucktards. It’s only April and the voters of last November have already turned on you.
heh- Republicans. The best thing to ever happen to Democrats, but the worst thing to ever happen to our country.
cmon steve, I dont see you as the partisan type.
If I don’t rag on Republicans then I’m only left with the memories of how much the Democrats have disappointed me for the last four decades.
Bob @ 25,
“Regarding the difficulty in deposing a sitting supreme court justice, WI did it in a different judicial election two years ago. I would suggest it is not as hard as you think for a challenge to be successful.
You should replace your speculation with a little research. Justice Prosser is only the fifth incumbent Supreme court justice to lose in Wisconsin since the court was established in 1852.
@32
lol…point taken.
Yawwn.. back in ’64 right wingers thought the Republican Party was feckless and in many cases, indistinguishable from many of the positions of the Democrats.
Their standard bearer in 64, Barry Goldwater, was trounced in the election that year. Everyone said the right wing was dead – for good.
Did that stop them from transforming the R party?
Now it’s more batshit insane beyond all their wildest dreams back then.
And an old right wing voter fraud fear-monger is up to his old tricks again:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.....?ref=dcblt
The usual sheep around here will bleat his nonsense.
Whenever the R’s lose a tight race, they cry “vote fraud”.
Whenever the recount and investigation is complete, we find it’s the R’s who’ve been committing “vote fraud”.
@33 Darryl:
I’ll concede your statistic if you concede that it appears that it has happened twice in about two years.
This ain’t 1852.
@27 Spoken like a true Republican! All Republicans think if they lose an election the other side must have cheated! It never occurs to them that voters just DON’T LIKE THEM!
Some of the reasons why voters don’t like Republicans: They lie, cheat, steal, torture, kill, and molest innocent goats.
Bob @ 38,
“I’ll concede your statistic”
What the hell does that mean? When confronted by a fact, a concession isn’t necessary. You either accept it or you falsify it!
“if you concede that it appears that it has happened twice in about two years.”
Sure…but I will dispute the salience of your observaton. There are 22 states that elect justices, and most states have 7 justices, so observing two incumbent losses in two nearby elections doesn’t seem very surprising.
“This ain’t 1852.”
Who the fuck suggested it was? My comment implicitly referred to ALL years with judicial elections in Wisconsin from 1852 to 2011. Please knock off the empty bullshit throw-away lines and try to engage at a bit higher level, will ya?.
The fact is, incumbent justices infrequently lose elections in Wisconsin.
It is also very likely that a month ago, Kloppenberg was a virtual unknown to the Wisconsin electorate. I don’t say that out of personal knowledge. I hadn’t, and I suspect you had never heard of either of the candidates prior to the “bitch” scandal. (And being a Wisconsin boy, I pay more attention to WI politics than most.) But several media sources have pointed out that several weeks ago, Kloppenberg was a virtual unknown to the Wisconsin electorate. Something happened…and Kloppenberg won.
In a normal year the incumbent wins easily—that is an objective, quantifiable fact. In elections where “something happens” the incumbent loses. It is the voters sending a message.
In this case, the voters made a statement. Maybe the message was “don’t call a female Justice a bitch” or maybe it was “Conservatives are destroying my state” or maybe it was, “Sarah Palin endorsed you? Ewwwwww!!!!” Or maybe it was a combination of all three. All we know is that the voters didn’t treat this like the vast majority of judicial elections.
@31 He’s not. He’s just making an impartial observation of obvious facts, like a physicist counting quarks in a collider.
[Deleted — see HA Comment Policy]
@34 Is it news to you that we progressives are disgusted with our spineless Democratic electeds? You must not read much.
@35 If Goldwater were alive today he’d be embarrassed by the people calling themselves “conservatives” now.
well you elected em…good job.
just what we need, a bunch of spineless boobs running shit..no wonder the foreign govts love ’em.
thats what you get when you vote partisan…dumbass.
@41 One of the things we know is Wisconsin turnout in an off-year election usually is 25% but the turnout in this election was 33% so Walker seems to have galvanized some folks.
Firing up your opposition isn’t exactly a hallmark of a competent politician …
There’s a reason why politicians, including sane Republicans, haven’t crapped on public workers like this until now. That’s because there’s so damned many of them. When Walker tried to fuck over Wisconsin’s teachers and state employees, he turned those workers and their families — who probably number at least 400,000 voters — into a highly motivated voting bloc AGAINST him and his party. Oops.
The last Republican in Washington stupid enough to do that was John Spellman, who antagonized our state’s public workers by refusing to give them their paychecks. That turned Spellman into a one-term governor and Washington hasn’t elected a Republican governor since — and that was almost 30 years ago.
As someone else here pointed out above, stupid Republicans are Democrats’ best friends. Keep it up, idiots.
@46 “well you elected em…good job”
Given the alternative your party offered us, we had no choice.
It’s not necessary to list here the depressing litany of Republican failures, debacles, and catastrophes that have accumulated since 1980. Everyone knows what they are.
I dont have a party, you old fart.
unlike you, I dont need someone to tell me who to vote for.
The biggest lie of all is “the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility.” It was borrow-and-spend Republicans who broke the bank between 2001 and 2008 and ran up the deficit. These fucking fools actually believe that you can increase government revenues by eliminating taxes. Want to know how we got $14 trillion into debt? Just start counting the mercenaries that Republicans paid $150,000 a year, and the number of cases of Coca-Cola that Republicans made us taxpayers buy from Halliburton for $110 per case, or how about the $400-a-gallon diesel fuel they burned in Iraq … and remember the no-bid contracts? Or how about the $700 billion prescription welfare program for Big Pharma? I could go on, but there’s really no need to …
@51 “I dont need someone to tell me who to vote for”
You’ve made it pretty clear that you do, because you clearly can’t figure it out yourself.
Darryl@41:
My point was that the incumbent has lost twice in the last two years in a WI supreme court election. In recent years people are much more fired up than in historically typical elections, and given the polarization and vitriol now characterizing campaigns, the numerous media choices available to spread the messages of candidates, and the large amount of money involved, history is likely not a reflection of current-day realities. You can adhere to your historical facts, feel free. I can continue to point out that something supposedly so hard to do has been done twice, now, in one state, in two years. It probably isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Daily Kos and MSNBC were not around 20 years ago. Times are different. Engaged electorate effecting change – would you not like to believe that is a good thing, and that you can help that kind of interactivity to continue? There are a lot more informational resources that cause people to be engaged than there used to be. It will make it easier for these supposedly rare events to recur. Ergo, my point that they are no longer rare, and that the 18th and 19th century data are no longer relevant.
Darryl@41:
I just learned that I may have spoken too soon. It may be that yet another state supreme court incumbent wins his re-election race. Prosser up 40 votes as of today.
Seems you are right after all. Certainly something worth celebrating, yes?
this is also my new favorite thread;
GOOD JOB DARWHYLE!
how about some math analysis!
AHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA