I think I’ve shared with you before my thoughts on Scott Walker. I wonder what goes on inside his head. He told the fake David Koch that Reagan firing the air traffic controllers made him win the cold war (?!?!?). So perhaps Walker is a bit wrong in the head? Walker could have gotten most everything he wanted early on (all the wage concessions) and I’ll bet the sneaky stuff he tried to put in the budget repair bill (no-bid sales of state assets, turning Medicaid over to a Heritage Foundation wingnut) if he had agreed to drop the collective bargaining provision. Well Walker didn’t take a deal and here’s where we are today:
We’ll have our full poll on the Wisconsin conflict out tomorrow but here’s the most interesting finding: if voters in the state could do it over today they’d support defeated Democratic nominee Tom Barrett over Scott Walker by a a 52-45 margin.
The difference between how folks would vote now and how they voted in November can almost all be attributed to shifts within union households. Voters who are not part of union households have barely shifted at all- they report having voted for Walker by 7 points last fall and they still say they would vote for Walker by a 4 point margin. But in households where there is a union member voters now say they’d go for Barrett by a 31 point margin, up quite a bit from the 14 point advantage they report having given him in November.
It’s actually Republicans, more so than Democrats or independents, whose shifting away from Walker would allow Barrett to win a rematch if there was one today. Only 3% of the Republicans we surveyed said they voted for Barrett last fall but now 10% say they would if they could do it over again. That’s an instance of Republican union voters who might have voted for the GOP based on social issues or something else last fall trending back toward Democrats because they’re putting pocketbook concerns back at the forefront and see their party as at odds with them on those because of what’s happened in the last month.
I’ve seen commentators mention that Union households generally vote for Democrats by a 60-40 margin. I think we’d call that 40% the Reagan Democrats. If this voting pattern shifts by even 10%, that’s a 2% rise in the popular vote for Democrats. I think only time will tell to see if we’ve reached a turning point in this fight but Scott Walker has brought the rightwing agenda into stark clarity for a lot of people.
BTW, Scott Walker won by 5% in November, 52-47, so this is a 12% turnaround in his numbers.