By Rob Janicki
We have been focusing on the Indiana Republican senatorial primary, which sitting Senator Dick Lugar lost on Tuesday. What we let slide was the primary for the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. After all, it was just a primary on the Republican side with a little known candidate opposing Walker. Walker went on to win handily and I mean handily, but that's not the story line. Read on.
Governor Walker was really being challenged by hyperventilating liberals of all kinds. The union favorite was, Kathleen Falk, who has 34.7% of the Democratic vote with 94% of the vote count in as of this writing, The winner of the Democratic primary was Milwaukee Mayor, Thomas Barrett who managed 57.5% of the Democratic vote. The remaining three dim Dems have 4.1%, 3% and 0.7% of the vote.
Here's where we get to the hook in this report. Walker's vote count was 584,929 compared to the combined vote of all the candidates in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 596,089 votes. Walker's Republican opponent, Arthur Kohl-Riggs. managed 18,236. When you combine Walker's vote count of 584,929 and Kohl-Riggs vote count of 18,236 you come up with 603,165 total votes cast for the two Republicans, which is greater than the total Democratic vote in their primary.
The point of these vote counts is that the general election between Governor Walker and Mayor Barrett will be close. It will all revolve around the voter turn out on June 5th. There is one catch to this analysis. There were a total of 678,635 votes cast in the Democratic Lt. Governor's primary. There was no Republican Lt. Governor primary as no one challenged siting Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch. This leads one to wonder why more votes were cast in the Dem Lt. Gov. primary than in the Dem Gov. primary. The answer has to be that Republicans crossed over to vote in the Dem Lt. Gov. primary to possibly alter the outcome and have a weaker Dem Lt. Gov. candidate win. Only time will tell on this count. The recall election will take place on June 5th and will be a monumental conflict between conservative Republicans and the might of unions from around the United States that have come to Wisconsin and poured untold millions of dollars into the state in order to recall Gov. Walker.
Election results: wisconsinvote.org
Why the fuck would you combine Arthur and Walker's totals? I promise you that no one who voted for Arthur would ever vote for Walker
ReplyDeleteExactly how do you know that no one who voted for Arthur would ever vote for Walker? Do you have some special insight that would lead you to assert this as fact or are you just expressing an opinion? Opinions are fine until they step over the line and purport to be fact.
ReplyDeleteUsing your logic the same could be said for all the Democrat candidates. The purpose of combining the totals for each party was to illustrate the turn out for each party in order to view and assess possible voter enthusiasm for each party and then to compare voter enthusiasm between the two parties.
Falk was the choice of unions who poured in tons of money to see her win the primary. Unions were adamantly opposed to Barrett based upon his past history that included a hard line toward unions. Will the Falk voters then choose not to vote for Barrett using your logic? Not likely.
With Wisconsin's open primary it is possible that some Republicans, knowing that Walker would win the Republican nomination, crossed over to vote for a lesser Democrat candidate in the hope of influencing the Democrat primary.
Bottom line, remember that Walker defeated Barrett 18 months ago to become governor and that is a fact, not opinion.