Betsy Woodruff reports on the somewhat inflated significance that many Republicans are attaching to Scott Walker’s re-election bid as governor of Wisconsin:

While many of the potential Republican presidential nominees are highly polarizing for the right—Sen. Rand Paul has been in hawks’ crosshairs since Day 1, and Jeb Bush’s stances on immigration and Common Core already have Tea Party types seeing red—Walker is the rare Republican star who nobody hates. He matters so much to some Republicans that if Wisconsin’s governor loses on Tuesday night, winning the Senate would just be a consolation prize. “In my mind, if Scott Walker loses, it’s a bad election cycle even if there are big wins everywhere else,” says Phil Kerpen, who runs the fiscal conservative advocacy organization American Commitment, “because the impact on public policy will be more negative than any political upside elsewhere.”

On the first point, I suspect that Walker doesn’t provoke resistance from any corner of the party because he hasn’t had very much to say on a number of issues that divide the party. To the extent that he has said anything about foreign policy or national security, for instance, he has chosen to avoid making any commitments that would align him with any particular faction. “I don’t know that you could put me in either camp, precisely,” Walker bravely offered when asked about the Christie-Paul quarrel last year. In other words, Walker isn’t polarizing among most Republicans because he hasn’t yet taken positions that would make him enemies one way or the other. For the moment, he is widely liked inside the GOP because he is so deeply disliked outside of it. In the event that he became a presidential candidate he would have to take positions that put him at odds with some significant part of the Republican coalition. Of course, that depends on Walker’s re-election, which is anything but guaranteed.

If Walker does end up losing, as I am predicting he will, it shouldn’t come as a great shock, nor should it be treated as such a huge setback. Let’s remember that Walker was first elected in an unusually good year for Republicans in a state that had not made a recent habit of electing Republicans to statewide office. In that extraordinarily Republican year, Walker won with 52% of the vote. In a less lopsided election year, it’s possible that Walker might not have won the first time. Considering the controversy in his first term and the attempted recall, it wouldn’t be so strange if the electorate of a normally Democratic-leaning state grew tired of Walker and chose someone else to replace him. It does Republicans no favors to exaggerate the importance of any one governor’s race, and it would be a mistake for anyone to read too much into a Walker loss.