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Walker’s Wisconsin Woes

Walker's declining approval ratings could drag down his 2016 candidacy.

As Scott Walker has risen in Republican primary polling, his approval ratings in Wisconsin have been going in the opposite direction:

A new Marquette Law School Poll finds Gov. Scott Walker’s job approval rating has fallen to 41 percent, with 56 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin saying they disapprove of how he is handling his job as governor.

Much of the recent decline seems to have been driven by the unpopularity of Walker’s budget proposals. For example, his proposal to slash $300 million from the state university system is opposed by 70%. If Walker interpreted his re-election to mean that Wisconsinites were eager for him to push through more controversial measures, it appears that he badly misread the political landscape. This doesn’t bode well for Walker for the coming year, and it is likely to be a liability for him as a presidential candidate as well.

The main argument for a Walker candidacy is that he pushed through a conservative agenda in a Democratic-leaning state and won re-election in spite of it. A related argument is that a two-term governor of Wisconsin should be able to make the GOP more competitive in Midwestern states where they have had little success in presidential elections for a long time. Walker was supposed to combine be the electable conservative alternative, and he can’t really be that if most people in his home state think he’s doing a poor job. These arguments are substantially weakened by evidence that Walker’s constituents are turning against him in significant numbers. According to the same survey, Walker trails Clinton by twelve points in Wisconsin, which doesn’t say much for Walker’s supposed electability. When a presidential nominee doesn’t carry his own state, he usually doesn’t win the election. If Walker’s approval ratings remain negative over the next year, it becomes harder to see why Republican primary voters in the early states would want to take a chance on him.

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