All eyes on Wisconsin. The Democrats and their union enablers went all out in their effort to recall 6 Republican state Senators yesterday. They needed to win 3 seats to regain a majority. They took only two. Time. Money. Buzz. The party of Spend! lavished all on this effort to repeal Governor Scott Walker’s initiative to curtail the power of government unions in Wisconsin and restore the state’s precarious finances. It was, as David Freddoso writes in The Washington Examiner (h/t <a href="”>Instapundit), supposed to be a referendum in which “the people” would demonstrate just how thoroughly they repudiated the Governor’s reforms. “But it turns out that “the people” had other ideas.”
In the end, even a massive infusion of cash and union volunteers was not enough to deliver the three state Senate recall races the unions needed, despite the fact that President Obama carried all six of the seats in question in 2008.
This marks the unions’ third huge defeat in Wisconsin this year. The other two were the passage of Walker’s bill and the re-election of David Prosser to the state Supreme Court. The grand talk of recalling Walker himself next year seems a bit blustery now, given the great failure of last night.
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Amen.
As of 3 August 2011, a single Lefty group, We Are Wisconsin, a registered political committee of unions led by the AFL-CIO, reported that it had raised $4.77 million in July. Its total contribution to the defeat was about $10 million.
In the last two decades, Wisconsin has been a solidly Democrat (Union) state. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been called “Little Moscow.”
The early estimate is $30,000,000 in union cash, $8,000,000 spend against Sen. Darling—the “crown jewel” of the effort according the the Wisconsin Democratic chairman. Darling won with the same margin that Walker carried her district last year. A Wisconsin Waterloo?—we must wait to see whether the retreat leads to Elba or St. Helena. A disaster in any case.
Now to root out the two Dems next week.