At Fighting BobFest North, in Chippewa, Wisconsin, about three hours north of Madison, progressive activists wanted to know what to make of the latest Marquette poll, which shows Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker up by six points over Democratic opponent Tom Barrett.
That's a bump for Walker from the last Marquette poll, which showed the two candidates in a virtual dead heat.
Buckle your seat belts. There are likely to be a lot more ups and downs.
This week, for the first time, TV viewers all over Wisconsin saw ads answering Scott Walker's $20 million campaign to defend himself against recall. One new ad declares: "Scott Walker's playing tricks with jobs numbers,"-- a reference to the Walker's claim, based on unpublished data, that Wisconsin has added jobs on his watch, despite a series of Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that rank the state worst in the nation over the last year for job loss.
The same ad then pivots to talk about the John Doe investigation, which has led to criminal indictments of 15 close Walker associates and led Walker himself to become the state's first governor to establish his own criminal defense fund. Update on the John Doe: the Government Accountability Board has clarified that Walker or his agents must, indeed, be targets of a criminal investigation in order to establish a criminal defense fund.
The Democratic Party issued a press release with links to the GAB documents clarifying the rules: Look for an ad on that soon. A series of new ads paid for by the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund target Walker's elimination of pay equity protections: "less pay because you're a woman?" cuts to BadgerCare, Family Care, and Medicare, and "helping special interests at the expense of our local schools." (The LaCrosse Tribune reported over the weekend that veterans will be bigger losers in the equal pay rollback, because the rescinded law actually provided greater protection to service members who wanted to return to their jobs after long deployments than it did to women, minorities, and other protected groups, who, unlike vets, can also sue in federal court.)
Look for an ad on that topic--perhaps tied to the criminal report on how Walker staffer Tim Russell stole thousands of dollars from a fund for widows and orphans of Wisconsin's war dead. But the television air war--the most expensive in Wisconsin history--is only one aspect of this historic recall election.
Get-out-the-vote efforts on both sides will drive the outcome on June 5. The speakers at BobFest North--Ed Garvey, Mahlon Mitchell (running in the recall election for Lieutenant Governor), Senator Kathleen Vinehout, and John Nichols of The Nation Magazine, all urged the crowd not to waste time fretting about transient poll numbers, and instead pick an area nearby and help voters who might have trouble getting to the polls.
Proudly proclaiming his optimism about the recall, Nichols told BobFest attendees "It's easy to be a cynic--you don't risk anything. The problem with optimists is, they tell you that you have the power to do something yourself--and then you have to go out and do it."