From Wikimedia Commons This article is part of an ongoing biweekly series called “Highway 270,” which profiles heavily contested states in the 2012 election season. This week, I will examine the current political climate in Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes. Unlike perennial toss-up states Florida and Ohio, Wisconsin hasn’t gone Republican since 1984 (though many of its ultimately Democratic victories were narrow) and is fairly new to bei...
From Wikimedia Commons This past week, Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, trounced his Democratic challenger, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, in a heavily publicized recall election. Only two years after being elected governor over Barrett, Walker faced recall due to public rage over his legislation that stripped public sector unions of most of their collective bargaining rights. Walker’s margin of victory over Barrett i...
...e, Arizona and North Carolina are relatively safe in the Romney column and Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Nevada are relatively safe for Obama (although Nevada is much less safe than the rest). That leaves Wisconsin, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia as the states that will be in play next Tuesday. Now for the guesswork. Let’s give Florida to Romney – in the seven statewide polls conducted since Octobe...
...ck to the Hoovervilles of homeless Americans during the Great Depression and the recent tent cities Wall Street created this time in the Great Recession. However, it was also inspired by the more recent Walkerville protest of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on the working class, which itself came out of the inspirational and catalyzing Wisconsin Capitol Hill occupation. Wisconsin set a new tone for resistance across the United States. Af...
Wisconsin protests from Wikimedia Commons There’s a reason that one of the most popular chants in Madison, Wisconsin during protesters’ occupation of the capitol building was “This is what democracy looks like!” Because only being able to choose between two corporate-funded, unaccountable representatives is not democracy. There’s also a reason that the Democrats lost in Wisconsin earlier this month—not that incumbent governor Scott Walker outsp...
photo from Wikimedia Commons The 2012 Presidential Election just got real: GOP nominee Mitt Romney has selected Wisconsin representative and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as his running mate. Ryan, the author of the Republican-approved Path to Prosperity budget proposal (often simply referred to as the “Ryan Plan”) that sought to rein in long-term deficit spending by reforming Medicare, is a dedicated fiscal conservative and is cons...
...chief, although his other numbers put him in closer contention with Governor Romney. Furthermore, 69% of Coloradoans have already voted, a group that favors Romney over Obama. Final verdict: Romney, but it isn’t set in stone. Wisconsin: Obama ended his Badger State campaign win a bang in Madison today alongside Bruce Springsteen. I doubt this will substantially affect his campaign, but I wouldn’t say the same about his ground game. As I said Thur...
...because the president’s economic record is not viewed as negatively anymore. So even with a hurricane and the jobs report, the most likely outcome is that the race maintains the status quo, and the President wins. Why? Ohio. Wisconsin. Nevada. That’s it. Obama wins those three states; he wins the election. And he’s up by and average of 2-4 points in all three of those states. Bill Clinton is the only candidate to have lost a state after being up...
From Wikimedia Commons Bad job numbers, the president’s not so “fine” gaffe, a failed recall attempt in Wisconsin, a plethora of White House scandals – and to top it all off, Mitt Romney, the guy who two months ago elicited no more than a deferential shrug from the average Republican, out-fundraised the Obama campaign by over $16 million in May. Altogether, the news is daunting to Democrats and harmful to the president’s re-election effor...
...the $800 billion plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Ryan’s pleas to federal agencies included letters to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies.” The content of both AP reports may be true, and might have even been relevant for voters in the 2012 presidential election, but the reports were not fact checking – they were engagin...
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