By State Representative, Leon D. Young
Leon D. Young
It’s not unusual to have two candidates running against each more than once, but what’s most unusual, in this instance, is to have the rival candidates squaring off in a recall election, a mere 16 months after their last encounter. It’s now official: Tom Barrett and Scott Walker will meet, once again, in the general recall election, on June 5th.
The political divide between the two candidates couldn’t be greater, based on Walker ’s political shenanigans since taking office. Consequently, he must now answer to the Wisconsin electorate. According to recent polling data from Marquette University Law School , Barrett and Walker are in a statistical dead heat, just one month away from the recall general election.
A postmortem of the primary results provides some interesting insights into the political fortunes of both candidates. Although not supported by organized labor that spent heavily on promoting Kathleen Falk, Barrett won decisively. In fact, he carried 56 of 72 counties, and utterly dominated in the two big counties of Milwaukee (where he beat Falk 72 percent to 25 percent) and Dane (where he won 61 percent to 31 percent).
Walker can also be encouraged by his primary election results. He was able to garner 628,538 votes, which is roughly as many votes (approximately 670,000) that were cast for the entire field of Democratic challengers.
As the poll numbers suggests, this is shaping up to be an extremely tight contest. However, the candidate, be it Barrett or Walker, that can deliver its base of supporters will win. It’s just that simple.
In my view, however, it would behoove the voters to remember Scott Walker’s track record to date, and reflect on what Abraham Lincoln once wrote:
You can fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
Let’s send this unequivocal message to Scott Walker on June 5th!