Wisconsin Recall Elections are Today

The recall elections for the Wisconsin legislature are in full swing today, which place six Republicans at risk to lose their seats.  Two more Democrats will face recall next week.  As the article notes, the out-of-state, third-party money fund the recall efforts at an unprecedented rate from both conservative and liberal groups:

Cash flowing into the recall elections from third-party interest groups already has approached $30 million, election watchdogs say, and total spending by third-party groups and candidates could top $40 million.

That total would double spending on all 116 of last fall's state legislative races combined. About $19.25 million was spent in those races for 17 Senate seats and 99 Assembly seats, which included 312 candidates on the primary ballot and 225 candidates in the November 2010 general election, said Mike McCabe, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign executive director. 

The money spent so far in this summer's nine recalls — one already has been decided — is believed to have already broken Wisconsin's record for state Senate and Assembly races set in 2008, when candidates and groups spent about $20 million on 115 elections.

I encourage anyone living in the districts holding elections to go vote (for the record, I am not voting as the Republican effort to recall State Senator Fred Risser of Madison predictably failed).

The recall elections, specifically the ones held today, will determine whether the massive protests last winter here in Madison were successful or not.  I have already read some commentators who declared that the protests failed miserably, as the bill to strip public unions of their right to collectively bargain passed after some procedural chicanery.  However, I disagree.

While the protests failed to cause either Governor Scott Walker or the Republican controlled legislature to either squash the collectively bargaining bill or draw them to the table to compromise on the more extreme provisions, it did electrify Wisconsin's unions and its Democratic base after the Republican routed the Democrats in the 2010 election.  The protests created a location to organize a state-wide resistance against the Walker Administration, which culminated in the recall elections taking place today.

Since I live about 6 blocks away from the state capitol, I was present at most of the protests.  After the first protest, which was comparably small to the one that followed, you could barely walk 30 feet without running into someone collecting signatures for the recall elections.  The organizers were able to contact each other and create a state-wide recall effort powerful and organized enough to, for better or worse, attract political organizations to fund the recall efforts.  I highly doubt that the recall efforts would have taken place at the level and effectiveness that are seen today without the protests to provide a location and the energy for the initial stages of the recall effort.

Of course, if the recalls fail to break the Republican lock on the State Senate, then I would admit that the protests were, in the end, ineffective.  A poll taken last month indicates that Governor Walker's policies and his leadership style have turned off a large segment of Wisconsin's voting public.  But the question is if enough people dissatisfied with the current governor and legislature are located within the districts facing recalls.  We will know the answer by tomorrow when the election results are processed.