Scott Walker became the nation’s first governor ever to survive a recall election ”“ and it was not as close as many predicted. With over 99-percent of the vote counted, the Republican Walker led Democrat Tom Barrett 53-to-46 percent, with Brookfield kidney specialist Hari Trivedi getting the other one-percent.
Walker’s victory margin was slightly bigger than when he first defeated Barrett in 2010.
Good. I don’t care for the man’s politics but this was an abuse of the recall. The appropriate time to fire a politician whose policies you don’t like is in regularly scheduled general elections, not through recalls engineered by big money special interest groups who were offended. A recall should be reserved for corruption or a gross abuse of power. This sort of thing is a slippery slope. Once you start down it no one will ever be able to undertake any kind of controversial policy decisions without having to worry about which special interest with deep pockets is going to try to throw him/her out of office early. That threat has become much more acute with the SCOTUS effectively opening the floodgates to unlimited political contributions by entities that can’t vote.