When Gov. Scott Walker announces his run for the White House next Monday, his supporters will relish the chance to cheer their candidate. Meanwhile, his critics will be just as eager to share their views.
Fewer than half of Wisconsin voters were happy with the job Walker is doing as governor in the most recent Marquette Law School Poll.
As he’s inched closer to running for president, Walker has fared well in national polls of Republican hopefuls. He thinks he knows the reason. Here’s what he said last week on Fox News:
“We’re good at fighting and winning -- not just three elections in four years in a blue state that hadn’t gone Republican since 1984 for president -- but winning the big battles, from tax relief to right to work to photo ID, you name it.”
Walker is perhaps best known for Act 10, the law that crippled most public unions in Wisconsin. While the governor survived a recall election over Act 10, and voters later gave him a second term, some of his policies seem to be losing favor with voters.
According to the last Marquette Law School poll in April, only 41 percent of voters approve of the job he’s doing. Charles Franklin is the poll’s director.
“He’s not alone by being somewhat low in his job approval. Gov. Christie in New Jersey is at about 30 percent job approval. Gov. Jindal in Louisiana is also quite low,” Franklin says.
Franklin says the numbers might not look great for those GOP hopefuls, but primary and caucus voters are actually more interested in where candidates stand on issues.
“Questions about what would you do with ISIS, what would you do with health care reform, those kinds of questions motivate voters in primaries rather more than the details of a record of someone who doesn’t even live in your state,” Franklin says.
While voters in other states may be most interested in candidates’ positions on issues, approval ratings at home can provide campaign fodder, according to Mike Wagner, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison. Wagner says a candidate’s popularity at home can affect the narrative candidates unfurl.
“If Gov. Walker’s popularity is high, he can say, ‘in a state where I took on organized labor and I took on academics at the university, my popularity is still very high,’ and if it goes down, his opponents can say, ‘Gov. Walker says he’s an electable candidate but his own state disapproves of what he’s doing, and that means he’s not someone who’s electable in the general election,’” Wagner says.
Wagner says governors who run for president have a record on which to stand -- and be attacked.
UW-Milwaukee professor Mordecai Lee says if Walker’s numbers plummet, he could struggle in debates.
“Here’s a guy who says that he’s really changed Wisconsin, that he’s shown bold leadership. But then if one of his opponents in a primary debate starts throwing numbers out about what his standing is in Wisconsin, then that would undercut his argument,” Lee says.
Meanwhile, Walker could use rising numbers to his advantage, during GOP candidate debates. Yet approval ratings don’t only influence campaign rhetoric, according to Christopher Murray, of the Les Aspin Center for Government. Murray says popularity can impact campaign coffers, by showing national donors which candidates show the most promise.
“Bush, Rubio, Kasich, Walker – the kind of “top tier” Republican candidates -- they all have to win their home state or they’re not going to get elected president, if you look at recent history. And so that is certainly something that donors with options are going to pay attention to,” Murray says.
Murray says it would be hard for the Republican nominee for president to carve out a path to the White House without winning key swing states. One of them could be Wisconsin.
