Wisconsin GOP Holds on to Senate Majority in Contentious Recall Election; Massive big labor effort at national level and $10’s of millions to oust them fails, Walker and his effective policies supported, hopefully will reverberate across the country!

Wis. Repubs Hold on to Senate Majority in Contentious Recall Election

“…a massive effort to oust them from power could reverberate across the country.”

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The recall elections for the six Republicans, including incumbent Alberta Darling, above, aimed to punish them for voting for Gov. Scott Walker’s budget measures, which included restrictions on public employees’ collective bargaining. Early Wednesday, Walker issued a statement saying, “It’s clear the voters also want us to work together to grow jobs and improve our state.” (AP Photo)

GOP Wins Wisconsin Recall Battle, Big Victory for Walker

Wisconsin residents rejected a Democratic attempt to grab control of the state Senate, voting to retain four of six Republicans in recall elections Tuesday. The GOP wins, which dropped the Republican majority in the Senate from 19-16 to 17-14, still leave the party in control of that body, as well as the state Assembly. They provided a victory to freshman Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose budget-cutting measures had sparked controversy and led to recall movements throughout the state.
FULL STORY 

• Wis. GOP’s Stand Could Reverberate Elsewhere
• Redistricting Boosts Wisconsin GOP in 2012
• GOP Retains Wis. Political Power With 4 Recall Wins
• Outside Spending Dominates Wisconsin Recalls

Breaking: What the GOP Victory in Wisconsin Means (this is a great day for the state and a great day for the entire nation!)

Posted at 9:56 pm on August 9th, 2011 by

With six Republican state Senators facing recall elections in Wisconsin, the Democrats needed only three to take control of the state’s Senate. That control would not have been sufficient to overturn Gov. Walker’s government union benefit reforms, but would have become become a symbol of resurgent union power. Union/Democrat victory in Wisconsin would have become a basis for mounting recalls against Republicans in Ohio, Indiana and perhaps elsewhere. The perpetual campaign would have become truly perpetual, with recalls popping everywhere the unions thought they had any chance of winning.

But the Democrats failed. Of the six seats up for grabs, they only captured two, and despite the massive money backing the Democrats, the GOP holds the state Senate. And one of those two recall races that the Democrats won involved a GOP incumbent who had become mired in personal scandal, so the Democratic victory there doesn’t say much at all about the reforms that are at the center of the recall effort. The four GOP victories speak volumes.

The fact is, the Democrats and unions poured $30 million into the recall and made it a national effort. Their failure, in the heart of Big Labor country, is one more sign that the era of big labor unions dictating policy to state and local government is over. If they can’t win in Wisconsin with a focused effort, just where can they win? With Massachusetts and other blue states also reforming government union benefits packages? And the right-to-work states outpacing the union states in economic growth? And with Big Labor’s president occupying the White House?

The GOP holding onto the Wisconsin Senate is a major blow to Big Labor, maybe their biggest setback in a generation. The big unions will not go quietly, but go they will, eventually. 

This entire sequence of elections has been nationalized to the point that they’re symbolic of the overall national ability to enact reforms, especially in the face of union organization and hostility. But they’re largely symbolic at this point, for the simple reason that Gov. Walker’s reforms will stand whether the GOP holds onto the Senate or not. And there’s strong evidence that those reforms, though they’re only a few months old, are already working.

A failure in Wisconsin is worse for the Democrats and the unions, in my opinion, than a failure for the Republicans would be. Wisconsin is the birthplace of the modern labor movement. It has routinely been a blue state until the last couple of election cycles. Failure tonight for the Democrats may mean Wisconsin is gone to them for a long time to come, while for the Republicans, there’s next week’s shot at recapturing the Senate and the long game of continuing reform and continuing to chip away at the union’s bastion.

Next week, three Democrats face recall. The best they can hope for is to retain both seats, no gain is possible. How sweet would it be for the Republicans to pick up even one of them?

Related pre-election result articles:  Democracy Shrugged in Wisconsin Slugfest by Gary Larson – “Their agenda thwarted by voters in one election, they [progressives and the left] were not to be stopped from forcing a new election. In banana republics, forcing new elections because a powerful cabal didn’t like the outcome of a recent election is hardly viewed as democratic.”  “Public Union Power versus The Public Interest.”  Founding Father James Madison envisioned “factions” in his brilliant Federalist Paper #10. Just as we see in Wisconsin, and theirs is a bare-knuckled attack to wrest power from ordinary people by a special interest bullying its way to retain power over the state’s purse strings. (It’s really all about money, isn’t it?) Funded by millions of special interest money and using unions to generate turnout, they may be able to overturn the voters’ decision to give control of the Legislature to Republicans. Steven Greenhut, author of a paperback with a long-as-sin title, “Plunder: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation , calls public union leaders “the new robber barons.”

FROM PROF JACOBSON, A REMINDER: The Wisconsin Recalls Are Not Over. “Republicans have a chance to deliver a political coup de grâce to the national union and Democratic intimidation tactics next Tuesday when there are two elections seeking to recall Democratic State Senators Robert Wirch and James Holperin. These two were among the fleebaggers who ran away to Illinois.”

 

Related, Big News – EDUCATION UPDATE: Study Shows Schools Perform Better Without Collective Bargaining. “The issue of collective bargaining rights for teachers was a huge issue on Tennessee’s Capitol Hill. Now the Associated Press has taken a close look, comparing how school systems do with or without collective bargaining rights. The AP discovered school systems without teachers’ collective bargaining rights performed slightly better than those with negotiated contracts.”

 

and of course with the better performance, also comes the caveat of lower costs!

 

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Walker’s Reforms Are Working