Walker Wins Recall

The media got some egg on their face last night. As the exit data began to be released, the media started getting all breathless, reporting that the exits showed a race that was a statistical coin-flip, 50-50, etc. I'm sure they were hoping that they would get several hours of going over the data and keeping viewers in suspense as they vied to be the first one to call it.

However, in a scene highly reminiscent of the 2004 election, the exit polling turned out to be way off. The race was called less than an hour after the polls closed with only about 20% of the vote total in and Mr. Walker leading by 20 points. Dane and Milwaukee Counties (Madison and Milwaukee respectively) narrowed things a bit as they finally came in in larger numbers, but Mr. Walker still walked away with a 7-point victory (53-46) (making Marquette University the winner in the polling predictor contest). Mr. Walker actually exceeded his 2010 vote total by about 125,000 votes (out of about 2.5 million cast) and his margin over Mr. Barrett (who was his opponent in the 2010 contest) grew by an additional 47,000 votes.

Overall it looks like the GOP went 5 for 6 in the recall race. The lone bright spot for the Democrats is that they appear to have won the recall race against 21st district (Racine County) state senator Van Wanggaard. His challenger, John Lehman, is up by about 800 votes (out of 71,500 cast). This will probably go to a recount but that kind of margin seems pretty big to overcome given the sample size. That will give the Democrats a 17-16 edge in the Senate. However, that doesn't mean quite as much as the senate will remain in recess until after the November election, when half of the senate (16 seats) will be up for reelection.

The talking heads (as predicted) were already trying to read the tea leaves and try to figure out how Mr. Walker's win would affect the national race in November. Mr. Obama came out well ahead in the exit polls taken, but since the polls were so far off, those numbers are effectively useless. My own take is that Walker's win will have close to zero impact on the race. Mr. Walker won because he had done an acceptable job to many people and more than a few others, while they may have disagreed with his policies, did not like the idea of removing a man mid-term who had committed no malfeasance. If anything, I think the decent state of the economy in Wisconsin will allow Mr. Obama to retain the state as Mr. Romney's economic argument will seem a lot less dire.

In other races, Mr. Romney won all counties in all five of the primary contests. He won 169 delegates from California, 50 delegates from New Jersey, 20 delegates from New Mexico and 25 delegates from South Dakota. Montana doesn't actually allocate delegates until its convention on June 16. This brings his hard total up to 1397 and his overall total (including unbound pledges) to 1436 or 125% of the required total.



The only other interesting bit of news out of the elections was that two cities in California (San Diego and San Jose) voted to cut pension allocations for city workers as a means of balancing their budgets. I doubt there is any real correlation to what was going on in Wisconsin and this, but with union pensions being the narrative of the day, the news gets a bit more play.