The Dkos/PPP polls on potential recall elections in Wisconsin look okay, but not great. Democrats lead in three of the potential races (quite narrowly in one, however) and trail in the others five. I think it may be tough to flip 3 seats. On the other hand, even flipping one (and there’s one where Democrats have a big lead) would send a message.
The number of signatures needed is not that large, about 15K per race. Democrats already have 56K signatures total (in eight districts) and when you think about the huge numbers at the rally, getting 15K signatures in each of the three districts where they lead in the polls should be very doable.
Getting signatures certified by courts is a tricky business, so expect a major court battle on this in six weeks when the signatures are due, if not sooner. I don’t know how much leeway Wisconsin law gives judges, but keep an eye on who the judges are here. If this goes before partisan Republican judges, I say all bets are off unless the law is completely explicit.
Yutsano
Not really. It’s not like Republican judges have been totally impartial on these issues before. Of course judges hate being turned over on appeal worse, so it could be an interesting balancing act here.
madredegemelos8
It will definitely take work–but we only need 3! I will be out this weekend collecting signatures. If you can’t canvass, please consider donating to the actblue page!
https://secure.actblue.com/page/recallrepublican8
Villago Delenda Est
Still, the “rule of law” only applies to Democrats. IOKIYAR, you know.
August J. Pollak
The next front is absolutely going to be the state GOP trying to make the recall itself illegal.
Fitzgerald is already declaring that Democrats aren’t allowed to vote; might as well start declaring that no one can.
Biggest problem I’m wondering about is if/when a Senator faces a recall, what stops them from just resigning and letting Walker fill a replacement, just to give a final fuck you to the voters.
danimal
IIRC, there is a judicial election coming up that could possibly shift the balance of power in the WI judiciary to the Dems. If that’s the case, there is a realistic chance of honestly gathered signatures being counted honestly.
Caz
Hopefully it will go before partisan democrat judges, then the law won’t really matter at all.
Yutsano
@danimal: You’re right, IIRC it’s either next month or May. Omnes will know better than I will the exact date, but if there can be some focus on that election as well then things might just start shifting.
Also: I’m not as depressed about that polling as you are Doug. There are no specific named candidates for the Dems yet, and polling against an unknown person tends to underperform until the actual personality is selected. And it would be bad to assume that will just be their opponent last election, although I’m sure at least a couple will be.
Steve
In a nutshell, this is the recall procedure:
1. First, you collect enough signatures;
2. A recall election is scheduled. The incumbent candidate, unless he resigns, is automatically on the ballot. Other contenders have to submit nominating petitions in the normal way.
3. If there are more than two candidates, there is a primary recall election where the top 2 votegetters advance. If anyone gets over 50% of the total votes in the primary, they win and there is no need for another election.
This is a different process from some states where the first step is a yes/no vote on recalling the incumbent.
Violet
If enough signatures are gathered to recall a senator, how does that work? They present the signatures to what office or person? And that office or person does…what exactly?
If a senator is recalled, does that force a special election to fill a seat, or can the Governor fill it by appointment?
When is the next regularly scheduled election?
AAA Bonds
Obama’s courting of big donors for 2012 may take a huge chunk out of the small donations that got him elected in 2008. From the Center for Public Integrity.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/3020/
Jim Pharo
Recall will soon be yet another liberal lost cause, like gun control or decent schools.
The other side won many years ago. We should stop fighting an unwinable war and focus instead on setting up what amount to sanctuaries.
If Walker has a hard time with re-election, it will not be because of his strong-arm tactics, which will slow him down about as much as Reagan’s PATCO firings slowed him down.
AAA Bonds
Hard to tell if you’re just a drag on my party or a Republican in disguise.
Chyron HR
@Jim Pharo:
Our ways must be as leaves upon the sea to you, Nostradamus.
someguy
I know it’s important to send a message in Wisconsin, but I don’t know why we aren’t initiating recall efforts all around the country. Seems to me it’s pretty cheap to collect signatures, we wouldn’t even need to really field viable candidates – the mere cost of constant campaigning for the Republicans could really put a hurting on them come 2012 and make it difficult for them to contest the regularly scheduled elections.
For that matter I don’t know why we didn’t file thousands of challenges last November – even if they didn’t work out well it would totally deplete Republican coffers, jam them up and depending on the state where filed could have prevented dozens of them at the national level, thousands at the state and local level, from taking office. Seems to me somebody should be generating boiler plate to unleash on them after the next election – contest every seat. That would send a message too.
Sentient Puddle
I would imagine that in these cases, polling generic Democrats would produce results that work in our favor.
jwb
@AAA Bonds: While I can’t say that I like the idea of Obama turning to big money, it might free up the resources of small donors to give more money lower down the chain—that might be even more necessary this cycle given Citizen’s United ruling. Because while Obama could probably raise a sufficient amount of money using a strategy similar to the one he ran in 2008, I don’t think small donors have the resources to cover the candidates up and down the ticket against the CU juggernaut. Still, it means we will have to figure out a way to organize our giving in a way to make it most effective.
jwb
@someguy: Not all that many states have mechanisms for recall—I think that’s the main reason.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@AAA Bonds: That article manages to concern troll pretty well. Not only was there naught but a couple of ancedotal comments, but the ending manages to wipe out most of the “small doners are running away” comments at the beginning.
They could be right. But they don’t present any prior examples, or polling, to support their commentary — and manage to undercut themselves at the end, anyway.
Ash Can
@Yutsano:
This was the first thing I noticed about that poll, and it made me think the numbers looked surprisingly good. Once an actual live person gets out on the stump and starts hammering home the case for dumping the GOP senator, things could change significantly. Basically, the poll as taken asked, “incumbent or non- incumbent?” If that many people are essentially answering a question like that as “Anybody but this horse’s ass,” those areas are primed to be flipped as long as the respective Dem candidates can run a halfway decent campaign — and heaven knows they’ve got some decent material to work with.
Ash Can
@AAA Bonds: Tokyo Rose.
jibeaux
@someguy:
Because most places don’t have a provision to recall elected officials. Wisconsin is something of an outlier in that regard.
jwb
@Sentient Puddle: I think polling races like these are at best a crap shoot, because figuring out who is likely to vote poses a very difficult challenge and the results will be driven by which base is more motivated.
jibeaux
@jwb: This is definitely the truth. Who turns out for a Very Special Election is what will matter, and it’s going to be pretty hard to figure that out. Although I will say that intuitively it seems to be advantage non-incumbent in most situations, and I don’t see this being too different.
James E Powell
Reagan firing the air traffic controllers was very popular with the public. I do not think what Walker has done could be described as popular.
jwb
@jibeaux: I would think so as well. In fact, given the high standards for recall, I would think every seat that has a valid petition submitted has to be considered very vulnerable.
Steve
@Ash Can: I don’t agree. The case for dumping the incumbent has already been made – people are either angry about these heavy-handed anti-worker measures or they aren’t. Everyone in Wisconsin has heard about this stuff, and either they’re angry at the Republicans now or they never will be. I would expect the average Dem (remember, these are only state senate seats, and not every state senator is Barack Obama) to underperform “generic Dem” in this scenario.
Jennifer
I’m not a Wisconsinite so I don’t know but…do the signatures even go to a judge? In my state they don’t; they go to the Secretary of State’s elections office for verification. I suppose you could have court challenges from either side (opponents claiming signatures were counted that shouldn’t have been; supporters claiming signatures were disallowed that shouldn’t have been) but I can’t recall having seen a challenge on this basis, mostly because in petition drives the organizers try to gather well beyond the required number – if you’ve got 15 – 20% more signatures than is required by law, throwing out a few that you shouldn’t or counting a few that you shouldn’t becomes a moot point.
jwb
@Steve: I expect whoever is on the ballot will outperform the polling fairly substantially, because those who are against the current situation are far more motivated to vote. The bigger question is whether they can get the proper number of valid signatures, since the standard is quite high. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are having difficulty getting enough signatures in the districts represented by those senators who are doing best in the polling.
Roger Moore
@someguy:
Because recall elections without a specific cause are likely to piss voters off. Most people believe that recalls are supposed to be reserved for extreme cases, not as a routine tactic. They don’t want to go back and re-do elections that had clear winners and losers unless the winner has done something that’s really beyond the pale. If you try to turn recalls into a routine tactic, you’ll discover that it just makes people think less of you and your candidates.
piratedan
@Caz: ahhh Caz, you got nothin’ to fear from us, we librulz don’t even own guns much less enough money to buy our own partisan judges. We are all pure of heart, Lenin and the broccoli mandate have made us so.
jwb
@Jennifer: I think you are likely to see lots of challenges here, because the absolute number of signatures is fairly high relative to the number of eligible voters so it will be hard (and time consuming) to get a large number of extra signatures, and the potential for out-of-district signatures is also very large.
Keith
A (perhaps) meaningful comparison – one that might tell how voter sentiment has shifted, is to look at those numbers versus the spread when those candidates last ran for office.
That was in ’08, during the Presidential Election with historically high Democratic Party or independently affiliated turn-out. Surely, the numbers from PPP couldn’t be better than when Obama volunteers were getting every last BHO vote into the booth, surely not right?
After all, not all those WI State Senate districts are up for grabs – usually.
Here is the list of election results from ’08, when all last ran for re-election.
In nearly every contested case there is a significant push toward the Democratic Party generic candidate compared to the actual tally from the ’08 election. The on exception might arguably be Darling, who somehow gains a point. Maybe the voters just love him for his last name – it is more fetching than Grothman after all.
PPP Poll —— ’08 Spread
Democrat 55 – Dan Kapanke 41, ’08 D 49 – Kapanke 51
Democrat 49 – Randy Hopper 44, ’08 D ~ 50 – Hopper 50
Democrat 49 – Luther Olsen 47, ’08 D 0 – Olsen 100% (ran unopposed)
Rob Cowles 45 – Democrat 43, ’08 D 0 – Cowles 100% (ran unopposed)
Sheila Harsdorf 48 – Democrat 44, ’08 D 44 – Harsdorf 48
Alberta Darling 52 – Democrat 44, ’08 D 49 – Darling 51
Mary Lazich 56 – Democrat 34, ’08 D 0 – Lazich 100% (ran unopposed)
Glenn Grothman 60 – Democrat 32, ’08 D 20 – Grothman 80
When one bears in mind that Wisconsin went for Obama in ’08 by a clip of >56% to just over 42% then these poll numbers might signal a huge shift in the fortunes of the GOP within Wisconsin. Larger perhaps than even Weigel assumes.
Walker hasn’t just broken the Badger state for workers (union or disorganized) – he appears to be on his way to making the state a terra incognita for the Republicans going forward. If, that is, passion can be maintained.
Ash Can
@Steve: But “angry at the incumbent” doesn’t automatically equal “definitely going to vote for whoever runs against him.” I’d be willing to bet that even in the districts where the generic Dem is leading in the polls, there are still a lot of feelings of “Yeah, the incumbent’s an ass, but what’s the alternative, and are we guaranteed that the alternative won’t be even worse?” We partisan political junkies know how we’d view that question, but we’re the exception, not the rule. If and when the voters see a real live warm body come along and say “Here I am, look at me, I’m the alternative,” the issue takes on an entirely different cast. At that point it moves from opposition to the incumbent to support for the alternative, and all the people who are waiting to see who steps forward as the alternative can say, “Well then, that’s fine.”
Yes, there’s opposition to the Republicans; that’s a given. But focusing support for the alternative is a different dynamic, and the emergence of real-live individual candidates will take care of that.
demz taters
@someguy: There’s a recall effort under way for Jan Brewer here in Arizona. I’m not too hopeful though since she was already a known quantity last fall and she was still voted in.
Lol
@10: That article is pretty much a textbook example of finding “facts” to fit a preconceived premise.
Some wannabe firebagger who only gave $50 and unsubscribed because she kept getting asked to get involved basically means nothing.
Obama’s small donor power was small donors who gave $25-50 *repeatedly* so that they ended up giving several hundred dollars over time. This is the same crowd that kvetchs how horrible it is that Obama raised money from people with jobs (gasp!) at private companies (oh horror!).
Mike
Elections in WI are run by a set of judges, all of whom have been appointed by outgoing governor Doyle, a Democrat. So that’s positive, at least.
Steve
@Ash Can: I think you have it backwards. I think people focus on whether the alternative might be worse once they actually know who the alternative is. Right now they are thinking purely about whether they like the incumbent or not.
D0n Camillo
Anybody know how the Republicans are coming along in their efforts to recall the Democratic senators?
Mike
@D0n Camillo: They aren’t saying, which probably means that their numbers aren’t so good.
lllphd
hey is anyone following the death threat stuff?
i am wicked wicked suspicious of that. here’s the deal.
first off, they “say” – walker first, last wednesday night’s press conference – all of them have been getting “them.” then they publish one huge long email that includes i mean every generic union talking point plus every blood dripping invective you can imagine. honestly, that email is long. and interestingly, well-written.
so that was thursday, and they say the doj is investigating. then friday, they report they’ve identified a suspect and she’s female, but no name and no other details, except she confessed.
meanwhile, the only media coverage of these “death threats” (plural, mind you; and “death,” ya know, like sarah palin got) is fox and a bunch of rightwingnut websites, one or two local papers, one of which was hopper’s paper saying why he would not be in the st pat’s parade, not because he got popped living outside his district with his mistress but because of the death threats.
so. it’s now late tuesday. and guess what folks? there is nothing further on the suspect, no other media outlets are looking into this very dire and grave and serious situation of libruhl union hippies making DEATH threats. nothing. nada. zip.
is it just me? or did karl rove just fart in our general direction? cuz it sure reeks of a rank case of astroturfitis.
lllphd
@Keith:
keith, these are truly helpful numbers, and hopeful; thanks so much.
yeah, especially helpful when you consider this recent poll canvassed for “generic” democrats. now some strong candidates have to step forward.
kideni
I keep swinging back and forth on what to think of the poll results, but I guess I kind of agree with Doug’s ok-not-great assessment. It’s great that the petitions got off to such a good start, because as Greg Sargent pointed out, it’s easier to get signatures at the beginning, when you can find lots of enthusiastic signers.
I was surprised that Alberta Darling polled as well as she did (52 to 44), since she barely won the last time around and her district went strongly for Obama at the time. But it sounds as though she has a weird district (part of Milwaukee that’s strongly Dem and then suburbs that are just as strongly Repub), so perhaps the people answering the phone skewed more to the Red districts. People in that part of the state can speak to that better than I can. Her opponent last time around was in the Assembly for a long time and popular, and he’s apparently willing to give it another go. John Nichols told Thom Hartmann that there are strong candidates ready to go in other districts (he didn’t give any more specifics, so I don’t know what he bases that assertion on).
The only recall effort against a Dem that seems to be making any noise is against Jim Holperin, in the northeast part of the state. The Repubs aren’t saying anything about numbers, but from what I’ve read he may be vulnerable since he barely won in 08 and his district is rather purple. That said, what noise there is about the efforts against the Dems is minimal. I can’t see how they’d get enough people in Madison to sign a petition against Fred Risser, and even if they somehow pull it off, there’s no way he’d lose the election.
lllphd
ya gotta love headlines like this:
Schumer: House GOP acting like Scott Walker Republicans”
Keith
@lllphd: Thanks Illphd – though I do feel bad about switching Alberta Darling’s gender.
Glen Tomkins
Pessimism and optimism
I think you’re overly optimistic on how easy it is to get the petition signatures, and overly pessimistic on the recall vote that would follow succesful petition drives.
Characerizing the goal as 15k signatures makes it seem easier (though still not easy) than the more informative characterization as 25% of the voters in each district who voted in the last gubernatorial election.
You have to have separate petitions for each district. Only voters in that district can sign their district’s petition. You have to have at least 25% of the registered voters in that district sign.
You can’t just set up a table at a huge rally, and have the attendees sign. Even among the Wisconsinites in attendance, only about a fourth will be eligible to sign any petition, because only a fourth of the seats are subject to recall right now. Even among the fourth who can sign, few will know which district they live in, and therefore which petition to sign. Lastly, you’re going to get about 90% of the benefit from havng people sign at rallies from your first rally, because it’s mostly the same people who will attend all of your rallies, and they can only sign once.
You can get away with signing at rallies, or positioning your sign-up tables at high traffic sites, if you only need a small percentage. But if you need 25%, you have to do two things.
First, you need control over your voter list. You have to know who’s signed already as a minimum, both so as to not waste further effort contacting those people, and because you need to avoid duplicates to know where you are in the process and to have signatures that will survive challenge. As a bonus, a voter list that already has IDs, likelihood of voting our way based on past behavior, tells you who to contact first for signatures.
Secondly, you do need to go out and contact people where they live, not wait for them to come to you. The 25% requirement is just too high a percentage of the pool to have any expectation that they will come to you in sufficient numbers.
So yes, getting enough valid signatures is certainly doable, but far from a given, far from easy. It will take a lot of organization and a lot of door-knockers.
But I think that winning the resulting elections will be easier than the dKos polling makes it appear. Asking the question that WI voters in these districts will face in 2 months this way, “Do you want to fire your current Senator?”, was predictably the form of the question most likely to produce results favorable to the incumbents. Polls that ask the question in terms of the issue are finding that WI voters are on our side at 60%+. A majority of voters in her district voted for, to take an example, Senator Darling, which probably means they like her personally. All but the most sociopathic of bosses feels at least some twinge at firing even the most sociopathic of employees. So ask the question in terms of taking the axe to Senator Darling, and you encourage even respondents who support the teachers to hallucinate some middle way, whereby neither the teachers nor Darling lose their jobs.
We win the elections in, probably, six of these districts if, by election day, that illusion that both Darling and the teachers can all keep their jobs, is gone. Our side is going to have a lot of help from the other side in shattering that illusion, because them people over be them some True Believers, Hallelujah.