Remember the big protests last year when Wisconsin removed the subjects of some benefits like health insurance and pensions from the scope of allowable collective bargaining? According to most of the media, it was the end of the world as we know it. For months and months we have heard how the people of Wisconsin (and the public employee unions) were going to right this wrong. Well, yesterday the recall election forced on Wisconsin by the left held its primary. Kathleen Falk, the candidate of those same unions, was crushed in the vote by Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee. Barrett, of course, is the Democrat who said that he was not necessarily opposed to all of the reforms passed by the state legislature that began this whole saga. In other words, the voters in Wisconsin will get to choose between two candidates neither of whom is strongly opposed to the labor reforms.
On the Republican side, Governor Scott Walker won the primary over token opposition. Walker got 97% of the votes case in the primary. but that is not the real story about the primary. Walker got 622,000 votes in a meningless primary. All five of the Democrats running in the primary together received just over 660,000 votes combined. If Walker almost outpolled the Democrats even though they had a real election and the GOP primary was a non-event, it bodes quite will for the general election in three weeks. It seems that the Walker voters are ready to come out to vote against the effort by the Democrats to use national money to overturn the results of the elections of 2010. If that happens, and it is looking better and better that Walker will win, it will be a terrible blow to the power of the public employee unions.
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