As you could not fail to know by now, last night the votes were counted in Wisconsin, and Scott Walker became the first Governor to stave off defeat in a recall election. At present, it appears that one of the four Republican Senators was recalled and replaced, so that the recall efforts were successful only in that Republicans marginally lost control of the Senate.
There are three lessons in this victory.
1. Today, the power of public sector employee unions is overrated (see the LLNYP's liberal mouthpiece Russ Douthat here and the Jay Cost article he cites here), depending as it does on voter sympathy that is greatly reduced in times of no growth, especially if the unions are part of the cause of slow growth, as in California, New York, and the other blue disasters of the upper Midwest. In such a case, the vaunted union ground game is overmatched against that of the fiscally motivated tea party and its allies, e.g., FreedomWorks and superPACs of the moment.
2. Conservatives must not fear to act against public sector unions. They will survive if they cast their legislative actions as fair to the taxpayer and the unions' opposition as greedy. Remember: in the public sector case this battle is always the unions against the taxpayers.
3. It is essential that fiscally conservative actions be taken with even the slimmest of majorities, even if the legislative majority may be lost. Even the slightest accommodation with the left in order to stay in power neuters the power. Power must be exercised when won or it's not power. Action will hearten the ground troops and the Reagan Democrat/Independents, some of whom are forced union members -- removing the automatic deduction of union dues reduced union membership by 60% in Wisconsin reducing the union's access to funds to spend on elections. It will also dishearten union partisans.
Finally, it must be noted that the RealClearPolitics.com metapoll -- an assembly of all horse-race polls on the recall into a single poll -- was remarkably accurate. Below are the final RCP averages and those averages adjusted by either of two standard assumptions regarding the undecided -- that they either won't vote or that those who do will split exactly like the decided -- compared to the final tally.
RCPAvg UndiesOut Final
Walker 51.5 53.48 53.2
Barrett 44.8 46.52 46.3
Undies 3.7
Margin 6.96 6.9
The final results were within 0.3%, and Walker's margin of victory was predicted within less than 0.1%. This was true even though the polls it averaged were far lass accurate individually, and included many autodialer robopolls. Big samples may matter more than the margin of error would lead you to believe.
