In Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up, election-season yard signage has become an aggressive sport. Most of the city’s green spaces are covered in signs for the Democratic candidate for governor, Mary Burke, and the few signs for the incumbent, the Republican Scott Walker, are oversized, as if to compensate—or bully, depending on your point of view. One belongs to a longtime neighbor of my family’s. My father has largely stopped talking to her. This race, which is in a dead heat, is not about polite disagreement.
Walker’s Presidential ambitions are no secret, and next week’s election will determine not only whether he keeps his seat but if his middle-America, what-you-see-is-what-you-get persona will be peddled to the rest of the country, too. His style has its appeal. “I like politicians willing to take risks, to make reforms,” Todd Osborne, a software engineer who supports Walker, told me. “Even when they may not be politically popular. It was his damn-the-torpedoes attitude, right off the bat.” Osborne said that his property taxes, which had increased by five hundred dollars a year for three years in a row, went up by only $1.18 after Walker’s tax-cutting measures went into effect, as part of legislation known as Act 10. Osborne acknowledged that friends of his had been deeply upset by other components of Act 10, which dismantled public-sector unions and required members to contribute more to their benefits; but, he pointed out, as an employee in the private sector, he’s been contributing significantly to his health-care and retirement plans all along. Forty-seven per cent of the residents of Wisconsin agree with him.
Most of that forty-seven per cent does not live in Madison. Every day at noon, for the last three and a half years, a protest group called the Solidarity Singers has performed “We Shall Overcome” in the colonnaded rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol. The group formed during the protests against Act 10, in March of 2011, and was buoyed last year when the Walker administration ordered Capitol police to remove the singers from the building. The cops arrested a teen-ager, a former Marine, a Lutheran minister, and several grannies who continued to sing as they were hauled away in handcuffs. The singers erected a shrine with photographs of the arrests a few dozen feet from a lamp-lit, Beaux-Arts-style corridor that leads to Walker’s office. Their persistence reflects the depth of resentment that the other half of Wisconsin feels toward the Governor.
Among the offenses cited by anti-Walkerites is a law that Walker and the state legislature passed in 2013, which rolled back environmental regulations, allowing Gogebic Taconite, a Florida-based mining company, to begin exploration to open an iron-ore mine in the Penokee Hills, in the northern part of the state. It could become the largest open-pit iron mine in the world. According to leaked e-mails, Gogebic donated seven hundred thousand dollars to a business-advocacy group that shared an adviser with Walker’s recall-election campaign, in 2012, allegedly at Walker’s behest. The mine itself, early samples indicate, could pollute the air and severely damage the fragile water system; it also backs up against the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation. When protesters gathered there and damaged some equipment, Gogebic hired guards from an Arizona-based private-security firm called Bulletproof, who showed up wearing fatigues and armed with assault rifles.
Burke, a wealthy business executive whose family runs Trek Bicycle, was only a few points behind Walker in the polls pretty much from the minute she entered the race. That says less about the strength of her candidacy than about how polarized Wisconsin has become. “I don’t think everything’s going to be all puppies and rainbows if Burke gets elected,” Brian Standing, a county employee and Solidarity Singer, told me. “But I have half a hope that she’ll listen. This guy, he doesn’t listen.”
Part of Burke’s appeal to Democrats may have been her ability to contribute to her own campaign; she has spent five million dollars, as was revealed on Monday. That still left her fundraising well behind that of Walker, who, over the past year, has raised twenty-five million dollars to Burke’s sixteen million. About forty-five per cent of Walker’s money came from outside of the state, compared with twenty per cent of Burke’s.
The passion of the state’s voters seems lost on the candidates. In debates, they bothtend to focus on budgetary numbers. That can be a buzzkill, especially when delivered in the flat Midwestern drone that Burke and Walker affect. Burke’s arguments are prosaic, while Walker is a plainspoken, convincing interlocutor. “It’s like if you speak clearly, go slowly, you’re not seen as a manipulator,” Jonathan Rosenblum, a writer and attorney in Madison, told me. He’ll vote for Burke, even though, as he put it, “I started to feel excited about her just yesterday.”
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