Recall Recap: The Latest From Wisconsin
Sidney-winner John Nichols of The Nation went on Democracy Now! yesterday to talk about the ongoing campaign to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker for stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. The pro-recall contingent needed 540,000 signatures, and they obtained over a million, making the campaign to unseat Walker the largest recall effort in U.S. history.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And John, most people don’t realize that those million signatures represent about almost a half of the electorate in Wisconsin. Could you—when you say the proportion that the signatures represent.
JOHN NICHOLS: Well—yes, they represent almost half of the electorate in the last election, in 2010, and what you might reasonably presume to be the electorate that would participate in a recall election. It’s not all the electorate. There—Wisconsin, up until very recently, didn’t require you to be registered to vote before you went to vote. So, you know, we don’t know. A recall election could actually pull in hundreds of thousands of additional voters. This is a very exciting and very charged thing. But what is important to remember is that the size of that proportion of the existing electorate has never been achieved before.
A state board must now review the signatures to ensure that they are valid. If the pro-recall faction has gathered enough signatures, Walker will face a new election, and possibly a primary challenge within his own party.
Walker didn’t campaign on an anti-collective bargaining platform, instead he foisted the controversial and unpopular law on the electorate as one of his first acts of office. The voters of Wisconsin may finally have their say on collective bargaining rights.
Nichols’ forthcoming book is entitled, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street.
