PPP has conducted a new poll in Wisconsin, and voters now say that if they had a second chance they’d elect Tom Barrett instead of Scott Walker. So what caused the change of heart?
The difference between how folks would vote now and how they voted in November can almost all be attributed to shifts within union households. Voters who are not part of union households have barely shifted at all- they report having voted for Walker by 7 points last fall and they still say they would vote for Walker by a 4 point margin. But in households where there is a union member voters now say they’d go for Barrett by a 31 point margin, up quite a bit from the 14 point advantage they report having given him in November.
For a long time, union households have voted in only moderately large numbers for Democrats. Nationally, they voted Democratic by a 61-43 margin in 2010. Some of this is because of social issues trumping pocketbook issues, but some of it is undoubtedly because lots of union members didn’t really think Republicans were all that big a threat to their jobs. Sure, they talked a big game, but in office they never really carried through.
But however things turn out in Wisconsin, those days are probably over. Scott Walker’s brand of hardball might easily bump up the Democratic share of the union vote to 70% or more in 2012, and that represents a gain of nearly two percentage points in the overall popular vote. Unless Republicans can somehow contrive an anti-union message that wins that back among non-union independents, their chances next year have suddenly gotten a whole lot longer.
