Election data analyst Nate Silver took to Twitter to dispute a New York Times article claiming Scott Walker’s three election wins during two terms in office weren’t really all that impressive.
Sorry @nytimes, but Scott Walker's electoral track record is pretty damned impressive: http://t.co/wbASpTnRGw
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 6, 2015
“Walker was the second-most-conservative GOP governor running for re-election in 2014,” Harry Enten writes on Silver’s Five Thirty Eight website.
Of all the Republican governors running for re-election in 2014, Walker is the most conservative compared with the type of governor you’d expect was elected based on the 2012 presidential vote. The next closest is Paul LePage in Maine. Based on Walker’s ideology and the ideology of the incumbents running in 2014, you’d expect him to have been a governor of a state that Romney won by about 13 percentage points (Montana, for example) instead of one he lost by about 7 percentage points.
Walker may not be more electable than an average Republican, but electability isn’t the only thing that matters. As my colleague Nate Silver pointed out, Republican voters will be looking for a candidate who is both conservative and electable.
Enten’s analysis is intended to dispute a piece by Nate Cohn in the New York Times in which he claims Walker’s electoral record “isn’t as impressive as it looks.”
Cohn doubts Walker would have won if he were up for re-election in 2012.
“Mr. Walker’s electoral performance was average for a Republican running for governor in 2010 or 2014. His showing — a modest victory in a modestly Democratic state — was highly consistent with the extent that Republican candidates for governor outperformed Mr. Romney’s showing from 2012,” he writes.
He even goes so far as to say Walker’s 2014 victory was the “least impressive” of the year among Republican gubernatorial candidates in the Midwest. But that doesn’t take into account weak, poorly funded Democratic candidates in Michigan and Ohio, for example. Is also doesn’t factor in Walker’s self-funded multi-millionaire opponent who tag-teamed with national unions that had a score to settle.
What Walker demonstrated was he could enact a conservative agenda in a purple state – the birthplace of progressivism – and win two elections and a recall within four years.
Despite what is stated in yet another hit piece by the New York Times, that makes him highly attractive to a lot of Republican voters.
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