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Why did Scott Walker comfortably defeat the recall by better than 53 to 46 percent? With so much energy and effort by thousands of workers, activists, students, and young people going into the Wisconsin Uprising, why did this movement fail to achieve its prime immediate political goal? How did Walker persuade 38 percent of members of union households to vote for him?

Walker’s huge sums of money, most of it raised outside Wisconsin, was a factor; he outspent Tom Barrett by 7 to 1 or better. The governor flooded the state with commercials arguing that Wisconsin had gained 23,000 jobs while he was in office, flatly contradicting the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed a job loss greater than that for 2011. Other Walker commercials contrasted this claim with job losses in Milwaukee under Barrett.

Walker’s ideological framework, simultaneously populist in tone and demagogic, was that public sector workers were the “haves” and those in the private sector were the “have nots.” Obviously, some private sector workers, battered by job losses and pay and benefit cuts, were open to this appeal.

For the most part Barrett did not directly counter this image of greedy public sector workers. Instead he focused on the ongoing investigation of Walker’s operation when he was a county executive. But many Wisconsinites dismissed that investigation, in which some of Walker’s former staff pled guilty to doing political work on county time, as “just politics.”