06 June 12
ere's a headline you won't see, but should: "Scott Walker Spent 88% of the Money to Get 53% of the Vote."
Political pundits will spend the next few days and
weeks analyzing the Wisconsin recall election, examining exit polls,
spilling lots of ink over how different demographic groups - income,
race, religious, union membership, gender, party affiliation,
independents, liberals/conservatives/moderates, etc - voted on Tuesday.
But the real winner in Wisconsin on Tuesday was not Gov. Scott Walker, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, but democracy.
Walker's Republican campaign outspent Barrett's
Democratic campaign by $30.5 million to $4 million - that's a 7.5 to 1
advantage. Another way of saying this is that of the $34.5 million
spent on their campaigns, Walker spend 88% of the money.
Walker beat Barrett by 1,316,989 votes to 1,145,190 votes - 53% to 46% (with 1% going to an independent candidate).
Here's another way of saying that: Walker spent $23 for each vote he received, while Barrett spent only $3.47 per vote.
But the reality is even worse than this, because the
$34.5 billion figure does not include so-called independent
expenditures and issue ads paid for primarily by out-of-state
billionaires (like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Joe
Rickets), business groups, and the National Rifle Association, which
were skewed even more heavily toward Walker. Once all this additional
spending is calculated, we'll see that total spending in this race
could be more than double the $34.5 billion number, that Walker and
his business allies outspent Barrett by an even wider margin, and
that he had to spend even more than $23 for each vote.
In other words, business and billionaires bought this
election for Walker. The money paid for non-stop TV and radio ads as
well as mailers. There's no doubt that if the Barrett campaign had
even one-third of the war- chest that Walker had, it would have been
able to mount an even more formidable grassroots get-out-the-vote
campaign and put more money into the TV and radio air war. Under
those circumstances, it is likely that Barrett would have prevailed.
Pundits can have a field day pontificating about the
Wisconsin election, but in the end its about how Big Money hijacked
democracy in the Badger State on Tuesday, and how they're trying to
do it again in November.
Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor
of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy
program at Occidental College. He is the co-author of "Place Matters:
Metropolitics for the 21st Century" and "The Next Los Angeles: The
Struggle for a Livable City." He writes regularly for the Los Angeles
Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. His next book, "The 100
Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame,"
will be published by Nation Books in the spring.
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