April 06, 2011 11:19 PM UTC

Wisconsin Attack on Workers Backfires Bigtime

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote earlier this week that the April 4 civil rights rallies could mark a pivotal moment in the 2012 election cycle. As we said on Monday:

When the 2012 elections heat up next summer, we may be looking back at this day as a tipping point in gains by Democrats at the ballot box. The over-reaching and completely unnecessary moves by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans around the country awakened a slumbering group of progressives that might not otherwise have been as enthused about 2012. Walker’s efforts to take away collective bargaining rights prompted unprecedented demonstrations locally and created a firestorm that swept across the country.

…the rallies scheduled for today have a very clear civil rights focus after Gov. Walker’s attempts at union busting in Wisconsin. This is certainly a progressive cause, but we’re talking about people’s livelihoods here. This isn’t just a symbolic opposition to a general set of beliefs — this is a very real opposition to a very real, and very specific, attack. Why Republicans decided to pick this fight is a mystery to us, but perhaps they just misinterpreted seeing a larger mandate in the 2010 elections — a mandate that quite clearly did not exist, as poll after poll shows most Americans oppose what happened in Wisconsin.

Our friends at “The Fix” have the rundown on what happened at the ballot box in Wisconsin yesterday, and what a colossal error the Republican attack on unions appears to have become:

Less than a month after the contentious budget fight concluded in Wisconsin, voters went to the polls across the state in an off-year election that was cast by Democrats as a referendum on the brief tenure of Gov. Scott Walker (R) and Republicans in the state legislature.

The results suggest that, at a minimum, the budget standoff energized Democratic voters and, at a maximum, could well have played a role in tipping the ideological composition of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court.

In the state Supreme Court race, incumbent David Prosser was trailing challenger Joanne Kloppenburg by 224 votes with all but three of the state’s 3,630 precincts counted. (The race is officially non partisan but Prosser was supported by national Republican groups and Kloppenburg by Democratic ones.)

And, in the Milwaukee County Executive race to replace Walker, Democrat Chris Abele beat Republican state Rep. Jeff Stone by a surprisingly large margin in a campaign where Abele ran a series of ads casting Stone as a Walker clone.