For all the “day one” promises that have been made in the 2016 presidential race, it’s hard for voters to know how most candidates would actually govern. Repealing Obamacare, tearing off carbon caps and tearing up an Iran nuclear deal are all catchy ideas, but they do not amount to a White House strategy.
There is one candidate, however, for whom this air of mystery does not apply. Even among the current and former governors in the field, he is exceptional for the clarity of his record as an executive, owing to the methodical quality and ideological consistency of his leadership. Most every detail of his career feeds confidence in what he intends to do next.
He is Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor who is now in his second term and who declared a run for the Republican presidential nomination on Monday.
Not only has Walker established a remarkably clear-cut fiscal record, steadily reducing taxes while shrinking spending commitments, but he has also signed legislation on issues of urgent national debate including guns, abortion, voter ID, criminal sentencing, minimum wage, community policing, private-sector unions, education, healthcare, environmental conservation and more.
Walker’s foreign policy résumé is sparse. But otherwise, the American voter has a wealth of evidence on which to evaluate him. To understand what a Scott Walker presidency would mean, voters can look to his record in Wisconsin.
“We transformed the state,” Walker boasted at a Wisconsin Republican convention in May. Below is a list of 15 things he meant by that.
1. Pinch the public sector
Walker rose to national fame by carving out a big piece of the state budget pie – compensation packages for public-sector employees – and taking a huge bite. Hit with a recall election, he became the first US governor in history to survive one. He might have lost and disappeared. Instead, he’s running for president with heavyweight donor support.
When Walker took office in 2011, Wisconsin faced a $137m spending shortfall with a six-month horizon. His answer was a “budget repair bill” that put the livelihoods of social workers, prison guards, nurses, teachers and snow-plow drivers on the chopping block. The state patrol, local police and fire departments were excluded.
For many Wisconsinites and sympathetic onlookers, the step represented a betrayal of workers carrying out core government functions. Democratic legislators fled to Illinois to deny a quorum. Protesters occupied the capitol.
“The capitol grew so packed with human bodies, the staff who worked there physically could not move around the building,” Walker wrote in Unintimidated, a 2013 memoir. “The smell, as soon as you walked into the building, was overpowering.”
On 11 March 2011, Walker signed the budget repair bill into law. The workers lost collective bargaining rights and were saddled with new health insurance and retirement costs. Their average take-home pay fell by 8% to 10%, on median salaries of about $44,000.
After three years, Walker said the law had saved the state of Wisconsin $3bn. Politifact called the claim “mostly true”.
Fallout from the law has been more difficult to track, playing out as it has, and will, in tens of thousands of families over many years. In any case, the law did not “repair” the Wisconsin budget for long, for reasons introduced in the next section.
2. Cut taxes for the wealthy while eliminating tax relief for low-income families
Despite Walker’s strike at public pensions, he has struggled to balance the state budget, thanks to large tax cuts he has signed. His first act as governor was to convene a special session of the legislature that produced $140m in tax breaks. His first budget expanded those revenue reductions to an estimated $2.3bn over 10 years. In 2014 he signed another big tax cut, which drove the state from an estimated $1bn budget surplus to a $283m shortfall.
Who benefitted? The majority of the original $2.3bn in cuts went to businesses of all sizes, but $366m went exclusively to multi-state corporations. Other measures, such as capital gains relief ($436m), were pitched narrowly to the wealthy.
Walker’s budget, meanwhile, eliminated tax credits that served an estimated 140,000 lower-income people.
“At a time when Wisconsin is supposed to be putting people to work, Governor Walker is actually stealing from working families in order to give big payouts to special interests,” state representative Tamara Grigsby told the Wisconsin State Journal.
To close the budget gap, Walker has taken a knife to education and other big pieces of the state budget pie. But there is one major sector that he has chosen to leave untouched: corrections.
3. More prisons, more prisoners, more prison spending
Walker’s record on prisons goes back to the 1990s and his days as an assemblyman, when he authored or co-sponsored 27 bills “that either expanded the definition of crimes, increased mandatory minimums for offenders, or curbed the possibility of parole”, according to a study by The Nation.
As governor, Walker has granted zero inmate pardons and snubbed initiatives backed by fellow budget hawks to reduce incarceration rates, which are now nine times greater in Wisconsin than they were in the early 1970s. The implications for Wisconsin’s bottom line are plain. In 2012, for the first time, the state’s annual corrections budget of about $2.3bn surpassed the budget for public universities.
In the US overall, young African American men are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of their white peers. Walker may not be the leader to fix the problem, judging by his record in Wisconsin, which ranks first in the nation for rates of black male incarceration.
4. Cut education spending
To counterbalance tax cuts, Walker has gone looking for savings in what was, before it was passed by corrections, long the third-largest area for state spending: the University of Wisconsin (UW) educational system. Walker’s current budget, which he signed Sunday, cuts $250m from the UW system.
Tom Loftus, a Democrat and the longest-serving assembly speaker in the state, told Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he saw an “existential threat” to the state’s distinguished chain of universities.
“The UW System is the most successful public policy [in Wisconsin] in the last half of the 20th century,” Loftus said.
Walker has also targeted spending on K-12 education, and sought to divert taxpayer funds from public schools into charter school programs run by private companies.
5. Limit Medicaid expansion, at a price of hundreds of millions
Under President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, Wisconsin had the opportunity to expand Medicaid to cover all adults under the age of 65 living at or below 133% of the poverty level. Participating in Obamacare is politically difficult for any Republican governor, however, and Walker has been no exception. He opted for a partial expansion that excluded tens of thousands of Wisconsinites.
“Some people will portray this as not caring about people,” Walker said. “I think it’s just the opposite. I care too much about the people of this state not to empower them to control their own destiny.”
The policy has not only had human costs. A 2015 estimate by the state budget office found that Walker’s partial expansion had created avoidable healthcare expenses for the state totaling $400m over just two years. At about the same time that estimate came out, Walker announced that the state would miss a $108m debt payment at the end of June.
6. Guns: concealed carry, castle doctrine and no waiting period
In June, a week after nine people were shot dead inside a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Walker signed two bills relaxing gun control in Wisconsin. He found himself defending the timing.
“If we had pulled back on this, I think it would give people the erroneous opinion that what we signed into law today had anything to do with what happened in Charleston,” Walker said.
The bills eliminated a 48-hour waiting period for handgun purchases and allowed retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons inside schools.
Walker’s earlier moves to eliminate gun control had earned him an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association. In 2011, he signed the state’s first concealed carry law. Later that year, he signed a “castle doctrine” bill, extending legal protections to people who use deadly force against perceived intruders.
Progressive Wisconsinites have condemned the governor’s gun laws. One Democratic state legislator called the concealed carry law “a radical departure from Wisconsin’s history”.
7. A strict voter ID law in a state where turnout is everything
Of the five counties with the highest voter turnout rates in the entire US, three are in Wisconsin. It’s not just that Wisconsinites are unusually giddy about civics. A combination of racial and demographic segregation, a virulent talk-radio culture and other influences have all but eliminated swing voters in the state. The side that wins is the side that shows up.
Walker won in 2010 and 2014 in part because those were not presidential election years, when more Democrats showed up to the polls.
“I think as campaigns overall have intensified, you’ve gotten to the point where you’re not just making a blanket argument to the voters,” Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2014. “It’s more about turnout than anything else.”
In spite of this – or because of it – Walker signed a bill in 2011 that would make it more difficult for some voters to cast their ballots. Wisconsin’s voter ID law, which requires voters to present photo IDs at polling places, has been classified by the national conference of state legislatures as one of the nation’s most strict.
Legal challenges have so far prevented the law from being applied in an election – but those challenges ran out in March 2015, when the supreme court upheld it.
8. Mandatory ultrasounds with physician narration, abortion ban after 20 weeks
In 2013, Walker signed a bill not only requiring ultrasounds for abortion patients but also requiring the care provider conducting the ultrasound to “provide a simultaneous oral explanation to the pregnant woman during the ultrasound of what the ultrasound is depicting” and to “provide to the pregnant woman a medical description of the ultrasound images, including the dimensions of the unborn child and a description of any external features and internal organs that are present and viewable on the image”.
Asked about the law two years later, Walker sought to deflect attention to the marvelous wonder of ultrasound technology.
“I find people all the time who’ll get out their iPhone and show me a picture of their grandkids’ ultrasound and how excited they are,” he said. “So that’s a lovely thing. I think about … my sons are 19 and 20, you know, we still have their first ultrasound picture. It’s just a cool thing out there.”
Walker seemed to downplay his opposition to abortion during his 2014 re-election fight. But with that victory behind him and a national election ahead, in March he released an open letter supporting an abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape or incest.
Walker also stripped funding for Planned Parenthood and signed a rule requiring that a doctor performing an abortion have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The rule was blocked by a federal judge.
9. Historic mining concessions threatening environmental disaster
Wisconsin’s far northern Penokee Hills offer some of state’s “last remaining unbroken forests” with “open water, wetlands, forests and rock cliffs”, according to the Nature Conservancy. In 2013, Walker backed legislation to open the Penokees to what would have been perhaps the largest open-pit iron ore mine in the world.
A mining multinational, Gogebic Taconite, proposed to dig a half-mile-wide, 1,000ft-deep mine that could have extended 21 miles through the area. In 2013, Walker signed a law that waived an oath of environmental compliance for the company, granted favorable financial terms and permitted it to fill untouched lakes and streams with mining waste.
Earlier this year, Gogebic Taconite provisionally closed its local offices, saying the project had stalled out due to opposition from Native American groups and environmental conservationists.
10. Roll back living wage, minimum wage, prevailing wage, equal pay
For 100 years, Wisconsin state law has required that “every wage paid or agreed to be paid by any employer to any employee … shall be not less than a living wage”, which is defined as one that permits “an employee to maintain herself or himself in minimum comfort, decency, physical and moral well-being”.
Walker’s current budget includes a provision that eliminates the state’s definition of a living wage, according to Think Progress.
The current budget also eliminates a prevailing wage law established in 1933 that bars local governments undertaking public works from hiring companies that pay employees less than a fair wage. Walker has fought equal pay protections for women, too. In 2012, he repealed a law that allowed equal-pay claims to be filed as lawsuits in state court.
During his 2014 re-election effort, Walker campaigned against raising the minimum wage, which in Wisconsin is the federally mandated $7.25.
“It is a job-killing agenda,” he said. “It’s done for political expediency. It’s a cheap headline.”
11. Cut funding for community policing
Walker killed a community policing grant for the Milwaukee police department in May 2013, a year after he survived his recall election. The move prompted Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn to give a frank interview to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“I don’t know of a governor anywhere in the country who succeeded in turning his state’s economy around by actively facilitating the decline of his biggest city,” Flynn said. “This isn’t like: ‘Bad things are happening in Milwaukee and I can’t stop it.’ This is: ‘Can I put another stick in the eye of Milwaukee on another issue?’”
Flynn said Walker had attacked community policing as punishment for Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett having run against him in the recall election.
“What else could it be?” Flynn said. “Perhaps, you know, the leadership of this city should go to Madison and kiss a ring and bend our knees and say: ‘Yes, overlords, please don’t hurt us anymore. We’re so sorry.’ I mean, enough.”
12. ‘Right to work’
At pains to frame his struggle with the public sector as a fiscal fight, and not a war on workers, Walker said repeatedly in 2011 that he had no intention of confronting private-sector unions, calling them “my partner in economic development”.
As a state legislator, Walker had supported so-called “right-to-work” legislation which bars agreements between employers and unions under which employees are required to pay union dues. But he dropped that cause as governor, saying at the state Republican convention in 2012 that he had “no interest in pursuing right-to-work legislation in this state”.
“It’s not going to get to my desk,” Walker said. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it isn’t there because my focal point [is] private sector unions have overwhelmingly come to the table to be my partner in economic development.”
Fast-forward to March 2015, and Walker’s preparations for the presidential race. The governor signed a bill making Wisconsin the 25th state to have a right-to-work law.
“This sends a powerful message across the country and across the world,” Walker said. “‘Wisconsin is Open For Business’ now is more than just a slogan. It’s a way of doing business.”
Politifact called it a “Full [flip] Flop”.
13. Ending paid sick leave, attacking guaranteed one-day weekends
In 2008, 69% of Milwaukee voters in a referendum approved a law requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to any worker – one hour of sick leave for 30 hours worked, and up to nine days of sick leave per year. Three years later, Walker overruled the measure with legislation that banned municipalities from imposing sick leave mandates on private employers.
Walker’s budget for 2015–2017 – which he signed into law on Sunday – goes after required weekends, too. Wisconsin law currently mandates at least 24 consecutive hours of rest in every seven consecutive days. A measure first reported in the Nation, creates an exemption that would allow employees to “voluntarily choose” not to take their one-day weekend.
State legislators have jokingly referred to the measure as the “abolishing the Sabbath act”.
14. Drug screenings for recipients of public aid
Walker’s most recent budget seeks to make good on a campaign promise to require drug screenings for recipients of public aid programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits. In May, the Wisconsin legislature’s budget committee approved the requirement.
“We need people who are drug free,” said Walker.
The measure would require people in job training programs, the state’s FoodShare program and most people seeking unemployment “to take a questionnaire that may subject them to drug tests later”, explained local WMTV news. “Those who fail the drug tests would get taxpayer-funded treatment.”
A separate measure approved by the Wisconsin assembly in May would track and limit the amount of designated “junk food” welfare recipients would be allowed to purchase.
15. ‘I can do the same across the world’
occupy the state capitol in protest against proposed budget cuts in Madison in February 2011. Photograph: Darren Hauck/Reuters
Lacking experience abroad, Walker has billed his local work as preparing him for global leadership. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, the governor asserted that his fight with public-sector unions had helped prepare him to fight “Islamic terrorists”.
“I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists does not wash up on American soil,” Walker said. “We will have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message not only that we will protect American soil but do not, do not, take this upon freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world. We need a leader with that kind of confidence.
“If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
Walker later walked back the statement.
“Let me be perfectly clear: I’m just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling this difficult situation is the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal.
Despite a reputation as a politician who is unfailingly on-message, Walker has made other missteps as he begins to speak publicly about world affairs. In February, he told a Florida anti-tax crowd that “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime” – Walker was born in 1967 – was when Ronald Reagan broke up a strike by air-traffic controllers in 1981. (Potential 1981 runner-up: mutually assured destruction.)
“It sent a message not only across America – it sent a message around the world,” Walker said, according to an account in the Washington Post, because it showed America’s foes that “we weren’t to be messed with”.
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