It was only June when Scott Walker announced his formal intention to run for the presidency. His presidential bid was no surprise; the announcement was preceded by months of speculation and scrutiny. Walker was, after all, the prospective frontrunner in the GOP’s 2016 field. More so than any other candidate in the race, Walker had established a record of accomplishment in office. He had survived three statewide elections in the space of just four years, and had undergone the press vetting and built up the national fundraising network that accompanies such feats. Walker was the candidate to beat. On September 21, Scott Walker dropped out of the race. What couldn’t be accomplished in three years by an army of Democrats and all the money and muscle big labor could muster, the Republican primary voting base achieved in three months. But while it might be tempting to blame the Walker campaign’s implosion on the rise of Trump and political media’s myopic focus on the celebrity candidate, this would be a mistake. Like Rick Perry, Walker is primarily to blame for his collapse.
At the dawn of 2015, Walker looked like the candidate to beat. He had just emerged victorious from his third statewide victory and looked set to benefit from the various fundraising committees and PACs that were setting up operations in preparation for a presidential bid. Walker’s team had tapped the veteran campaign strategist, Rick Wiley, to manage his eventual bid. But the strength of Walker’s organization was undermined by the imperceptible weaknesses of the candidate.
Walker was embroiled in two relatively manufactured controversies early in the year. In London, Walker was asked whether he believed in evolution, a question he answered by simply saying he would “punt.” Walker took a similar approach to a ham-fisted press effort to generate controversy when he replied, “I don’t know” to a questioner who asked if the Wisconsin governor believed that Barack Obama was a Christian. Neither of these questions was valid. The fact that Walker’s refusal to answer the inquiry about Obama’s faith led to the same level of controversy that would have erupted if he had replied in the negative and suggests that a scandalous outcome was preordained. Still, these were ominous portents. It was Walker who declined to take a strong position, even one of frustration with the questions to which he was being subjected. This would turn out to be prologue to a series of embarrassing walk-backs from the candidate.
The headlines announcing yet another policy reversal on Walker’s part soon became disconcertingly routine. “Scott Walker denies flip-flop on ethanol,” Politico declared in March. “Scott Walker’s complete immigration reversal,” the Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein observed in April. By July, Walker was reversing his reversal on immigration reform. “I’m not going nativist. I’m pro-immigration,” Walker allegedly told Heritage Foundation economist and supporter Stephen Moore according to a New York Times report via Jonathan Martin headlined “Forget what I said.”
“Scott Walker’s Many Answers on Gay Rights,” The Daily Beast noted. “Scott Walker stumbled over his own prior comments Wednesday, saying that when he called on the Boy Scouts to reinstate a ban on gay leaders because it ‘protected children,’ he meant the ban protected them from media scrutiny,” a July dispatch in Politico revealed.
At a certain point, it’s not them; it’s you.
By the first Republican presidential debate in August, Walker was a diminished figure. He seemed to disappear into the scenery on the debate stage alongside nine far more boisterous and brassy Republican presidential aspirants. His performance in that debate failed to reverse his slide in the polls. By the second debate, Walker walked on stage and virtually disappeared. CNN’s moderators asked the Wisconsin governor a grand total of three questions over the course of as many hours. He spoke for just 8 minutes and 24 seconds.
Walker was already trying to manufacture a campaign reset come September when he delivered a fiery speech in California just prior to the second debate. “The speech is the leading edge of a campaign reset that Walker and his allies are expected to execute in the coming weeks,” wrote National Review’s Joel Gehrke. “To wreak havoc on Washington, America also needs a leader who has been tested,” Walker averred. But it was already too late to arrest Walker’s slide in the polls. By the middle of the month, press reports indicated that donors had closed their wallets to Walker, his campaign staffers were beginning to look for the exits, and a CNN survey released on Sunday revealed that the Badger State governor registered less than one percent support.
In what would prove to be the definitive postmortem of the Walker campaign, National Review’s Eliana Johnson and Rich Lowry sought to identify what failed Walker. “The advice you’ll hear from neutral observers to the campaign is, ‘Let Scott Walker be Scott Walker,’” they noted. The assessment from friends and observers was that Scott Walker the presidential candidate was overly strategic and managed to death. But what you won’t hear is that the quiet and unassuming conservative reformer was undone by Trump. In stark contrast to how resolutely he governed in Wisconsin, it was Walker’s flailing and directionless response to adversity in the form of a crowded GOP presidential primary field that proved his ruination.
One of the earliest victims of Walker’s serial unsure footedness was the politician consultant Liz Mair. Walker’s campaign took Mair on for her digital expertise but dropped her in a public and flamboyant fashion when it surfaced that she had disparaged Iowa Republicans’ taste for federally subsidized ethanol mandates. Walker calculated that he needed those Iowa Republicans more than he needed an accomplished digital strategist. He was wrong.
“Things he got wrong: Misunderstanding the GOP base, its priorities and its stances. Pandering. Flip-flopping,” Mair wrote of her former boss. “Becoming so invested in winning, no matter what it took, that he lost sight of his real identity as a political leader.”
It’s all quite tragic, but it would be scapegoating to blame Walker’s implosion on either Trump or the utterly unwarranted amount of coverage his gonzo campaign has generated in the entertainment industry that is the political press. It was Walker who failed to communicate to the GOP electorate how he would serve as an effective executive in the White House. From frontrunner in April to the second campaign to suspend operations in September, Walker’s story is a testament to the unpredictability of American presidential politics. Anything can happen. But don’t blame Trump or a seemingly superficial set of Republican primary voters for Walker’s fate. For that, he only has himself to blame.
