Last week, the esteemed and incomparable Giles Goat Boy wrote a diary pointing out that Wisconsin is number 50 - dead last - in job creation since Scott Walker took office.
Today we find out that there is something that Scott Walker has been successful at.
We're number one in partisanship, according to PPP.
The article in from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Partisan chasm especially deep in Wisconsin
and is based upon a PPP poll from last month, but is just now being covered by the esteemed WI press. I tried to find the poll information on PPP's site but instead just found cheerful stuff like Clinton would beat Walker, Ryan in Wisconsin in 2016. (P.S. - she mops the floor with Rubio too.)
Some nuggets from the MJS article:
Gov. Walker's approval rating from Republican voters was 92% in a Wisconsin survey last month by Public Policy Polling.
His approval rating from Democratic voters was 9%.
Invert those two numbers and you get something very close to President Obama's ratings in Wisconsin: 93% approval from Democrats, 4% approval from Republicans.
In both cases, the partisan divide is bigger than anything Public Policy Polling has recorded for governor and president in the 40-plus states where it has polled since 2011.
Wisconsin is not just a microcosm of the red-blue divide among America's voters.
It may be the premier example.
In the 40-plus states where PPP has polled since 2011, no other governor has had a partisan approval gap nearly that wide. This has been a signature of Walker's polling numbers since the war erupted in Wisconsin over public-sector unions in 2011.
Thank you, Scott Walker. We suck at jobs, but we're number one in partisanship!
The last bit at the end of the article would almost be sad, if so many of us weren't living through this experiment in rolling back democracy. False equivalency rears its ugly head...
Wisconsin is a place where the partisan divisions are unusually stark, and nobody's bridging them.
Sweet
***. They're right. Thankfully, few Democrats in this state want to bridge the divide to the current republican positions on voting rights (right to vote's not guaranteed, ya know!), women's rights (Contraception kills babies!), gay rights (Go to Minnesota or Iowa, ya queers!), and the rights of individuals to organize in the workplace.