Scott Walker, conservative, anti-union, won governorship in 2010 in the backlash against the Affordable Care Act. He was unpopular but survived a recall election in 2012. Won re-election in 2014.
Walker hasn't been able to create the jobs he claimed he would.
So where is the the "right person with the right message" to defeat Walker? Why is Scott Walker, hero to the Koch brothers, looking at an unopposed third term?
Article from NYT from 2015 may have some clues. Walker wooed the construction trades before Trump did
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/magazine/scott-walker-and-the-fate-of-the-union.html?_r=0
Even when he was attacking public unions for robbing the taxpayers of Wisconsin, Walker consistently praised private-sector unions, particularly those in the construction trades, calling them “my partners in economic development.” During his first term, many of those unions, including Local 8, backed Walker’s effort to rewrite the state’s environmental law so that an enormous iron-ore mine could be built in a pristine section of northern Wisconsin, a few miles from a Chippewa Indian reservation. The mine, which was never built, was fiercely opposed by Native American tribes and conservationists, but the mining company promised to deliver hundreds of union jobs, creating a split in Walker’s broad-based opposition.
In 2010, Terry McGowan, the president of Local 139, a statewide union of 9,000 heavy-machinery operators, endorsed Walker, because he had promised to increase highway funding and build more roads. McGowan supported him again last year, but since then, he has come to reconsider. Testifying at a right-to-work State Assembly hearing in March, McGowan’s voice cracked as he described the death, three days earlier, of Ryan Calkins, a 33-year-old union operating engineer who got caught in a drilling rig while working on a highway interchange in Milwaukee. “Remember that name — Ryan Calkins — because he will just be a little blurb in the newspaper,” McGowan told the legislators. Five hours after Calkins was killed, McGowan said, he received a call from a lawyer for Calkins’s employer; it needed someone who knew how to operate the specialized drill to help remove the mutilated body. McGowan sent one of his union members, who had trained at Local 139’s facility in central Wisconsin. “Now we’re talking about possibly taking training and safety away from our industry?” McGowan asked in disbelief.
A few days after McGowan testified, I went to see him at Local 139’s impressive new glass-and-steel union hall in wealthy suburban Waukesha County, a stronghold of support for Walker. McGowan greeted me warmly, but I could see he was still shaken by Calkins’s death. “I gained a lot of respect for the guy that I called, because he made it very obvious he didn’t want to do it,” McGowan said. “But he said he was not going to allow a fellow operating engineer to sit wrapped around that drill bit in that weather and freeze solid. You could hear his family in the background. I’m sure he was looking at his wife and kids while I was talking to him.”
In his testimony, McGowan described his members as “beer-drinking, gun-toting, pickup-driving rednecks” and reminded legislators that many of his workers are politically conservative and usually vote Republican. Local 139’s special relationship to Republican politicians was made clear when Scott Fitzgerald, the State Senate majority leader and the sponsor of the right-to-work bill, floated the idea of exempting McGowan’s union, along with a few others.
“One side of the aisle likes the work we do, but not our organization, while the other side likes our organization, but not what we do,” McGowan told me. He had lobbied heavily on behalf of the iron-ore mine. “I was surprised that the United Steelworkers fought the mine so hard, when the mine would have used their equipment. The mine became political, and a lot of the unions that opposed it; they did it so that Walker couldn’t get a victory out of it. My thinking was: jobs.”
Fidgeting behind his desk, McGowan rubbed his bald scalp and half-smiled. “I sort of trusted the guy,” he said, recalling his 2010 endorsement of Walker. “I took some bullets at the time from the other unions.” When Walker’s “divide and conquer” video was released in 2012, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked McGowan about the governor’s remarks. McGowan told the paper that the phrase “divide and conquer” troubled him. “It means turning worker against worker,” he said.
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