A Victory and a Warning

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National Review:


A Victory and a Warning
Some worrisome trends are evident in Judge Prosser’s reelection.

Conservatives are right to cheer Wisconsin supreme-court justice David Prosser’s apparent reelection, but it’s worth looking closely at the results. While his victory was encouraging, Prosser won only because turnout among Milwaukee’s black voters was significantly lower than the statewide average, and because his percent of the minority vote was nearly three times as high as Gov. Scott Walker’s was in 2010. Two other 2010 GOP advantages — higher-than-normal GOP turnout and strong support from white working-class Democrats — were absent. These facts should concern conservatives who think the public is already prepared to embrace wide-scale entitlement reform.

Normally, results in Wisconsin judicial races do not closely follow partisan voting patterns, but this one did. According to Bert Kritzer, a University of Minnesota law professor, there was a 90 percent correlation between a county’s voting results for governor in 2010 and its results from last week, the highest correlation in Wisconsin history. Conservatives and liberals are doing battle nationally over whether entitlement programs should be reformed to reduce the federal debt, and Prosser and Kloppenburg were the vehicles by which those groups could register their opinions on the same question at the state level.

In a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute, New Jersey governor Chris Christie said that public-employee pay and benefits are to states what entitlements are to the federal government. Since collective bargaining is what enables public-employee unions to obtain their generous compensation packages and pensions, collective bargaining is essentially a state-level version of an entitlement.