By Susan Armacost, Legislative/PAC Director, Wisconsin Right to Life
Collective bargaining and public employee benefits–these were the issues that ignited a flurry of recall elections throughout Wisconsin. Several state Senators were targeted in recall elections last summer. And now, Wisconsin’s governor, lieutenant governor and four more state Senators currently face a second round of recall attempts.
Why is Wisconsin Right to Life, a single-issue organization, actively involved? Each of the targeted public officials is strongly pro-life and their opponents are pro-abortion to the core!
Thus while Wisconsin Right to Life takes no position on collective bargaining or public employee benefits, we have been, and will continue to be, actively involved in the recall elections. The stakes for unborn children in these recall elections are extremely high.
On Tuesday, the recall primary elections were held and Wisconsin’s courageous right-to-life Governor Scott Walker was able to turn out massive numbers of his supporters even though he had only token opposition in the Republican primary.
By contrast there was a highly contested Democratic primary with four candidates. The frontrunners were Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and former Dane County Executive and union favorite Kathleen Falk. (There were two other, much weaker candidates.) In spite of massive union spending on behalf of Falk, Barrett emerged victorious.
The gubernatorial general recall election will be held on June 5 when Governor Walker will once again face pro-abortion Tom Barrett, as he did in 2010.
There was never any doubt that Gov. Walker would handily beat his unknown primary opponent and he did so by a whopping margin of 97% to 3%. But what was surprising–and very hopeful–was the number of Walker supporters who voted in the primary.
Christian Schneider, senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, did an analysis of the numbers and pointed out that in a primary in which Walker ran essentially unopposed, he garnered 15,000 more votes than Falk and Barrett combined. “Republican voters had absolutely nothing to vote for, and yet they turned out in droves to send a message,” he wrote.
Yesterday’s voting results buoyed Wisconsin Right to Life’s supporters throughout the state because it demonstrated the extent of the passionate support for our great and courageous governor Scott Walker. But there is still the June 5 recall general election to contend with. That election will determine once and for all whether Wisconsin will be led by a governor who cares deeply about the sanctity of all human life or by one that has consistently shown a blatant disregard for the lives of the most vulnerable members of the human family.
It will be a hard fought fight. It may have begun as a battle over collective bargaining and public employee benefits, but the stakes for unborn children and other vulnerable people in our state could not be higher.
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