How Scott Walker won, and what resulted

Considering the electorate's appetite for turmoil this year, it's odd that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker flopped so quickly in his presidential bid. His record, as he plausibly claimed, made him a likely choice "if people are looking for someone who is truly going to … wreak havoc."

Maybe Walker's style is too Midwestern-mild for the militant moment. But to eavesdrop this winter as Wisconsin has marked the five-year anniversary of Walker's revolution there is to be reminded that havoc is just what befell entrenched political forces in Madison, but also that considerable savings followed for taxpayers.

Wisconsin, an old drollery has it, is just like Minnesota — only with conservatives. It's characteristic of Walker's wild ride that his approval ratings in the Badger state this winter are in the dumpster, struggling to reach 40 percent. Yet candidate Walker's boast was quite true that in five years he's won three bruising gubernatorial elections (one an extraordinary 2012 recall contest). Republicans who swept to control of both legislative houses behind Walker in 2010 also have maintained those majorities, despite unprecedented recall elections challenging 13 state senators.

The state Supreme Court was swept into the Walker whirlpool, too, battling through its own overheated elections and in an actual physical altercation between two court members back in 2011. And all this followed the spectacle of a weekslong "occupation" of the State Capitol by many thousands of public employees, during which 14 Democratic senators temporarily fled the state to prevent a lawmaking quorum.

The main cause of the melodrama was what Walker himself dubbed "the bomb" — legislation known as "Act 10" that largely eliminated collective bargaining for most Wisconsin public employees. Signed into law in March 2011, the measure is what most enrages Walker's enemies, but may also have helped him weather the storm.

"The election dynamic," says Todd Berry, president of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, "is that there's a segment, not hard-core … conservatives, who thought there had to be some kind of change in this area." Particularly regarding schools, he adds, "there seemed to be a broad middle made up of people who aren't Walker supporters, but supported this particular move. They'd heard enough from [school] districts over the years that they didn't have flexibility in hiring and firing and promoting, that their budgets were unbalanced … ."

Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer, author of "The Politics of Resentment," a study of Walker's rise, recently told Wisconsin Public Television that Walker has shown "genius — I mean, it worked very well" in exploiting "rural consciousness" in outstate Wisconsin where many blame urban elites for causing and ignoring rural economic distress while disrespecting their "way of life" and "values."

Berry says his organization's analyses show annual Act 10 savings for Wisconsin school districts of $400 million to $500 million, roughly enough to make up for the cuts in state aid that were key to Walker's budgets and tax reductions. It meant that districts could adjust to reductions and limit layoffs, Berry says.

The largest savings came from requiring for the first time that teachers and many other Wisconsin public workers contribute to their pension and health insurance costs (while allowing competitive bidding on health care plans). Wisconsin, Berry says, was unusual in its compensation structure before Act 10, with school benefit costs running 40 percent to 60 percent above the national average. "Act 10 gave districts greater flexibility," Berry says, not least to steer more resources toward better pay for young teachers or boosts for teachers who take on heavier workloads or demonstrate distinctive merit.

The MacIver Institute, a "free market" think tank in Madison, has calculated Act 10's total cumulative five-year savings for all units of Wisconsin government at $5.24 billion, helping to make possible more than $2 billion in tax cuts.

In July 2014, the fact-checking website PolitiFact scrutinized Walker's claim of similar annual Act 10 savings for "taxpayers." He put the cumulative total then at "more than $3 billion." The fact-checkers judged the claim "Mostly True," pointing out only that the public workers who absorbed higher pension and health care costs were also "taxpayers."

Increasingly, since Act 10, what public workers in Wisconsin are not is union members, probably because the organizations can no longer do much for those who join. In a series of articles assessing the law's impact, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that "After Act 10, two of every three dues-paying members of the public employee union representing state workers dropped out." The union's spending on lobbying plunged from over $1 million in 2011 to under $170,000 last year. The paper reported that teacher unionization has likewise dropped, while combined private- and public-sector union membership in Wisconsin has fallen from 13.3 percent of workers five years ago, above the national average, to 8.3 percent, well below average.

A cozy back-scratching symbiosis between Democrats and public-sector unions was never unique to Wisconsin. Act 10 and its aftermath is a cautionary tale proving such an arrangement can go too far. Despite his bruises, Walker looks positively buoyant compared with his sworn union enemies.

Walker, of course, has not been able to similarly transform Wisconsin's economy, weighed down as it is by a reliance on heavy manufacturing employment that has kept its recovery lagging Minnesota's and the national average. Wisconsin's economic mediocrity long predates Walker, but his failure to deliver on expansive promises of job growth and "open for business" reinvigoration is probably the main disappointment deflating his political currency.

But Act 10's anniversary debates reconfirm that if Scott Walker has already been forgotten on the national political stage, his impact on Wisconsin will last a good long while.