Here & Now

Democrats, Walker Take Campaign to Milwaukee

Frederica Freyberg:

Now to our continuing coverage of the candidates running in the primary race for governor. In past weeks we’ve been introducing you to democrats running in the primary. Tonight, we shift our attention to the republicans. Incumbent candidate Governor Scott Walker declined our invitation to appear in our studio. However, I was able to catch up with him on the campaign trail in Milwaukee County last night. That’s where he held a rally as a counter event to the democratic debate taking place across town. His message to the media as well as volunteers was his intent to remain positive, but not to get complacent.

Scott Walker:

I would imagine there’s a lot of people on the left who feel frustrated, maybe they didn’t do more or something in that regard. So they’re extra energized in that regard. Again, we’ve got to make sure that even though I won three elections with the help of a lot of people here in this room and other grassroots volunteers like them, that nobody takes it for granted.

What a great crowd on a great day. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. In fact, it’s actually kind of` timely tonight because the eight democrats who are running for governor are having a debate tonight. We’re going to see a stark contrast because their rhetoric is increasingly not only becoming more and more dangerously liberal. They’re increasingly talking with rhetoric that’s filled with more and more anger and hatred. We believe this election will be won based upon what people hear we’re for and they’re able to see, not through the filter of others telling them that, but you’re able to deliver personally to people at the door, at work, at worship, wherever it might be. We can give you the clipboard and paper, if you want the old fashioned way or we can take your cell phone and tell you right where the walk list is. You can go right down the block over here. We can tell you where the voters are, where they stand and then we just queued it up, I just did the videos for this, we can actually allow you to go to the door. And when someone says my most important issue is education or taxes or the economy or welfare or transportation, whatever it might be, you can actually personally deliver to them a 60 to 90-second video from me telling you about what we’ve done and, more importantly, what we’re going to do going forward.

We need to make sure that, not just our activists but voters — not just those on the right but independent voters who have routinely helped us win elections are motivated and that complacency we thought for some time would be a concern to this election. People say the economy is good, budgets are balanced, schools got more money than ever before. They assume we’ve won three times before which we have and say, “Well, it’s not going to be a tough race.” We think it will be a tough race just because the momentum, in terms of turnout is definitely driven by those with anger on their side. We hope to counter it with, again, not only our optimistic story, but with a good amount of organization.

Frederica Freyberg:

On the issues, Governor Walker also touched on his economic cornerstone of Foxconn, highlighting how it will benefit Wisconsin beyond the southeast corner of the state.

Scott Walker:

We see it in Green Bay, where there’s going to be 200 high-tech jobs. I hinted the other day in Eau Claire that there will probably be another announcement. Maybe not quite exactly the same but some more good news up in the Chippewa Valley tied into Foxconn. You look overall 10,000 construction jobs, people from Black River Falls, from Brownsville, from Marathon City, places all over the state of Wisconsin are benefiting from it. Long-term you’re going to see supply chain. You’re going to see small businesses benefiting just like they do with other companies in the state, like Oshkosh Corporation. They do business with about 700 companies in 140 different communities across the state. When Foxconns fully operational, they’ll do four times that amount. But probably the most exciting thing I found, whether it was up in Wausau at Northcentral Technical College or elsewhere across the state, is talking to students who are enrolled in programs in hopes they can either work for Foxconn or companies related to Foxconn. To me, I think that’s the biggest impact statewide.

Frederica Freyberg:

At their debate democratic primary candidates for governor voiced fierce opposition to Foxconn.

Tony Evers:

It was the worst deal on record. Scott Walker, any of us on stage, anybody in the audience here, frankly, could have cut a better deal than Scott Walker did.

Matt Flynn:

We are paying a foreign company $4.5 billion to pollute Lake Michigan and I’m not going to stand for that. I’m going to go in and shut them down.

Mahlon Mitchell:

If we’re going to have Foxconn come in here and pay $4.5 billion and we’re going to pay them $4.5 billion to actually do business here in the state of Wisconsin, we need to make sure that those that are under-employed and those that are unemployed can get to those jobs.

Josh Pade:

We are talking about Foxconn which is a tremendous impact on southeastern Wisconsin, the southeastern Wisconsin economy. How can we connect what’s going in southeastern Wisconsin to northwestern Wisconsin, to northeastern Wisconsin?

Kelda Roys:

There are a lot of politicians who want to give our money away, in big corporate welfare deals like Foxconn. But ultimately we can’t pay companies to create jobs.

Paul Soglin:

The governor does not know what he’s doing. We’d like to know what he was smoking when he negotiated this deal. In China, they’re laughing at us.

Frederica Freyberg:

Two candidates not specifically asked about Foxconn, Kathleen Vinehout and Mike McCabe, did raise their hands when asked to do so if they would kill or stop the Foxconn deal.