Intimidated By Gov. Scott Walker’s Success, Multiple Wisconsin Democrats Refuse To Run For Governor In 2018

May 11, 2017

Wisconsin Democrats continue to struggle to find a serious candidate to run for governor. As this new report from National Journal shows, potential Democrat gubernatorial candidates are dropping one by one, refusing to challenge Governor Walker’s successful record of results in 2018. Unable to offer any alternative other than the same failed policies that decimated their electoral bench, Wisconsin Democrats are stuck with Bob Harlow – a failed Congressional candidate from California – as their only gubernatorial candidate willing to run.

National Journal reports:

“Re­pub­lic­ans have been sys­tem­at­ic­ally tar­get­ing these po­ten­tial can­did­ates. The re­search com­piled be­fore and after Janu­ary’s meet­ing has leaked in­to loc­al press as can­did­ates con­tin­ue to take them­selves out of con­ten­tion.

Rep. Ron Kind was one of the first ma­jor Demo­crats to tease a pos­sible run when he told Wis­con­sin Pub­lic Ra­dio in mid-Feb­ru­ary that he hadn’t ruled out a Walk­er chal­lenge. Re­pub­lic­an sources said the party began ready­ing a statewide di­git­al-ad cam­paign tar­get­ing Kind on the scan­dal at the Vet­er­ans Af­fairs med­ic­al cen­ter at Tomah. But be­fore Re­pub­lic­ans could hit Kind with evid­ence that his of­fice knew about vet­er­an ab­use there in 2008, Kind told the As­so­ci­ated Press that he wouldn’t run after all. Re­pub­lic­ans and Demo­crats alike an­ti­cip­ate sim­il­ar at­tacks could crop up when he runs for reelec­tion next year.

“[Of] the can­did­ates who heard the lead pipe whist­ling by their head and ducked and dropped out: the first was Ron Kind,” said one Re­pub­lic­an strategist in the state.

Ven­ture cap­it­al­ist Mark Bakken was also re­por­ted to be a pos­sible can­did­ate, only to tell those close to him by the end of March that he wouldn’t run. One Bakken as­so­ci­ate said last week that he wasn’t truly con­sid­er­ing a run and did not want to put fam­ily and in­vestors through the rig­ors of a cam­paign.

But Re­pub­lic­ans didn’t take any chances, giv­en a pos­sibly well-heeled Bakken can­did­acy. Mul­tiple Re­pub­lic­an sources con­firmed re­ports that GOP op­er­at­ives had dug up de­tails about Bakken’s al­leged im­plic­a­tion in an on­go­ing sexu­al-har­ass­ment suit against his busi­ness part­ner.

The state GOP was also search­ing for re­cords from Dane County Ex­ec­ut­ive Joe Par­isi’s of­fice be­fore he too bowed out. Par­isi said Tues­day that he de­cided not to run after he ‘gave it a lot of thought.’ While he said, ‘the path ex­ists” for Demo­crats, ‘it doesn’t have to be me.”

‘There’s no doubt he’s in a very strong po­s­i­tion, mostly be­cause of his cam­paign or­gan­iz­a­tion and his ac­cess to vir­tu­ally un­lim­ited funds,” Par­isi said, ‘not be­cause of ac­com­plish­ments he’s made as gov­ernor.”

Days after Kind took him­self out of con­ten­tion, former state Sen. Tim Cul­len made good on his months-long con­sid­er­a­tion by open­ing a cam­paign com­mit­tee. But he dropped out of the race two weeks later, cit­ing the ‘huge chal­lenge in rais­ing the cam­paign dol­lars to be even re­motely com­pet­it­ive with the mil­lions and mil­lions of out-of-state dol­lars that will flood Wis­con­sin to keep Gov­ernor Walk­er in power.”