Nate Silver hits NYT: Scott Walker’s electoral record ‘pretty damned impressive’
March 8, 2015
By Olaf Ekberg
Election data analyst Nate Silver took to Twitter to dispute a New York Times article claiming Scott Walker’s three election wins during two terms in office weren’t really all that impressive.
“Walker was the second-most-conservative GOP governor running for re-election in 2014,” Harry Enten writes on Silver’s Five Thirty Eight website.
Of all the Republican governors running for re-election in 2014, Walker is the most conservative compared with the type of governor you’d expect was elected based on the 2012 presidential vote. The next closest is Paul LePage in Maine. Based on Walker’s ideology and the ideology of the incumbents running in 2014, you’d expect him to have been a governor of a state that Romney won by about 13 percentage points (Montana, for example) instead of one he lost by about 7 percentage points.
Walker may not be more electable than an average Republican, but electability isn’t the only thing that matters. As my colleague Nate Silver pointed out, Republican voters will be looking for a candidate who is both conservative and electable.
Enten’s analysis is intended to dispute a piece by Nate Cohn in the New York Times in which he claims Walker’s electoral record “isn’t as impressive as it looks.”
It is totally different on the national stage this man has no chance.
If only NJ could find a Governor with credentials like this, maybe we wouldn’t be in a situation where 23% of our state budget in 2017 was going just for pension payments and health care coverage for a bunch of retirees !