Mark Belling reported several people in southeast Milwaukee County have received robocalls from Meyer Teleservices telling them that, since Scott Walker had the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the bag, they should instead vote to save Jeff Plale’s job in the 7th Senate District Democrat primary. He did not know who paid for the calls.
While I received a similar call from the outfit, the version that ended up on my answering machine did not include any reference to the Republican primaries. It also had only a vague reference to the Plale campaign via a plea to call “the campaign” (unnamed) at the campaign’s phone number, and did not contain who paid for the call. The transcript (click the transcript to hear the audio):
I heard about those robocalls on Sykes this morning.
It looks like the Plale campaign was correct and Walker did win big. Plale really coulld have used some of those votes. Walker didn’t need them.
Plale would have needed far more of those votes than you think, or that honestly are out there. It took the perfect storm to get Plale in the seat in 2003 (a special election with the primary was tied to an odd-year non-partisan general election where, outside the sole Wisconsin Green candidate, only Democrats were running) because the Big-S-Socialist types found on the East Side and at UWM outnumber the blue-collar union types that Plale grew up with and represented as an Assemblyman.
In fact, there were very few people who did cross over to the Republican side, and far fewer than the 2,814-vote margin. I ran some numbers for Patrick McIlheran when he wondered about the same thing. Taking a look at Oak Creek, which is where one would expect the majority of that crossover to happen, there were about 225 people who voted in the 7th District Democrat primary in 2006 (out of just over 1500, and that was a year when both parties had hotly-contested attorney general races, and only the Democrats had primaries for sheriff and district attorney, with the latter effectively being THE election as only an independent was waiting on the general election ballot) who didn’t vote in the 2010 7th District Democrat primary. In the district as a whole, there were actually more people who voted in the 7th Senate Democrat primary this year than 2006.