Gov. Walker delivers his new, two-year spending plan to the Legislature Tuesday, and some analysts say the document will reflect Walker's attempts to appeal to multiple constituencies.
A few details of the spending plan have leaked, including a 13 percent cut to the University of WisconsinSystem and $1.3 billion in borrowing to pay for transportation projects.
Ron Elving, NPR’s senior Washington editor, says Walker is performing a balancing act.
“Most everything that he does in Wisconsin now has to be viewed in the context of what he is trying to do in respect to his 2016 prospects,” Elving says.
Elving says on one hand, Gov. Walker has a budget to balance and does not want to raise taxes, so one of his only options is to cut spending, such as for the UW System.
At the same time, Elving says Walker is attempting to become a viable national candidate, by portraying himself as a populist – someone who appeals to the middle class, and not the academic elite, for example.
“We see Gov. Walker establishing his bona fides as someone who is a champion for the taxpayer, for the little guy, for somebody who is a blue-collar worker, or what we used to call a blue-collar worker, and has not attended the University of Wisconsin and probably did not have any ambitions to do so, and this is a way for him to show that he wants to cut back on the cost of government,” Elving says.
Elving says there is another constituency the governor will try to please - wealthy conservative donors. He predicts Walker will need at least $100 million to be taken seriously on the national stage.
“He has to keep all of those balls in the air, and thus far, with his success in Iowa and some of the other good notice that he’s been receiving nationally, he seems to be doing that,” Elving says.
In a poll released over the weekend of likely Republican Iowa voters, Walker leads the GOP presidential field by 15 percent.
Last week, more of Walker’s state budget details emerged, and they include two noteworthy plans to borrow money. One is for $210 million to fund a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. Another is for more than a billion dollars to pay for road projects.
While the governor and fellow Republicans have criticized borrowing in the past as “kicking the can down the road,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington Bureau Chief Craig Gilbert does not think the approach will hurt Walker politically.
“You know the voters that he’s thinking about are not so much the Wisconsin voters anymore as Republican primary voters around the country and whether that kind of thing is a liability for him when you stack it up with things they like about him, which are things that he’s already done and all the fights he’s already fought, I’m not sure that’s a big problem for him,” Gilbert says.
While analysts may view Walker through a political lens, Rob Henken, president of the non-partisan Public Policy Forum in Milwaukee, points out that the governor faces financial realities.
“I think the first thing that people have to realize is that there is indeed a budget problem here,” he says.
Henken says based on what state agencies have requested in funding for the next biennium, Wisconsin’s deficit would hit $2 billion by mid-2017. He says the structural problems go back many years, spanning both Republican and Democratic leadership.
“When there is a structural imbalance you want to look at both the expenditure side and the revenue side, but that’s where you get into ideology. That’s where you get into values. That’s where you get into a lot of different factors and I can’t point to any blueprint out there that tells you the right way or the wrong way to balance a budget,” Henken says.
State legislators – particularly Republicans who control both houses – will have to decide if they agree with Gov. Walker’s blueprint for balancing the state budget. They will begin pouring over the document after he delivers it this evening. The process will take months, during which Gov. Walker is likely to continue visits to states with early primaries and caucuses leading up to the Republican presidential nomination.
