Scott Walker pulls out of California Republican event
Walker’s campaign has been foundering and floundering since the last FOX News Republican debate and he is seemingly in free-fall in the polls.
With his constant missteps, walk-backs, and inability to project an air of confidence or even competence, is Walker preparing to throw in the towel? If so, I must admit that I am a bit surprised; I thought he’d be one of the last guys standing.
Corroboratory report. Walker Cancels Appearance At California Event
End?! Like, there was a beginning?!
I hope so, but I rather suspect that this is a misreading of something unrelated. Walker has no real chance in the long run, IMO, because he’s simultaneously an extremist and a dumbass with the breathtaking stupidity of a brick, but I would expect him to stick it out at least until the wildly swinging numbers begin to stabilize, and perhaps Trump vanishes from the scene. His agenda is basically a collection of all the right-wing talking points taken to an extreme, and the only thing he knows how to do is bust unions and make life intolerable for public servants, teachers, and university professors.
Seriously, he’s not a bright boy. Policies aside, he tends to photograph with a kind of perpetually stunned expression, like he’s been caught in the middle of a fireworks explosion, to quote Bill Maher.
Cutting and running before Iowa is basically admitting your irrelevance in electoral politics, so I think we’ll see very few do so, even if that does rightly apply to a few of the Republican hopefuls (and a few of the Democratic ones as well, to be fair). Not unless that absolutely have to, like because they ran out of money, or if some career-killing scandal breaks. After Iowa, you can exit with “dignity”, at the very least. Not saying that’s when Walker leaves or not (I really have no idea how it’s all going to shake out), but that’s the minimum date.
A link I had in another thread that sort of agrees with the OP, published before the pull-out.
It certainly doesn’t help that Walker got approximately zero media coverage after the second debate. I suspect the Koch Bros are wondering if they should fish or cut bait now.
Awesome money quote from that link:
He is young enough, he might be trying to cut bait and hope it is all forgotten so he can polish up and try again, rather than push it to the official scorecards(primary results) where his career could be ignominiously buried forever.
Too late for that. He’s already bait, and it will be remembered next time.
That worked great for Rick Perry.
Yeah, Walker’s done, and he probably knows it.
Walker looked like a very strong contender, pre-Trump. But Trump pretty much took all the voters driven by the illegal immigration issue, and Walker hasn’t been able to distinguish himself at all in debates.
Walker was a big loser last night, NOT because he was terrible (he was okay) but because he’d lost all his traction and needed to do SOMETHING to make himself interesting and relevant again.
He didn’t.
I don’t know about all this. I’ll admit that Walker is a much weaker candidate than I would have anticipated at the beginning of the summer, but he’s still has a credible resume (re-elected midwestern governor in a blue/purple state, success at fighting the unions, cutting taxes, and all that right-wing horror show stuff), and has decent access for money. And it’s still four months before Iowa.
This could go either way, and it’s really up to Walker. One, he can continue to flounder, his donors write him off, and everything collapses. Or two, he can clean up his ability to state positions, stake out the “conservative with results” space, and clean up when the non-serious candidates start to fade. I think Walker is still someone to be worried about. Hopefully, I’m wrong.
OTOH, he beat a recall election, and he knows it, which might now imbue him with false “I can still pull out of this tailspin!” confidence.
According to a graphic from NPR, Walker talked the least of all the candidates - about eight and a half minutes.
Trump talked for twice as long.
Yes, Walker beat a recall. In **Wisconsin. **
Home state of Joe McCarthy.
Quoth Dave Barry: “We think it’s something in the cheese.” 
Also home of Robert Lafollette, Herb Kohl, Tammy Baldwin and (as Alice Cooper pointed out) a major city that’s elected five Socialist mayors.
Nice try, though.
But the boarder wall with Canada, who is going to champion that now?
Anyone can have a bad campaign and Walker hasn’t done very well. He’s still going to be a contender in the future or he could be VP.