WaPo | Walker had decided to challenge Gwen Moore (D),
an African American woman who represented a partly white and deeply
Democratic state assembly district that surrounded Marquette, Hiller
said.
Republican leaders welcomed Walker’s bid. He wouldn’t win,
but he would still force Moore to spend money and time defending the
seat. (Walker later moved to suburban Wauwatosa, and it was there that
he won his seat in 1993.)
In 1990, the 22-year-old Walker spent
days knocking on doors in the district, preaching a get-tough message.
He wanted 200 more cops on the street and stronger mandatory sentences
for drug dealers.
“The number one fear is crime,” he wrote in a
letter to Marquette students, asking them, again, to vote for him. “For
too long, we have ignored this issue and now it is time to do something
about it.”
Moore, who is now a member of Congress, said: “His
campaign was one big dog whistle.” She believed that Walker’s anti-crime
message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without
saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst
stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”
Hiller,
Walker’s campaign treasurer, said that Moore was entirely wrong about
Walker’s message. “There was no racial angle,” he said. “It never
crossed our minds.”
On election night, Walker’s chances looked so
terrible that Walker and Hiller left the district and the city of
Milwaukee behind. They started driving to Madison, the state capital, to
attend parties for other Republicans who had a chance.
Then, for a minute, something strange happened.
“We’re
listening to election returns on the radio, and the guy comes on: ‘In a
surprise in the [7th District], Scott Walker is ahead of Gwen Moore,’ ”
Hiller said. “Literally, I pulled off the road.”
The two young
men sat there on the shoulder, blindsided by the idea that Walker — a
politician who hadn’t won anything he really wanted — might be about to
win. Fist tap Vic.
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