But three years later, in 1993, Walker won a seat in the Wisconsin state legislature and hasn’t lost an election since.
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The son of one ex- president and brother of another, ex- Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced his bid for the Republican nomination on June 15.
He tweeted: “I’m in”.
He joins a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates that already includes more than a half dozen current and ex- governors.
Walker’s rise to national prominence began in 2011, when he passed a controversial agenda to fix the state’s budget shortfalls by revoking most of the state’s public unions of their collective bargaining rights. Though Walker wasn’t directly involved in creating the measure, unions blamed him anyways. He won election in 2010, defeated the recall in 2012, and was re-elected in 2014. While the brothers haven’t yet said whether they will throw any of their sizable fortune behind Walker, their backing can still bring in funds for him.
Speculation for a presidential run followed Walker ever since he won three elections within four years.
Still, Walker finds himself strongly positioned-especially in Iowa-as the primary gets underway. Some Republicans want assurances of his sophistication on national security and domestic policy.
A clarification has been filed to note 15 candidates have entered race, including Walker’s entry Monday, and two more are expected to get in. And there are others who’ve won elections, but haven’t consistently taken on the big fights. He burst into the top tier of likely Republican presidential candidates in January, in a fiery speech touting his governing record at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines. “Because in America we value our independence from the government, not our dependence on it”. One, does the two-term governor have the foreign-policy chops to be president? “We did it by leading”.
In a video announcing his candidacy early on Monday, Walker gave a glimpse of that theme.
Walker’s struggles with the unions in Wisconsin have paid off big-time in raising money as well.
Walker also inroads with the state’s sizeable evangelical population, which is key in Republican caucuses. The panel also rejected deep funding cuts for K-12 public schools and the popular SeniorCare prescription drug program as well as a proposal to borrow $220 million for a new Milwaukee Bucks arena. He’s argued that paying the subsidy is better than losing the tax revenue the team generates.
“To promote adherence to his rigid partisan views and to please the special interests that have backed his campaigns, Walker has pit the people of Wisconsin against each other in contentious ideological fights”, she said in a statement. When it emerged, in 2013, that his nominee for a student to serve on the Board of Regents had signed a petition supporting the recall, Mr. Walker withdrew the nomination. The governor has denied both claims.
He no longer supports a legal pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. He often speaks about how his father was a Baptist minister in tiny Plainfield, Iowa, until his family moved to Wisconsin when he was 10.
“The path for a Republican to win the presidency comes through the Midwest”, Walker told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in April.
The Mississippi River is all that separates Walker’s Wisconsin from Iowa, so expectations will be high for him there.
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Walker has been hailed as a conservative hero for taking on labor unions in a blue state that has voted Democratic for president since 1988. While news outlets turned up evidence that Mr. Walker’s administration had directed budget writers to replace the public-service mission with a focus on meeting “the state’s work-force needs”, the governor tweeted that the changes had been the result of a “drafting error”, which was subsequently corrected.
