Amid some mixed and intermittently disappointing results earlier this month, the defeat of Scott Walker was an unambiguous moment of catharsis. Acting proudly as tribune for the national conservative movement and its billionaire backers, the two-term Wisconsin Governor spent eight years waging ceaseless war on the state’s public education system, its environmental laws, its social safety net, and, critically, its labor movement.  

Despite fierce and often heroic resistance from unionized workers, activists, and citizens, Walker leaves office with a catastrophic legacy to his name, having successfully implemented many of the Republican Party’s most toxic planks in the face of strong headwinds. Following a protracted battle in 2011, which resulted in a weeks’-long occupation of the Capitol Building, collective bargaining rights were stripped from most public employees. After a concerted and nearly successful effort to recall him failed, Walker won reelection in 2014 and continued the assault: tax cuts, a voter ID law designed to suppress turnout, draconian welfare rules, the expansion of school vouchers, abortion restrictions, and relaxed gun control laws all followed.

Notably, in 2015 Wisconsin became the twenty-fifth state with a repressive “right-to-work” law on the books, consolidating Walker’s reactionary crusade and dealing a further body blow to organized labor. The following year, Hillary Clinton would become the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Wisconsin since the Reagan landslide of 1984, as Donald Trump narrowly captured the state and its ten electoral votes.