Total Recall: Wisconsin Votes

So I’m wearing my red T-shirt today in solidarity with the voters in Wisconsin who are, by all accounts, flocking to the polls in numbers on the order of how many show up in a presidential election. For a recall vote. For an odd-year recall vote.

I wore it when I journeyed to Austin last February when there was a fairly decent crowd arrayed on the capitol building south steps, were protesting not only the anti-labor overreach of Wisconsin’s newly elected Republican majority, but also the expected budget cuts to education.

Nothing much good came of the education budget, but now we have a real show going up in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is a poster child, it seems, for all that is bad in American politics today.

Out of state TEA Party PACs are flooding the state with record funds. Democrats are being outspent by their Republican opponents who are responding by launching a massive grassroots effort. Hundreds of Democrats are calling into the state to get out the vote. Something that very much aided in getting voters to the polls in 2008.

Republicans even packed the Democratic Primary with non-Democrats in order to dilute the vote and throw some chaos into the process.

Then there’s the measures passed to make it harder for people to vote in Wisconsin.

It just goes on and on.

The only thing that keeps this country from resembling a banana republic is the fact that there isn’t rioting in the streets.

Not yet anyway.

The UK may have one up on us on that one.

Anyway, there are no indicators yet showing how this is going to go. A high turnout is always good for Democrats as evidenced by the 2010 elections in many states that went red that year. But I am not going to make any predictions. If it goes well for Democrats tonight it could bode very well for turning the tide going into next year. It could take the wind out of the sails of Republicans nationwide.

If it doesn’t though, we might as well pack it in and watch Rick Perry become the next president of the US.