Mary Burke’s poor (in many senses*) gubernatorial campaign against Scott Walker.

While this is a very interesting article written about Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke (who will likely to face Scott Walker in November), this is the most important sentence in the whole thing:

So far, neither the Democratic Governors Association nor EMILY’s List (which spent $3.5 million to help elect Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2012) has launched ads on Burke’s behalf, and both groups declined to say when they planned to do so.

Given that the election is in four months, you would think that this would be more of an issue. RCP goes on to explain the situation: Mary Burke was recruited in large part because she would be able to self-fund, but she showed no interest in doing that several months ago and apparently her opinion on the subject has not changed since.  Going after Scott Walker will be expensive – RCP reported estimates that were eight digits –  and Walker is already far ahead of Burke in terms of fundraising and lining up donors: and while I’m sure that Democrats are eager to remove Walker from office, Republicans are just as eager to keep him there.

And there are going to be rather more of us in November.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*If you read the RCP article, you will realize very quickly that Mary Burke is not really experienced in retail campaigning (her previous electoral experience was winning a school board election). This is not an insurmountable handicap, but when a candidate is being outspent and outraised already it’s probably not a good sign if s/he’s not all that great on the campaign trail.