Scott Walker thought he had cracked the code. “You divide and conquer,” he famously told a major right-wing donor, days before beginning his first term as Wisconsin’s governor. If he could break the public employee unions, who funded Democratic candidates in his state, Republicans would never lose an election again. He’d be free to reward friends and punish enemies until he got sick of winning.

For a while, Walker was right. He won three elections in four years, including a bruising recall. Wisconsin was the ideological laboratory of conservative dreams. But then Walker got greedy. Not content to simply do the bidding of corporate interests through low tax rates and deregulation, he embarked on one of the biggest economic disasters in recent history. After Tuesday’s elections, we can say it was one of the biggest political ones as well.

In July 2017, Walker inked a deal with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer known for being so punishing to its workers that it had to install nets to prevent suicides.* Foxconn would build a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, producing LCD screens for large-panel televisions—a first for North America. The company claimed this would create 13,000 good-paying jobs and $10 billion in investment. In exchange, Walker offered $3 billion in state subsidies.

“The Foxconn campus will be large enough to hold 11 Lambeau Fields,” Walker gushed when announcing the agreement. His approval ratings had sagged after a lackluster presidential run, and he had failed to keep his first-term promise of creating 250,000 new jobs. The Foxconn deal would be the capstone of his tenure, a public-private partnership to create a high-tech hub in the upper Midwest—a real legacy item.

Instead, the deal was just a way to flush out taxpayer money, without getting much from Foxconn in return. Walker was nothing but a bagman for a coordinated hit on Wisconsin’s treasury, and he paid for it. On Tuesday, he ran into a little-understood fact of modern political life: corporate welfare is deeply unpopular.