Alan Greenblatt, a staff writer for Governing, is a former reporter for NPR and CQ.

Plenty of Republicans don't want to vote for Jeb Bush. The same cannot be said about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. That's why this understated and under-known Midwesterner could rise up and beat not just expectations but the entire field. In fact, Walker could plausibly clinch the nomination without losing a single early state.

Walker, who is making his candidacy official on Monday, has always combined the populist instincts of talk radio with the policy agenda of a free-market think tank. This is working well for him in Iowa, where he enjoys a regional advantage and is now leading by more than eight points. He polls even a bit better in eastern Iowa—which shares media markets with Wisconsin—and where “Walker's fight with the unions and his survival and governorship were covered a lot more extensively,” says Art Sanders, political scientist at Drake University in Des Moines.


If Walker is a good fit for Iowa, what about New Hampshire? There's practically a separate contingent of Republicans who are running in the two states. Strongly conservative candidates have camped out in Iowa while comparative centrists such as Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are betting big on New Hampshire. Walker is one of the few candidates who can complete in both places and is practically the only hard-right conservative who has gotten a good reception in New Hampshire so far.

“He has a chance to carve out a special place for himself in this primary,” says Tom Rath, a former New Hampshire state attorney general and longtime GOP operative. “Among the movement right or ideological right, the strongest argument for electability is Walker's.”

That takes him to South Carolina, which at this premature stage is hard to handicap, especially given the presence of home state Sen. Lindsey Graham as part of the mix. David Woodard, a GOP consultant who teaches at Clemson University, conducted a poll back in February that showed that while only about half the Republicans even knew Walker's name, far worse than candidates such as Bush, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio, he still finished within a single point of Bush, the poll’s top performer. “To know him was to love him,” Woodard says, which gives Walker “tremendous upside” in the state. A win in South Carolina would put him in the catbird seat going into the so-called SEC primary of several other Southern states 10 days later.

If Walker can pull off wins in all or many of these states, he will have garnered a lot of momentum long before attention turns to Florida, the home state of Bush and Rubio. Eight years ago, Rudy Giuliani tried to weather loss after loss in early states to make it to his Florida stronghold. That didn’t work out at all, even in Florida. Should Rubio and Bush suffer a similar fate in early states, there is little reason to think they’d fare any better.

This scenario may not play out just right for Walker, but it's as likely as any other. He's still not all that well-known, but Republicans who are familiar with him have come to like and admire him. Partially for that reason, a case can be made that Walker is the only candidate in the entire oversized field who is not just acceptable but fully embraceable by every faction within the party. As primary voters think about who they really want and who they really think can win, Walker could easily stand out as the choice with no ideological asterisk to create any doubt.

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It was Walker’s political enemies that have made him such a serious contender for the presidency. Some politicians get lucky with their choice of opponents. Scott Walker won the lottery.

Stripping public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights turned out to be the perfect battle for the Wisconsin governor to pick. Not only did he win the policy fight shortly after taking office in 2011, but unions ended up doing Walker a huge political favor by seeking to recall him, turning him into a folk hero on the right and a money magnet for corporate donors all over the country, from the Koch brothers on down.

It's a major episode in recent Republican history. Compare it to Kasich's experience after he signed similar legislation in Ohio around the same time, only to watch voters repeal it a few months later.

“The fight with the unions gave Walker that national platform,” says Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center. "If the unions had not made it into a battle for the ages, Scott Walker would not be a viable candidate for president.”

Part of his appeal is tautological: He looks like a winner because he has been a winner. Walker never tires of pointing out that, thanks to the recall election in 2012, he's won three times in four years. That’s quite a feat in a state that hasn't supported a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.

Walker has thus shown GOP voters that he's not only willing to take on a tough fight, but can find a way to prevail. “Conservatives, social or fiscal, are hungry for someone who is going to take a stand,” says Matt Reisetter, a consultant in Iowa with ties to religious conservatives. “Walker has shown he's not going to fold or shy away from political fights when they arrive. This guy got hammered and hammered by liberals and he won in a blue state.”

Winning in a blue, or at any rate purple state, is key. Walker needs to show he can get to 270. To win the White House, Republicans have to pick up some states they haven't carried in a while. Midwestern states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and maybe Michigan, which are dominated by the GOP at the state level but which Obama carried twice, will be tempting targets.

Even Wisconsin wouldn't be a gimme, however. A Marquette Law School poll in April showed Walker losing there to Hillary Clinton by double-digits. Like many of the Republican contenders, Walker would face a heckuva job pivoting to the center for the general election.

But that's then. For now, Walker's singular talent within the current GOP field is appealing across the board to all the different silos of voters within the party. Walker has shed his former support for the Common Core education standards and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Conservatives appear willing to forgive him these shifts since he's managed as governor to put points on the board when it comes to nearly every other issue they care about, including cutting taxes, curtailing abortion and voting rights and making life easier for gun owners.

And then there are his anti-union bona fides. There are plenty of issues that divide Republicans. Taking on labor unions is not one of them.

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Walker could surely falter. With so many candidates, a small shift in support among voters ends up being significant. In previous cycles, plenty of candidates have been the flavor of the month, only to have their taste turn sour soon after. With such a large field, that's bound to happen repeatedly in the coming months.

At the same time, Walker should have greater staying power than most of his rivals. Even his most adamant opponents in Wisconsin—who are not few in number—give Walker credit for possessing serious political skills. He received some negative coverage earlier this year for a few apparent verbal stumbles. His foreign policy remains a work in progress. But Walker is the most disciplined of politicians, never saying anything he doesn't mean and never visibly losing his temper.

With his sometimes-sleepy eyes, Walker can come across as mild, but that plays to his everyman appeal. He doesn't have to fake not being a millionaire. Through a long career in politics, Walker has managed not to enrich himself. He eats lunch at his desk and dresses like he shops at discount stores (he likes to brag about how he once paid $1 for a sweater at a New Hampshire Kohl’s). His lack of a college degree won't damage him among his fans in the resentment set. All in all, Walker does not have a bad set of credentials to lead the elite-hating party of billionaires.

Walker isn't the most dynamic speaker in the GOP crowd. He's not going to blow away everyone else on a debate stage—but he will have a place at every debate, the first tangible prize of this particular pre-primary season. "He's comfortable in what he talks about," says Ann Selzer, an Iowa-based pollster. "He surprised people with the first speech that caught fire here"—his appearance at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January—"by showing he could give a passionate speech. It wasn't fire-breathing or throwing red meat, it's what he believes in."

Walker manages to get across exactly the message he intends, whether it's stoking the passions of a partisan crowd or shading his intentions just enough to keep fence-sitters this side of skeptical. For instance, Walker repeatedly said during his reelection campaign last year that he hoped the legislature would not send him an anti-union right to work bill, saying such legislation would be a "distraction." That led some voters to believe he was opposed to the idea.

No such thing. Walker has supported the concept of right to work from his earliest days as a legislator, back in his 20s, and didn't hesitate when a bill reached his desk in March. It was the culmination of a strategy Walker himself once described to a wealthy donor as "divide and conquer" when it comes to labor issues. Walker secured support from some unions back in 2011, even while he was stripping most public employees of their bargaining power. All of this is to say that he's more sophisticated in his approach than his bulldozer image may suggest. "He had a strategy there that a lot of people didn't give him credit for," says Matt Hennessy, a Democratic consultant in Connecticut. "He disarmed some very important constituencies that could have cost him that fight."

As you might expect a Democrat to say, Hennessy believes the stances Walker is taking now could haunt him in the general election. It's one of the key debates in Republican circles—do you have to run too far to the right to win the nomination to be able to win in November? That, however, is a question for another day.

If he gets the nomination, Walker will never utter divisive words like "abortion" again. But he's never been one to bother reaching out to Democrats, either. Walker is strictly a 50 percent-plus-one kind of guy. That has worked for him in Wisconsin, arguably the nation's most polarized state, fiercely divided between liberal Madison and Milwaukee and just about all the rest. It's a place where Walker has shown complete mastery of the political terrain. Of course, winning with just his base and a few persuadable independents would be a much tougher act to pull off nationwide.

Walker has shown no inclination to worry about this so far, calling, for instance, for a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage in the immediate aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision. Even his sons didn't like that one. For now, though, Walker's play is to assure conservatives that while everyone is talking to them about guns and immigration and faith, he's not only with them 100 percent of the way, but knows how to win. "He looks like a winner," Woodard says, "and for Republicans who have lost to Obama twice, that counts for a lot."