JR Ross is the editor of WisPolitics.com. He has covered Wisconsin politics for 14 years.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has often said the biggest lesson he learned during his fight over stripping public employees of most collective bargaining powers is that he should have spent more time selling it to the Wisconsin public before dropping the plan on the state Capitol. But Wisconsin lawmakers haven’t seen Walker sell his controversial budget from the bully pulpit much these days.

As Walker prepares for a presidential run, he is increasingly speaking to national audience rather than a Wisconsin one. Instead of crisscrossing Wisconsin to get his budget passed, Walker’s calendar is filling up with trips to swing states, like his visit last weekend to Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride,” a motorcycle-themed political fundraiser.


“There is a reason why we take a day off the celebrate the Fourth of July and not the 15th of April, because in America we celebrate our independence from the government not our dependence on it,” Walker said to cheers during his brief speech at Ernst’s event. Walker’s small government rhetoric is getting a warm reception in Iowa, where he leads the presidential field by more then seven points.

In Wisconsin, however, GOP state lawmakers aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about an agenda some see as geared more toward what plays well at those out-of-state stops than what’s best for the people back home. While Walker chatted up Iowans from the seat of his Harley-Davidson last weekend, his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature continued to rework Walker’s budget, having already reversed politically unpopular cuts to education, among other things.

It was just the Friday before last that the Legislature’s budget committee eased Walker’s cuts to the University of Wisconsin System after previously stopping his $127 million hit to public schools. Right about the time the Joint Finance Committee wrapped up its final vote on that piece of the budget late that evening, Walker was 1,000 miles away in New Hampshire addressing the Belknap County GOP Sunset Dinner Cruise.

"The university doesn't deserve this cut. This is just reality," GOP state Sen. Luther Olsen said ahead of the vote. "To tell people that they're not working hard enough and they should teach more is probably just ridiculous," he said, responding to the claim by Walker and others that the university could absorb the cut through things like requiring professors to teach one extra class a semester.

It’s a scene that’s played out more than once this spring as lawmakers wrangle with Walker’s budget and other issues. His frequent out-of-state trips have given Democrats plenty of fodder to declare Walker an absentee governor placing his expected presidential run above the needs of Wisconsinites.

Walker has repeatedly brushed off the suggestion, pointing out he’s on the phone constantly with his chief of staff and legislative leaders, no matter where he is. He’s also scored significant victories on the things he likes to tout on the national campaign trail, like holding down property taxes, and GOP lawmakers insist publicly the governor is just as available to them as he was in each of his first two budgets, even if he’s often not at the table.

But it is somewhat odd to see a likely presidential candidate who has pinned much of his candidacy on the fights he’s won back home suffering loss after loss on his latest set of budget priorities—especially at the hands of his own party. Some GOP lawmakers privately see a governor who’s rarely on the bully pulpit to provide leadership on things like passing right-to-work, the effort by some Republicans to repeal the prevailing wage and securing the long-term future of the state’s transportation fund.

Some also complain bitterly—though almost never in public—that Walker’s budget was drafted with his presidential aspirations in mind, not what’s good for the state long term.

"We may have a crap budget, but we're going to make it better," freshman GOP state Rep. Rob Brooks said in an unusually blunt moment while on the Assembly floor.

The tension between Walker and GOP lawmakers this spring hasn’t been limited to his budget. Throughout the 2014 campaign, Walker argued right-to-work was not a priority, predicted it would not reach his desk and urged lawmakers against taking it up, saying it would be a distraction. But once it became clear the bill would pass with or without Walker’s support, he smartly transitioned to publicly backing the bill while pointing out that his personal support for right-to-work legislation, which prohibits businesses and unions from requiring workers to pay dues as a condition of employment, dates back to his days in the state Legislature. He now regularly touts turning Wisconsin into a right-to-work state, normally one of his better applause lines when he travels nationally.

That grated on some Republicans who felt Walker hadn’t really led on the issue, something that has again popped up on an effort to repeal the prevailing wage, which establishes pay for government projects and has split the GOP badly. After largely sitting out the early part of the debate, Walker began taking flak, including from a Wall Street Journal editorial that said the governor had been “silent” and Wisconsin Republicans have been losing their momentum since Walker’s first term. Fresh on the heels of that editorial and a column by a conservative Green Bay talk show host, Walker issued a statement promising to sign a full repeal.

But a frequent complaint from those backing the repeal is that Walker hasn’t been out front on the issue providing leadership.

Democrats have chalked up some of the GOP tensions to Walker’s frequent absences. A check of Walker’s March calendar, the last one his office has released to reporters, shows there were 19 days that month in which he didn’t list a single in-state event.

Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who’s in his first term on Joint Finance after 16 years in the Senate, said it was clear earlier this year Walker wanted to sign the budget by late May or early June. But Erpenbach blamed Walker’s travels for slowing down the process, saying the governor’s been inaccessible to Republican lawmakers.

“The governor just doesn’t care,” Erpenbach said. “He wants it over with. It’s to the point that he would sign whatever to get this behind him and move on.”

Typically, Wisconsin governors release their budgets in mid-February, the Joint Finance Committee goes over it line by line starting in mid-April, and the goal is to have it clear both houses of the Legislature and signed before the new biennium begins July 1.

But shortly after Walker was re-elected last fall, he began urging lawmakers to speed up the process, arguing the state could serve as a sharp contrast to the dysfunction in Washington, D.C.

Lawmakers also took that as a sign Walker wanted to get the budget behind him to free up his schedule, particularly after the governor started saying he would formally announce his intentions on a presidential race once the state budget was wrapped up. Add in that he’s already hitting the trail, and it just feeds the perception that Walker’s attention is elsewhere.

But state Sen. Alberta Darling, who like Walker survived a recall attempt over the governor’s union changes, rejected the notion he’s been an absentee governor. One of the co-chairs of the Finance Committee, Darling said she’s had no problem reaching Walker or his staff when needed.

“He’s responded to us when we really need to sit down with him,” said Darling, a Republican who represents Milwaukee’s suburbs. “Would it be nice to have him sit down more? Of course, and right now we’re at that critical time.”

Last week, the Joint Finance Committee, at an impasse over how to fund state road projects for the next two years, didn’t bother to meet. It is one of the final significant pieces left before the committee, composed of members from both houses, can vote on final passage and send the bill to the full Legislature. It’s also become symbolic to some of the tension between Walker’s presidential aspirations and his responsibilities back home.

Walker’s budget called for borrowing $1.3 billion, drawing protests from lawmakers at the long-term impact of continuing to put highway spending on the state’s credit card.

Knowing Walker would never accept a gas-tax hike to decrease borrowing, especially as he builds toward a presidential campaign, some GOP lawmakers instead started talking about raising the state’s $75 annual registration fee for cars. Walker caught them off guard, however, when he declared any fee increase would be a tax hike in his book, and he wouldn’t accept one unless there was a corresponding reduction in taxes somewhere else to offset the impact.

That may play well for the conservative base in places like Iowa, but it doesn’t shore up the long-term health of Wisconsin’s transportation fund, critics argued. If lawmakers sign off on Walker’s plan, Wisconsin would spend 22 cents out of every dollar in its transportation fund just to pay off debt starting in 2016-17. That would be more than double what it was in 2009-10, according to the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget arm. Few think that pace is sustainable.

Some lawmakers have taken the transportation proposal as a sign that Walker will not run for re-election in 2018, regardless of what happens in 2016. To them, he went for short-term fixes with his presidential run in mind that would stick them with cleaning up the mess once he’s gone.

Back from his weekend trip to New Hampshire, Walker made a stop last Monday in his hometown of Delavan, where he reiterated his bottom line for lawmakers on the gas tax and registration fee. But he offered little other guidance before he hopped a flight to Atlanta ahead of his stop in Florida as part of Rick Scott’s cattle call for GOP presidential contenders.

Frustrated with the governor’s position, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a fellow Republican, raised the prospect of wiping out all borrowing for roads, upping the ante in the showdown with Walker. The governor’s office responded late last week—while he was headed to North Carolina to address the state GOP’s convention—that he would sign a budget with no borrowing for roads, though it was not his “preferred option.”

"It is certainly not more conservative to borrow and spend than it is to pay for things as you go," Vos said earlier this month after Walker first ruled out a fee increase.

Walker has seen plenty of his budget reworked by the Joint Finance Committee this spring. Members nixed almost all of Walker’s efforts to reorganize state government, a priority he outlined in his annual State of the State address in January to make it “more effective, more efficient and more accountable to the public.”

Part of that plan included reforms the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which oversees loans and other incentives to spur job creation in the state. Walker replaced the state’s old Commerce Department with the quasi-governmental agency, but it has been beset by problems, including new allegations over a questionable loan to one of Walker’s donors. Wisconsin Democrats have called for a federal investigation of the failed $500,000 loan, and some see the agency as a potential liability for the governor nationally as opponents dig in, particularly since he barely made it halfway to his promise to create 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin during his first term.

Lawmakers also killed his call to require those in the state’s popular prescription drug program to apply for Medicare Part D and enroll if they qualified. And Walker’s plan to fund the public portion of a new stadium for the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks looks radically different than what he first proposed, and it was still up in the air whether lawmakers will sign off once it goes to the full Legislature.

That has all fed into the narrative that Walker has checked out on his budget.

Still, that misses one key point about the back-and-forth between Walker and lawmakers on the document: When it comes to what he wants to tout on the presidential campaign trail, the governor has largely gotten what he wanted.

Two years ago, Walker rejected the federal money to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and has touted his decision as a conservative approach to providing coverage for Wisconsinites. The move has not been politically popular in Wisconsin polls, and Democrats have used it to beat up their GOP counterparts on this budget. But Republicans have stuck to the decision.

Republicans also backed Walker’s call to impose new drug testing requirements for some on public assistance programs, one of the governor’s favorite themes on the campaign trail about weaning people from government help. And Walker can still talk up his efforts to continue expanding the school choice program statewide in Wisconsin, even if GOP lawmakers gave him a huge assist in reworking the funding formula for it after voucher advocates found Walker’s original plan unworkable.

Walker also likes to brag that under his budget, the typical homeowner in Wisconsin will have a smaller property tax bill in 2016 than in 2010, the year before he took office. That looks likely to survive, too.

With his top priorities largely intact, Walker now just has to keep an eye on when lawmakers will complete their work. If the Joint Finance Committee takes its final votes this week, there is still a chance Walker could sign it by July 1 and clear the decks for his expected announcement. Deliberations could drag on beyond that, but the governor’s backers don’t seem too worried about that affecting his expected announcement just yet.

Republican state Rep. John Nygren, the other co-chair of the Finance Committee, has been one of those frustrated by Walker’s position on transportation funding and the spot it puts lawmakers in long term. He wasn’t ready last week to bend to Walker’s demand of no revenue increases, and said it is an open question whether Walker could have gotten more of his priorities in this budget if he had spent more time publicly campaigning for them in Wisconsin.

“The things that are staying in are staying in because the Assembly and Senate support them as well,” Nygren said.