When Scott Walker strides to the podium to deliver the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) in San Diego on Thursday morning, it will not be just another campaign stop. It will also be tacit recognition of the Republican presidential candidate’s relationship with one of the nation’s most controversial and powerful lobbying networks.

It is a relationship that spans two decades. Since he first took public office in 1993 as a Wisconsin legislator, through to his current position as that state’s governor, Walker has maintained close ties to Alec, with policies to match. Many of Walker’s most contentious actions – a tough-on-crime bill that sent incarceration rates soaring, stand-your-ground gun laws, protection of corporate vested interests, attacks on union rights and many more – have borne the Alec seal of approval.

Should Walker win the Republican nomination in 2016 (a plausible outcome) and then defeat the Democratic candidate to take the presidency (a harder, though not unthinkable, challenge) he would become the first Alec alum to enter the Oval Office. In short, it is now possible to conceive of the first Alec president of the United States.

A poll on Wednesday by Quinnipiac University that tests hypothetical candidate scenarios in the general election next November has Walker beating Hillary Clinton in three key states – Colorado, Iowa and Virginia – by between three and nine percentage points.

To Alec’s critics, the prospect is chilling.



“Walker developed his political career with Alec’s help, and if he wins in 2016 there would be legitimate concern that he would bring its focus on corporate-friendly laws and enriching special interests with him to the White House,” said Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy, which monitors the lobbying group.

Walker’s press secretary Ashlee Strong, however, said the presidential candidate had a long-standing and positive relationship with Alec, “an organization that helps bring to life one of his most strongly held principles: that power belongs in the hands of state and local governments, not in Washington DC.” As a former state legislator, Strong added, Walker “looks forward to any opportunity to exchange ideas and discuss solutions with elected leaders who work closest to the taxpayers.”



But what impact does Alec’s involvement with so many senior politicians have on US politics? And what does Walker’s close involvement with the network tell us about his style of government and how he would steer a potential presidency?

The network acts as a dating agency: it arranges hook-ups between state legislators – overwhelmingly Republican – and major US corporations. It brings them together behind closed doors, to dream up new business-friendly measures.

Once ensconced in private, the politicians and corporate lobbyists are asked to decide which legislation they want to prioritize. Alec takes the preferred options, which by definition are beneficial to big business, and drafts them into model bills that it proceeds to disseminate across Republican-controlled state assemblies. The bills duly pass into law.

In 1998, Walker pushed through the Wisconsin legislature a Truth in Sentencing bill that eliminated almost all parole for many classes of state prisoners. He was open about Alex’s influence over the legislation, which had previously encouraged take-up of similar laws by other states as well as the federal government.

In a 2002 interview, Walker recalled that “many of us, myself included, were part of Alec … Clearly Alec had proposed model legislation. And probably more important than just the legislation, [Alec] had actually put together reports and such that showed the benefits of truth-in-sentencing and showed the successes in other states. Those statistics were very helpful to us when we pushed it through.”

Scott Walker celebrates his recall election victory in 2012. ‘Alec exists to facilitate corporate influence and Walker’s record as governor in Wisconsin suggests he’s OK with that,’ says Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy. Photograph: Darren Hauck/Reuters

The explicit design of the Truth in Sentencing law was to keep prisoners locked up for longer, and its impact was thus predictable: it vastly swelled the Wisconsin prison population and helped boost profits for the private prison companies which, at the time the legislation was enacted, constituted some of Alec’s most active corporate members. Combined with other moves to get tough on crime from the same period, the law helped to inflate prison numbers to a level that remains today at 23,000 – including putting one in eight African Americans of working age behind bars, the highest proportion of incarcerated black adults in the country.

As governor since 2011, Walker no longer officially belongs to Alec – political membership is drawn from state legislators. But he continues to preside over a political machine that is heavily indebted to the lobbying organisation for its ideas and direction, not least because at least 43 of the 82 Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are Alec members.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, in his first year as governor Walker signed into law 19 bills that reflected, to some degree, Alec thinking, which in turn reflected the desires of the big American corporations which make use of the lobbying network to inject their interests directly into the political process.

“Alec exists to facilitate corporate influence and Walker’s record as governor in Wisconsin suggests he’s OK with that,” Fischer said.

One of those first-year efforts was Wisconsin’s Castle Doctrine law, which Walker signed in December 2011 and which took as its template an Alec model bill. Alec, in turn, had based its model bill on Florida’s original 2005 legislation, devised with the help of the National Rifle Association, that increased immunity against prosecution for property owners who “stand their ground” and shoot, even to kill, when they feel threatened by someone.

The stand-your-ground laws – dubbed “shoot first” by detractors – were rapidly spread around the US under Alec’s active tutelage. Two months after Walker signed the bill, an unarmed black teenager called Trayvon Martin was shot as he was walking in a residential area of Florida by a self-appointed neighbourhood watch leader who was not initially prosecuted, prompting nationwide anger and debate about the controversial law.

Ten days after the death of Trayvon Martin, Bo Morrison, 20, was shot dead by a homeowner in Slinger, Wisconsin, when he sought refuge on the man’s porch after an underage party was busted by police. Morrison was unarmed, yet state prosecutors decided not to charge the homeowner, Adam Kind, citing the newly enshrined Castle Doctrine.

Alec came under so much flak in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting that several of its biggest corporate donors severed ties, pitching it into financial crisis. In an attempt to limit the damage, Alec disbanded the part of its operation that had spearheaded the stand-your-ground law, promising in future to concentrate on purely economic matters.

His whole economic agenda is an Alec agenda. State representative Chris Taylor

Yet Walker continues to proclaim his championing of the controversial law. In his speech announcing the launch of his presidential campaign last week, he specifically name-checked the Castle Doctrine, without mentioning its Alec origins, as one of his proudest reforms, along with his introduction of new voting restrictions (another Alec favourite) and the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Alec itself counters criticism of its influence in states such as Wisconsin by saying that it is an “educational organisation” focused on “limited government, free markets and federalism”. Its spokesman, Wilhelm Meierling, told the Guardian Walker was one of three Republican presidential candidates – alongside Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham – who have belonged to the network, in addition to six sitting governors.



“Legislators from across the country have engaged with Alec on a consistent basis since 1973,” Meierling said.

In addition to the Castle Doctrine, several other important pieces of legislation signed by Walker during the past four years all carry Alec’s stamp – some having been openly supported by the lobbying group, others importing word-for-word passages from Alec model bills. One of his first acts as governor was to encourage the passage of a bill that made it more difficult for Wisconsin citizens to sue big corporations for injury or other damages. As it moved through the legislature, Alec wrote to each of the legislators to say that it “supports this legislation which includes numerous provisions that reflect Alec’s civil justice reform policy and model legislation”.

Chris Taylor, a Democratic Wisconsin state representative who has become an Alec member in order to monitor its activities from within, said the lobbying group’s influence ran through Walker’s economic policy as governor.

“His whole economic agenda is an Alec agenda,” she said.

Walker’s 2011 assault on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, which led to dramatic protests at the state capitol and the surreal flight of Democratic legislators across state lines into Illinois in an attempt to block passage of the bill, as well as his approval this year of a similar right-to-work measure that stripped private sector unions of their powers, bear significant Alec influences. Taylor said their combined impact was to dampen down wages.

“Wisconsin has a crisis of wage growth,” she said. “The only people who are enjoying rising wages in the state are the 1% – that’s why Alec policies are so harmful. They maximise corporate profits while driving down wages of middle-income families, which in turn suppresses new jobs as people don’t have spare money to spend.”

Taylor will be attending the San Diego summit where Walker will be the keynote speaker. Alec says 2,000 legislators and business lobbyists are expected to attend, participating in numerous meetings where new model bills will be privately crafted – away from the prying eyes of the media.

This article was amended on 4 August 2015. An earlier version stated that “private prison companies constitute some of Alec’s most active corporate members”. This has been corrected.

