Poll after poll is telling Scott Walker the same thing: you are on the wrong side of public opinion. While early polling can fool you, we now have substantial data both from the nation and from Wisconsin.

There's NBC/WSJ:

Do you think public employees who belong to a union and work for state government, city government, or a school district should have the same right to bargain when it comes to their health care, pension and other benefits as employees who belong to a union and work for private companies?

There's Pew:

There's CBS/NY Times:

There's the AFL-CIO poll from GQRR:

And from Wisconsin, there's PPP:

Wisconsin closely divided, but against Walker On the biggest picture question: do you side with Governor Walker or do you side with the public employee unions 51% of voters in the state go with the unions to 47% who stand with the Governor. On another broad question: do you side more with Governor Walker or with the Democrats in the state Senate, 52% of voters go with the Senate Democrats to 47% who go for Walker. And perhaps the clearest indication that Walker has lost a majority of the voters in the state in this conflict, if only a narrow majority, is that 52% of voters now disapprove of him to only 46% who like the job he's doing. Those numbers are basically the inverse of last fall's election results.

Et tu, Rasmussen?

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Wisconsin voters shows that just 39% favor weakening collective bargaining rights and 52% are opposed. At the same time, 44% support a 10% pay cut for all state workers. Thirty-eight percent (38%) are opposed. That’s partly because 27% of Wisconsin voters believe state workers are paid too much and 16% believe they are paid too little. Forty-nine percent (49%) believe the pay of state workers is about right.

Rasmussen is Rasmussen, no more and no less accurate than usual, but this poll may be the only one that Walker actually looks at. Ouch for him, if he does. You know you are in trouble when your pet pollster deserts you.

The bottom line is that Gov. Walker has overplayed his hand with the public. Every Republican governor who is trying to curtail collective bargaining is at risk for being seen by the public as taking rights away, not balancing the budget. That can be done with givebacks (and the public is all for that, especially through negotiation.) But trying to curtail collective bargaining is seen by the public as the power grab it really is. The polls leave no doubt.

And as TPM notes re today's Rasmussen poll:

Rasmussen is out with a new poll that is frankly just devastating for Gov. Walker. Just devastating. We'll have a full write up momentarily. (Update: Here's our write-up.) But the thing that stuck out to me was the age distribution. We've all gotten used to polls in recent years that show Democrats with their strongest support among younger voters and Republicans with their best numbers among older voters. But I think most of us sort of implicitly figure this is significantly tied to what we call social issues -- gay rights, sexual politics, racial politics, etc. Not exclusively but that's where the young / old division in our politics is.

How this helps Republicans in general and Walker in particular is beyond me.

More on Republicans being on the wrong side of a multitude of the issues from Margie Omero, and on Wisconsin from Mark Blumenthal at pollster.com. It's becoming pretty clear that Walker's union-busting antics are not a long term winning move by Republicans.