State Rep. Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) announced her candidacy Saturday to run in a potential recall election against incumbent state Sen. Dan Kapanke (R-La Crosse).
Volunteers collected 22,561 signatures in a bid to force the recall in the wake of Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining bill. Kapanke supported the measure.
For the election to be triggered, 15,588 signatures must be verified.
Shilling is about as strong a candidate as we could hope for – and it’s a great opportunity for her, since she gets to take a free shot at Kapanke while keeping her seat. Hopefully this means we’ll have other similarly strong recruits from the state House in our other recall efforts. Also, this is a pretty big vote of confidence by Shilling in the quality of the signatures, which I’m guessing will stand up to scrutiny. Game on!
P.S. Click here for Jennifer Shilling‘s Assembly campaign site, which I’m guessing will get updated soon.
then there’s a special election to fill her seat, correct?
Since there is a (small but not zero) chance I might be ending up in Wisconsin this summer…
in the most Democratic district out of what all the districts Republicans control in the state senate?
between the favorable environment and not having to give up their day jobs, there’s pretty much no reason for the strongest candidates on our bench in each district not to run.
In SD-08 (Alberta Darling), you’ve got Sandy Pasch, and in SD-18 (Randy Hopper), you’ve got Gordon Hintz. The rub is they both represent what look to be the most Democratic parts of each district, so I’m not sure if they’d have crossover appeal.
is this like California where votes say “yes” or “no” to recall and THEN vote for a new Senator?
Is it the plan to do all these recalls separately?
That doesn’t make sense to me. Why not submit all signatures at the same time so all elections (recalling Republicans) can be held on the same day? This would save a lot of resources, and allow coordinated campaigning.
Basically, I am wondering if some brain trust decided to do them separately, or if nobody really thought about it and that is the way it is coincidentally going to happen?
per this comment, Shilling BEAT Kapanke back in 2000 for the very same assembly seat she holds now.
In another thread, someone said it’s not year clear what the effect on Walker will be, whether he will face the same sort of anger that he seemed to be facing a few weeks ago in a few years. Fair enough, I guess. But what about the other state senators? What about the rest of the Republicans in the Midwest? My impression of the court race was that she was a mediocre to port candidate and that people didn’t necessarily connect this to the anti-union stuff. In a more general sense, I can’t imagine that all of the passion just went away so easily. At least I hope it didn’t.
Kapanke actually ended up winning by like a percentage point? I’m 99% sure he will lose, so it’s not like I’m in denial, but what if he does end up winning and shocking everyone? What kind of conclusion would that mean could we take away from something of that magnitude?
I guess the only one I could think of is he’s better liked than the polls show. Sort of like The former gov’s of VT, WY, OK, CT, ect. Their states voted overwhelmingly for the other party, but they had an appeal with voters in their area that no one could fully understand.
But from the look of things, she just slapped “for state senate” on the bottom of her logo in a couple of places and added a tab to the scrolly picture thing on the front page saying she’s running.