Foxconn still an election wild card in Wisconsin

Project’s success or failure likely to affect Trump, Walker

Some Republicans once thought Foxconn would clinch Scott Walker’s re-election.

Some Democrats once thought it would backfire massively on him.

Neither one of those things happened. Walker lost his 2018 re-election race, but Foxconn was well down the list of reasons why. It certainly didn’t help the Republican governor. But there is little evidence it was “the reason” he lost either.

Now we’re entering a new political phase in the Foxconn story. As the company’s plans and public statements shift, the project is beset by growing doubts and uncertainties over whether it will ever deliver the jobs that were promised.

Foxconn still very much looks like a wild card in Wisconsin politics in the coming years – especially if it turns out to be an embarrassing disappointment. The political backdrop and the status of the project itself have already shifted since last year. And they will probably keep shifting over time.

Wisconsin now has divided government instead of one-party rule, meaning the credit or blame for Foxconn’s failure or success going forward is going to be subject to fierce partisan dispute.

Walker, the politician most closely identified

with Foxconn, is no longer in office. But he still has political ambitions, so it’s conceivable that Foxconn’s future will have an effect on Walker’s future.

And then there is President Donald Trump, who is deeply invested in the success of a project he touted as symbol of Midwest manufacturing revival. How the project fares over the next year and a half has obvious implications for the president’s re-election prospects in Wisconsin, a key electoral battleground.

But before exploring Foxconn’s role in future elections, let’s revisit its role in the last one, which is still debated.

Some have argued the Foxconn deal ($4 billion in public subsidies in exchange for 13,000 jobs) was so unpopular it cost Walker his job.

One problem with that argument is that when an election is decided by roughly one point and less than 30,000 votes, you can make the case that almost anything “decided” the election. Did the issues of education and school funding cost Walker the election? Did health care? Did roads? Did Walker’s own failed presidential bid? Did Trump’s weakness with suburban voters and the way he galvanized Democratic voters to turn out in opposition? It’s very easy and very plausible to imagine each of these factors, by themselves, accounting for Walker’s roughly 30,000-vote deficit. And most of them – maybe all of them — were arguably bigger factors in the 2018 election than Foxconn was.

The public polling on Foxconn offers some takeaways about the role the issue played in 2018 and the role it may play in the future. Statewide opinion about the deal was a little more negative than positive for much of 2018.

But it was essentially neutral on the eve of the election. In the final 2018 poll by the Marquette Law School last October, 40 percent of likely voters said the project would be “worth” what the state is paying the company in subsidies. A slightly higher share – 42 percent — said it would not be worth it.

In a statistical analysis of his polling, Charles Franklin of Marquette found that the Foxconn issue did move a small share of voters in each direction – it pushed some pro-Foxconn voters toward Walker and pushed some anti-Foxconn voters toward his Democratic opponent, current Gov. Tony Evers (controlling for bigger factors like a voter’s party identification). But the overall effect was virtually a wash.

“It’s conceivable that it cost Walker fractions of a percentage point, (but) I do not believe it’s conceivable it cost him the entire margin (he lost by), when you consider all the other issues that were also at work in the race,” said Franklin.

Neither side behaved as if the Foxconn issue gave them an unqualified advantage, since it wasn’t a major theme of their advertising. And the regional voting patterns last November don’t seem consistent with the idea that Foxconn cost Walker the election.

Compared to 2014, Walker performed better in much of northern and rural Wisconsin, where voters were more skeptical about Foxconn and were more removed from its predicted economic benefits. Meanwhile, Walker did worse than he had done in 2014 in the GOP-leaning counties of southeastern Wisconsin, where voters were relatively positive about the project.

Voters were dug in along partisan lines over Foxconn, which probably limited its impact on the election, and could limit its impact on future elections. The project was so strongly associated with Walker and Trump that it’s no accident that almost 70 percent of Republicans last year thought it was worth the public investment, but only 15 percent of Democrats did.

What does that partisan divide mean going forward now that we have divided government in Madison?

It creates some challenges for both parties. When the story broke in recent weeks that Foxconn was moving even further away from the notion of a major manufacturing center, GOP legislative leaders quickly blamed the new Democratic governor. But business leaders and Foxconn failed to echo that line. Then after a conversation with Trump, Foxconn leadership said it was sticking with plans to build display screens in Racine County.

For Republicans, attacking Evers on Foxconn means conceding the project is failing to deliver as promised, which Republicans don’t really want to do, since they are so closely identified with it. At the same time, Democrat Evers, as governor, doesn’t want to be seen as torpedoing the project, even though Democrats overwhelmingly opposed it in the first place.

These dynamics could muddy the political waters on Foxconn going into the next two election cycles. So too could the ongoing confusion over the project’s future.

Consider a few political scenarios.

One is that despite the mounting doubts and skepticism, Foxconn ends up actually delivering lots of jobs – in other words, that it’s a “success.” Yet that probably wouldn’t be clear for years. And you would still have controversy and political division over the cost to taxpayers.

Another scenario is that Foxconn flat out fails to deliver anything like the $10 billion investment, 13,000 jobs and mega-manufacturing hub that was touted by Trump and Walker when they gathered at the White House in the summer of 2017 to announce the project – in other words, that it’s an unambiguous failure.

But let’s say the project makes enough short-term progress that its “failure” isn’t widely or fully absorbed by voters for years, limiting its impact on Wisconsin elections in the next few political cycles.

A third scenario is that the project falters quickly enough that public opinion swings more sharply against Foxconn between now and the 2020 election. That would spawn a fierce debate between the parties over who is to blame, though Wisconsin Republicans have arguably more to lose under this scenario since it was a deal struck by GOP officeholders.

The one politician with the most at stake in Foxconn’s short-term future is probably the president. Wisconsin is a critical state for Trump in 2020. He put Foxconn at the center of his push to revive the manufacturing sector in the industrial Midwest and improve the fortunes of blue-collar workers, making it a potentially powerful campaign symbol of first-term success or failure.

As noted above, Foxconn was a second-tier issue in the campaign messaging by both sides in the 2018 mid-terms here.

But in 2020, depending on how the Foxconn story unfolds, it’s easy to imagine either Trump or his opponents putting it at the forefront of the presidential race in Wisconsin.