Walker won’t run for office in 2022
Ex-governor takes job with conservative group
Former Gov. Scott Walker has accepted a full-time position running a national conservative youth organization based in northern Virginia.
Walker said the move rules out a run for his old job or any other political office in the next few years.
“This would preclude me from running for governor in this next cycle or running for the U.S. Senate if Ron Johnson’s seat is open,” Walker said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel. He said he is “absolutely thrilled” with his coming role as president of the Young America’s Foundation, a group that works to promote and popularize conservative ideas among young people.
Walker said he will not assume his fulltime position until the beginning of 2021, when the group’s current president steps down after more than 40 years. He said his agreement with the organization is to serve at least four years.
The former governor said he will look for a residence in northern Virginia or Washington, D.C., but will also maintain one in Wisconsin.
Walker said he is announcing the move now in part to let potential candidates interested in Wisconsin's governor or Senate seats know he won’t be competing for either of those two offices. One of those two posts is currently held by a member of Walker’s party, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, but Johnson hasn’t announced his plans, saying he might seek a third Senate term, run for governor or return to private life in 2022.
“Starting January 2021, this will be full-time,” Walker said of his new job. “I won’t be engaged in anything else. This will be my sole occupation.”
Walker’s move could serve to open up the intraparty scramble that is expected to occur in 2022 among Wisconsin Republicans with ambitions for higher office. (There are no statewide offices on the state ballot in November 2020).
It also represents a sharp career turn for a politician whose entire working life has revolved around elective office.
Walker has waged 15 separate campaigns for office in the past 30 years, for positions ranging from the state Assembly to Milwaukee county executive to president of the United States. He lost his first political race, for the assembly in 1990, and won 11 of his next 12. But he was an early dropout from the GOP presidential field in 2015 and narrowly lost his bid for a third
term as governor to Democrat Tony Evers last fall.
An evangelical Christian, Walker said he and his wife, Tonette, have spent "a lot of time thinking about, praying about" the move.
“But it just feels like God’s calling us to take on this mission,” he said.
Walker said conservatives are troubled by polls showing large numbers of younger Americans are sympathetic to socialism or feel less pride in their country than do older Americans.
And, while the Young America’s Foundation is very active, he said, he hopes to take it “to the next tier” in its mission of promoting conservatism among young people.
“I look at it and say we’ve got to not just up the number of chapters … have a presence on every campus, public and private, not just four-year but even twoyear, but we’ve got to find new ways to communicate to folks …. new ways to get the message out,” said Walker.
The Young America’s Foundation bills itself as “the principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement.” It was founded in 1977 and merged in 2011 with Young Americans for Freedom, a group launched in 1960 by one of the godfathers of the modern conservative movement, William F. Buckley. It has been active in battles over speech at universities and in sending conservative speakers to college campuses.
Among other things, the group oversees the Reagan Ranch in California, where it holds events and conferences. Walker said, “I always go back to Ronald Reagan” in his political influences.
The foundation, based outside of Washington, D.C., in Reston, Virginia, is well-funded, reporting about $24 million in donations and bequests in 2018, and close to the same amount in spending. The current president, Ron Robinson, is listed in the organization’s 2017 tax forms as earning $695,000 from the group, plus more than $300,000 in other compensation.
Since his 2018 defeat for reelection, Walker has joined a speaker’s group. He is the fundraising chairman for an organization whose mission is to help Republicans around the country with their redistricting plans. He is serving as honorary chair of a group advocating for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. And he has said he will help lead the effort to re-elect President Donald Trump in Wisconsin.
Walker said that he will continue most of that work for now but will focus entirely on his new job beginning in January 2021.