Scott Walker leads early polls for the 2016 Republican nomination for President–and his support is only continuing to grow.
Walker’s support has been sudden and tremendous. On February 18, barely a month ago, he was third in a CNN poll–with just 11% of the vote, behind former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
But, just one week later in a PPP poll, he had leapt to a distant first place, with 25% of the vote, dwarfing Kentucky Senator Rand Paul with 13% and Huckabee with just 11%.
Scott Walker’s sudden explosion onto the top tier of presidential candidates began roughly around the time of his speech at CPAC in late February, where he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd and finished a respectable second place in their marquee Presidential Straw Poll.
But Walker remains a strong candidate for the Republicans regardless of speeches. In his four years as Governor of Wisconsin, he’s won election four times in a blue state, including a union-backed recall election in 2012–which shows he has the ability to reach across party lines and mobilize voters.
Walker has also been able to reach across the different factions of the Republican Party, attracting social conservatives and economic conservatives like no other candidate currently in the 2016 field.
Further, Walker has a tangible record of enacting conservative economic policies in Wisconsin. Most notably, he went after Wisconsin’s notoriously strong public sector unions–and forced them to make dramatic concessions that would help erase the state’s deficit and balance the budget without cutting services or firing employees.
