The 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial election took place on November 4, 2014, to determine the governor and lieutenant governor of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It occurred concurrently with elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections.
Incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker won re-election to a second term in office, defeating Democratic businesswoman and Madison school board member Mary Burke and two minor party candidates in the general election.
Walker, who was elected in 2010, survived an attempted recall in 2012, the first governor in United States history to do so, defeating Democratic nominee Tom Barrett. Wisconsin voters have elected a governor from a different political party than the sitting president in 27 of the last 31 elections since 1932; only once has a Democratic candidate been elected governor in Wisconsin in the last 18 contests when a Democrat was in the White House. Eleven of the last twelve Wisconsin governors, dating back to Republican Vernon Wallace Thomson in the late 1950s, had, unlike Burke, previously won an election to state government, the exception being Republican Lee S. Dreyfus in 1978.
The polling leading up to the election was very close, with no candidate clearly in the lead. The consensus among The Cook Political Report, Governing, The Rothenberg Political Report, Daily Kos Elections, and others was that the contest was a tossup.
(Text) CC BY-SA
