eaders of both parties voiced confidence about the outcomes
“There’s a tremendous amount of intensity to this,” said Mike Tate, the herve leger strapless dress chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
In one sign of that intensity, among those competing on the Democratic side are Republican-leaning candidates posing as Democrats, running against the real Democrats.
Mr. Tate predicted that Democrats would win back control of the Senate, even with what he called “the fake Democrats” (the Republicans, who encouraged those bids, prefer the term “protest candidates”) running in Tuesday’s races.
“That’s just a delay tactic to hold off the inevitable,” he said.
But Republicans said the protest candidates — whose entry forced primary elections rather than an immediate general election to decide the fate of the Republican senators — merely gave the senators a fair chance to campaign leona lewis bandage dress for their jobs.
Lawmakers had little time outside of legislative meetings until now to make their case to voters, said Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, who said the elections would come down to a question of whether people wanted to move the state forward.
“They don’t want to go back to the politics of the past,” Mr. Thompson said.
If recall elections are usually reserved for circumstances involving personal or official scandal, the recalls here are mostly a matter of the state’s mounting philosophical split.
On both sides, those picked for recall mainly matched two criteria: they had served at least a year, as the state’s recall rules require, and their districts were viewed by some to be vulnerable.
Those who have gathered thousands of signatures to remove six Republicans object to the lawmakers’ support of a law that strips away collective bargaining rights for public workers and say these senators have, more broadly, supported a series of conservative, budget-cutting policies pushed through by Gov. Scott Walker.
Those who have gathered thousands of signatures to remove three Democrats say that those senators violated their responsibilities by fleeing the state this year in an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to block the collective bargaining bill and that they are slowing the state’s progress by opposing much of Mr. Walker’s agenda.
Democrats complain that the Republicans have, with the threat of recall elections ahead, rushed through legislation in case they lose control of the Senate; even this week, some Democrats complained that the Republicans appeared to be hurrying to pass a redistricting bill — the remaking of political maps that comes every 10 years.
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