Wisconsin Recall Failure Kills Similar Effort in Michigan

I guess the folks in Michigan don't want to waste the time and money to lose a recall election:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in Tuesday’s recall vote is yielding dividends for another Midwestern Republican governor.

A group that sought to force a recall of Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder said Thursday it’s calling it quits, citing a lack of support and the chilly political climate in the wake of the Wisconsin vote.

Michigan Rising, an independent group that had set a goal of gathering 1 million signatures on petitions to force a recall vote on Mr. Snyder, said Thursday it will stop its recall campaign immediately. The organization’s leaders said in a web post that as of June 4 it had collected only 2,079 names on 655 petitions, well short of a target of 200,000 signatures by June 1.

“It has become abundantly clear that Michigan Rising was not going accomplish its goal of recalling Governor Snyder,” Michigan Rising’s communications director Bruce Fealk said in a statement. “The results in Wisconsin crystallized how difficult a task it is to recall a sitting governor, even when the unions and the Democratic Party play a significant role in the effort.”

Mr. Fealk, in an interview, said his group’s effort faced an uphill battle in part because Michigan election rules make it difficult to stage a recall in the first place. Michigan Rising needed more than 800,000 signatures to get a question on the November general election ballot asking voters if they wanted Mr. Snyder to face a recall vote. If that question passed, then the group would have had to find a candidate to run against the governor in a separate election.

There had been three recall elections against sitting governors in American history, the first two of which were successful (including the recall of Gov. Gray Davis that ended up giving us the Governator in California). Those recalls were based on the actual job performance of the governor.

The recall in Wisconsin was nothing more than a temper tantrum unrelated to Gov. Walker's actual job performance, and for that reason among others it failed. The same would have happened in Michigan where Rick Snyder is going his best to turn around the history of liberal failures in that state.