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The scientific consensus on the Wisconsin recall election is that it means little for national politics (exemplified by Nate Silver's analysis at FiveThirtyEight). Indeed, turnout in Tuesday's recall election was higher than turnout in the 2010 gubernatorial election that pitted now-Gov. Scott Walker against Mayor Tom Barrett (by about 350,000 votes) with those additional votes slightly favoring Walker. In the higher intensity recall contest, unsurprisingly, more people turned out but the opinions of those who turned out looked incredibly similar to those that voted in 2010.
By-elections (or "special elections")—those that occur outside the standard 'Tuesday in November' cycle—are generally characterized by low turnout. This is often seen as advantageous by those contesting them because the election becomes about the strength of voters' opinions toward the candidates rather than about the balance of opinions in the electorate as a whole. When elections fall outside of the standard cycle, the only people who typically vote are those that care a lot about politics generally and, more importantly, those who have very strong feelings about the candidates in the race.
The Wisconsin recall vote didn't work in the typical way. Total spending by candidates and outside groups in this election was over $60 million—more than had ever been spent in a Wisconsin state election. While money doesn't necessarily buy votes - as op-ed pages will read over the next few days - that scale of spending transformed what would have normally been a quiet by-election into a major, November-scale election.
But the consequence of that transformation—from an election where only the passionate few vote to an election where broad swaths of the electorate vote - means that the broader implications of this election are small. Headlines today and likely for many days will read what Walker's win means for business-politics, campaign finance, union strength, the 2012 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, whether this is a signal of something larger in American politics.
Had the recall been a small, typical by-election, the race would have said something about the strength of party organizations to rally their core supporters to turnout and been able to demonstrate an interesting psychological reality: that it is the strength of one's opinions that matter most for translating those opinions into behavior, like voting. By-elections often tell interesting stories of opinion strength, if little about the opinions themselves. But the recall election was large (larger, in fact, than the election that won Walker office initially). This means that it still says nothing about national politics, says nothing about the strength of party organizations or the number of strong Democrats and strong Republicans in the Wisconsin electorate, and the result per se has little to offer as a psychologically interesting story.
The only thing the recall means is that Walker held his seat with support from about the same proportion of voters that initially elected him. And that isn't necessarily saying much.
