Scott Walker's electoral record is just as impressive as it looks

Some conservatives have argued, however, that merely looking at Walker’s margin of victory misses a key point: Walker is really conservative. He implemented conservative policies in a purple state, and he was still re-elected by the margin you’d expect of an average Republican.

I tend to agree with this line of thinking.

Walker was the second-most-conservative GOP governor running for re-election in 2014.2 According to an ideological scoring system created by Adam Bonica, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, Walker is more than one standard deviation more conservative than the average Republican governor who ran in 2014. That’s impressive, given that there is some relationship (although a weak one for Republican governors) between the 2012 presidential vote and the ideology of incumbent governors running for re-election in 2014.

We can see Walker’s conservatism in the following graphic, in which we use Bonica’s candidate scores, which are based on fundraising, for each gubernatorial incumbent running in 2014 and compare them with the 2012 presidential vote in each state. Negative values further away from zero indicate a more liberal ideology, while positive values further away from zero indicate a more conservative ideology.