In Greenville, Walker recounted being in his front yard raking leaves with his sons one Sunday afternoon (“between church and watching the Green Bay Packers”).

“This car comes by, the horn honks, the window goes down, the hand comes up and he flipped me off,” Walker said. The governor, unshaken, continued raking the leaves.

The anecdote resonated.

“I can’t believe how he stood up to those union people,” said ­Janice McPhee, 72, a retired federal worker. “When he said that car drove up to his lawn and the window came down, I thought he was going to say they pulled a gun out. My God.”

GOP activists also like Walker’s Everyman roots. As the governor told each crowd, his father was a small-town Baptist preacher and his mother a part-time secretary. One set of grandparents lived on a farm (“my mother didn’t have indoor plumbing until she went off to junior high”), while his other grandfather was a machinist.