Scott Walker, not Paul Ryan, could be GOP convention surprise

Walk­er, by con­trast, openly har­bors na­tion­al am­bi­tions. As Politico’s Scott Bland re­por­ted, the gov­ernor has con­tin­ued to raise money and travel through the 527 or­gan­iz­a­tion used for his pres­id­en­tial cam­paign. He’s main­tained a busy sched­ule out­side of Wis­con­sin, rais­ing money for the party and re­cruit­ing fu­ture gubernat­ori­al pro­spects as vice chair­man of the Re­pub­lic­an Gov­ernors As­so­ci­ation.

Walk­er was painstak­ingly care­ful not to cri­ti­cize Trump in his en­dorse­ment of Ted Cruz. It was a not­able omis­sion, since Walk­er’s ori­gin­al niche in the GOP field was as the can­did­ate who could unite the blue-col­lar and white-col­lar wings of the party. He had used his cul­tur­al con­nec­tions to win over blue-col­lar Re­pub­lic­ans while tout­ing ex­ec­ut­ive ex­per­i­ence and a re­cord of bust­ing gov­ern­ment uni­ons to win over up­scale Re­pub­lic­ans. His now-for­got­ten “shop­ping at Kohl’s” shtick on the cam­paign trail was a dir­ect ap­peal to many work­ing-class voters who have now sided with Trump.

With Trump sug­gest­ing that an out­come deny­ing him the nom­in­a­tion is a usurp­a­tion of demo­cracy, it’s also much easi­er to sell the broad­er pub­lic on nom­in­at­ing a Re­pub­lic­an who par­ti­cip­ated in the pres­id­en­tial nom­in­at­ing pro­cess. Walk­er was a de­clared can­did­ate for sev­er­al months—and a per­ceived front run­ner—be­fore drop­ping out in Septem­ber 2015. It’s hard to see him turn­ing down an op­por­tun­ity to be nom­in­ated at a con­ven­tion, giv­en his long-stand­ing in­terest in run­ning for pres­id­ent.