Stunning collapse

Walker's campaign manager unloads

'It's a fucking bitch, man,' Rick Wiley tells POLITICO of the Wisconsin governor's stunning collapse.

By Mike Allen and Alex Isenstadt

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled the plug on a bloated campaign that was headed into debt and was being undermined by furious donors, a warring staff and — at the root of it all — a candidate who was badly out of his league.

Prior to the governor's abrupt exit from the Republican race, his campaign had a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan at the ready: Campaign manager Rick Wiley, in a half-hour phone interview with POLITICO on Tuesday night, said he had an “all-in Iowa” plan that would have moved the headquarters from Madison, Wis., to Des Moines and cut the staff from about 85 to 20 as of Thursday. But Walker, floundering in debates and on the stump, was facing such a sudden drought in donations that even those drastic moves wouldn’t have guaranteed solvency.

“We built the machine that we needed to get a governor in just phenomenal shape to take a stage in a presidential debate,” Wiley said. “I think sometimes it's lost on people the largeness of the job. I think people just look at it and say, ‘Wow! Yeah, you know, it's like he's a governor and he was in a recall’ and blah, blah, blah — he’s ready.

“It's just not like that. It is really, really difficult. ... I'm just saying, you know, like it's a fucking bitch, man. It really is.”

The staff left the office for the last time Tuesday — the campaign was officially over, and only lawyers and H.R. people were left as Wiley and the rest headed for The Boathouse, a Madison bar that was the campaign hideout, to enjoy the sunset together one last time.

Walker has a conference call with top donors scheduled for midday Wednesday to discuss what happened. In past such calls, the donors have been able to ask questions. And POLITICO interviews with many of them — in addition to interviews with over a half-dozen Republicans close to the campaign — show that they have lots of them: why the staff was so big, why he wasn’t better prepped for the debates, why he went from front-runner to also-ran in a matter of weeks.

A Republican close to Walker said: “The entire campaign was built a bit larger than it should have been early on. Then after the debates and the resources slowed, modifications were not made. ... Expectations were high, and there was momentum. And the thought was that you needed staff to keep that going, and get more resources coming in.”

Wiley, 46, a former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, had moved back to Madison to a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture to run the campaign. He had just landed in D.C. on Monday morning when he learned of Walker’s decision. Wiley had flown out for a Google panel with rival GOP campaign managers — which he, of course, wound up skipping.

Campaign chair Michael Grebe called and said: “The governor has decided to pull the plug on the campaign.”

By Wiley’s telling, the end came fast. “June and July, up through that first debate, were good, fundraising-wise — really good,” he said. "Hitting your numbers. And we thought maybe we could even project [that] outward, like tick our numbers up a little bit. And then the [Aug. 6] Cleveland debate happened. ... The press corps wrote that he didn't help himself but didn't hurt himself But the didn't-help-himself narrative took over. And fundraising started to go down.”

The problems snowballed, all self-inflicted. “The week after the debate, our events fell a little bit flat,” Wiley said. “And so then we roll into the Iowa State Fair, and the ‘birthright citizenship’ [gaffe] came up. And that was another one where the donors were like, ‘What's going on over there?’”

After five weeks, it was clear: Madison, we have a problem. “It culminated with a trip through Texas, the three days leading up to Labor Day weekend, where ... we're supposed to raise half a mil and we brought in $184k,” Wiley said. “That, coupled with we were in the mail with [a] mailing to our donors, and that was the first time that [an internal] file had lost money. ... So, at that point, we can say, ‘OK, we have a huge revenue problem.’”

Wiley said that three days before last week’s debate, he “sat down with the governor and the first lady and we talked about the cash on hand and we talked about the staff and what was going on [with the shakeup rumors] out there. ... I laid [out] the scenario that, ‘Look, the revenue is taking a hit. ... I think we need to come up with a plan where we scale back and go from there.’ So the decision was that I was going to come up with that plan.”

On Sunday night, just hours before Walker would end the campaign, Wiley sketched the grim figures in a phone call with the governor, who was being driven back from Iowa. Wiley said cash on hand was about $1 million, accounts payable were around $800,000, and fundraising “was like grinding to a halt.” (He said in the interview that after the next two-week payroll, “we would be close to a balance-sheet zero.”) Then he outlined his proposal for “all-in Iowa” cuts.

“I presented it to him and then I said, ‘You know, it's going to be tough right now with the environment that we're in for us to raise enough to sustain this plan,’” Wiley recalled. He said Walker didn’t really respond. “He just processed the information like he always does: ‘Thanks for the information.’ Appreciated the candor.”

While Walker had a fundraising problem, he also had a spending problem.

When Walker and Wiley began building the campaign team in January, they made a bold, and ultimately foolhardy decision: Go big. Walker was the front-runner in Iowa polls through the spring and early summer, and tried to capitalize on that momentum by hiring former Republican National Committee aides and Washington operatives, plus a Beltway P.R. firm to target conservative media, a full-time photographer and well-known consultants for outreach to evangelicals.

At the time, Walker could afford it. But as he began to fumble issues and Donald Trump took over the race, the cash flow began to slow. Then, on the night of Walker’s mediocre performance in the first debate, Grebe warned senior staff that the campaign would need to prepare for a severe fundraising ebb — and the possibility of staff cuts.

It was a startling admission, and some top Walker aides wanted to keep it from the candidate. Walker had been immersing himself in preparation for the second debate, and they didn’t want to throw him off his game.

Around Labor Day, Grebe approached Walker about instituting some staff changes, and he was open to the idea.

In the meantime, at the super PAC supporting Walker, Unintimidated PAC, top officials were preparing something revolutionary. Keith Gilkes, a former Walker chief of staff who was a leader of the super PAC, was legally barred from coordinating with the campaign. But in August, he began asking donors pointed questions about the campaign’s finances. He concluded that the situation was dire.

The super PAC, which had about $20 million available, looked into hiring field staffers in South Carolina and other early states — preparing to take over many communications and political functions from the campaign, rather than staying in the traditional role of running TV ads.

Aside from the finance issues, Walker also had a staff problem. Campaign sources said Tonette Walker, the Wisconsin first lady, had never warmed to Wiley. During a visit to campaign HQ shortly after the first debate, she wanted to know why her husband hadn’t used all his allotted time in answers (a mistake he repeated in the second debate). She made it clear she saw the lapse as a staff failure, which aides took as a shot at Wiley.

Walker advisers said they were considering bringing back longtime aides, Gilkes or R.J. Johnson, to replace or layer Wiley. Tonette Walker, along with Grebe, then began reaching out to a small group of longtime Walker supporters and inviting them to a meeting at the governor’s mansion on Monday morning — the session that resulted in the campaign’s end.

Wiley wasn’t invited. Two Walker confidantes said his future was among the agenda items in the two-hour meeting.

One person close to Tonette Walker said she recognized the deficiencies on the campaign staff and was willing to speak out about them. “People mistake her honesty for combativeness,” this person said. “I’m sorry the staff didn’t like her reality check.” Aly Higgins, Tonette Walker’s personal aide during the campaign, said: “She is protective of her family and has strong instincts, and a clear view of right and wrong.”

But Walker had a Walker problem: He just wasn’t ready for the national stage. It was often overlooked that just five years ago, he was the Milwaukee County executive. As he began the presidential campaign, according to advisers, he knew little about issues like immigration, the Ex-Im bank, and foreign policy. Walker’s campaign brought in experts to brief him on those subjects. Aides said he enjoyed the briefings and worked hard to become fluent in policy issues.

But his lack of knowledge showed — like when he said that Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking air traffic controllers was the most significant foreign policy decision of his lifetime. Yet expectations were sky-high for the governor, and his early appearances did little to lower them.

Wiley blamed the size of the campaign partly on Walker’s newness to the national spotlight. “It takes a lot to build a campaign to run for president, especially around someone who is introduced to a new set of issues,” Wiley said. “Foreign policy — brand new. And just the dynamics of the federal issues are different, obviously. I mean, my God, this guy is a machine — I mean he really, truly is. But that takes staff, it takes time to do that. And we built the campaign that we needed to get him ready.”

“Everything was rolling, and then we just a hit a wall,” Wiley continued. “So, you know, I'm not sure there's anything we could have done differently. I can go back and say, ‘OK, you know, could I have done without like three of the research kids who are continuing to fill in the Walker record?' Maybe. Sure. But then maybe Walker research suffers.”

Wiley said he feels “really proud of taking Governor Walker from one level to the other, to getting him ready to jump on that debate stage. ... He did a great job.”

“It is stunning to me,” Wiley added, “that you can lead everywhere and then have a debate performance that's panned as OK, and then all of a sudden you just plummet. ... We were going to try to ride it out in Iowa, and we just didn't quite make it.”