-By Warner Todd Huston

Oh, the union thugs in Wisconsin will certainly try to act as if winning a mere two of the six recall elections of the Republican State Senators in the Cheese State was a big win… but it wasn’t. In fact, this recall nonsense shows that the union issues were a huge failure. After all, they even shied from using the union issues to push the recall efforts after they got going because they were looking like a losing issue.

In fact, the two Republicans that lost their effort to beat the recall were the two that were a bit odd as it is, so beating them doesn’t seem to be such a great triumph. And even at that the margins of defeat were not great. David Fredosso of the Washington Examiner puts it well:

In the end, the union-backed Democrats picked up only two state Senate seats in Wisconsin last night, at a staggering cost in time, effort, and of course money. One of the seats was solidly Democratic, held by a Republican due to an apparent fluke of nature. The other was held by an alleged adulterer who had moved outside his district to live with his young mistress, and whose wife was supporting his recall.

A Pyrrhic victory, there, for sure.

Unions and left-wing Democrat operative told us that the people of Wisconsin were furious at Governor Scott Walker and his GOP partners. We were told that “the people” would swarm to the recall election polls and throw the rascals out. But aside from the two problem children above, none of the elections were even close.

So, what happened? With nearly $30 million spent on the recall efforts the two sides were pretty even (though the GOP had a slight edge). So, it wasn’t money that flipped the vote toward the GOP.

The truth is, the state is already seeing major benefits from Gov. Walker’s GOP agenda. Schools are seeing huge budget savings and some of them are even standing up to unions to find further savings. Even better, due to Gov. Walker’s efforts Wisconsin led the nation in jobs creation in June with 9,500 new jobs being created in the Badger State.

Wisconsin is growing again at last. Unions were the reason Wisconsin was being held back. And voters know it.

Mickey Kaus (a famous left-winger, but quixotic that he is often anti-union) makes some great points about this recall election, too.

Unions Lose Again in Wisconsin: It looks as if the organized labor movement has failed to recall enough Wisconsin Republicans to regain control of the state senate. That’s a) in an off-year election where union turnout usually makes the difference b) in famously progressive Wisconsin c) after spending many millions d) with a nationwide media and organizing push e) when labor had a galvanizing issue in Gov. Scott Walker’s direct assault on the institutional collective bargaining power of public employees, which led to a dramatic walkout by Democrats.

That puts it all well in perspective to show how badly the unions lost, doesn’t it?

Lastly, this whole recall idea is idiotic. We have elections to put people in office. If we don’t like them we have the opportunity to be rid of them during the next election. This frivolous use of recalls is simply illegitimate. But that aside, it is good to see that most of the people of Wisconsin understood that the folks that were only just elected needed the chance to get a fair shot at doing the job they were voted in to do.