Gov. Scott Walker hit mostly positive notes on the campaign trail Sunday, even as those traveling with Walker sharpened their attacks against Democrat Mary Burke.
Speaking from his boyhood hometown of Delavan in southeast Wisconsin, just a few hundred feet from the Baptist church where his father was once a minister, Walker asked supporters to help him finish this race.
“You got a day off after this,” said Walker. “There’s no Packers game. You can go knock on some more doors, you can make some more phone calls, you can reach out to your neighbors.”
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Walker said his campaign was giving people something to vote for, arguing that Mary Burke’s campaign was focused entirely on attacking him.
However, just minutes before Walker spoke, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, who was traveling with the governor, criticized Burke, calling her, “a liberal Democrat from Madison.”
He also said she was a “one-percenter who’s taken millions of her own dollars to buy the governor’s race.”
Priebus also referenced recent comments from two former Trek Bicycle executives — both Republican donors — suggesting Burke was forced out of her job there.
“If we were interviewing somebody to work at Long John Silver’s, we wouldn’t hire a person who walked in the door (and) lied about who they were, what they were,” Priebus said.
When the governor was asked afterward whether he stood by those remarks, Walker took a pass, saying he’d leave that to Priebus.
Burke told reporters in Milwaukee that voters would be able to see how in the closing days of this campaign, Walker was attacking her with “lies and slanderous comments.”
“This is the type of sleaze politics that doesn’t have a place here in Wisconsin,” said Burke.
Burke and Walker hit the road again Monday morning for one more full day of campaigning before Election Day.
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