Scott Walker tanking in another Wisconsin poll [UPDATE]

Scott Walker is falling in the polls.

​There's more bad poll news for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who insists he's going to stand firm in his budget battle to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.

Rasmussen Reports is out with a new survey of Wisconsin voters showing that 57 percent of them don't approve of how he's handling his job.

He's held in even lower esteem by parents with kids in public schools, where teachers have already agreed to a pay cut: 67 percent of those voters disapprove of what Walker is doing.

antrover/flickr

Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin President Mahlon Mitchell speaks to pro-union demonstrators in Madison.

​The Rasmussen findings come after a Public Policy Polling survey last week that asked Wisconsin voters whether they would support Walker over his Democratic opponent in November, Tom Barrett, in a do-over.

Barrett beat Walker by a 52-45 margin.

Those kinds of results, and national polls that reflect similar sentiments, prompted Forbes Magazine to declare that Walker has lost his war in "one of the great political miscalculations of our time."

You can't take on the state worker unions without taking on the teachers - and the teachers are more popular than Gov. Walker and his cohorts appear to realize.

By demonizing them, Walker and governors fighting similar battles in Ohio and Indiana are driving union workers back to the Democratic Party -- in key presidential election states.

And the longer Walker is forced to keep the battle raging by 14 Democratic state senators on the lam in Illinois, the more galvanized his opposition becomes. This past weekend, filmmaker and liberal activist Michael Moore, standing on a podium alongside firefighters, rallied a crowd in Madison:

Walker's pushing ahead, though. He claims that he's had thousands of supportive e-mails, even though he won't show them to anyone. The Associated Press and the Isthmus newspaper are suing him because he's keeping them secret.

Update: Based on an interview with Senate minority leader Mark Miller, The Wall Street Journal ran with a story this morning saying that the 14 missing Democrats were soon going to return to Madison. But one of the 14, Chris Larson, took to his Facebook page to denounce the story as spin.

Sen. Miller's comments are taken out of context in the Wall Street Journal article just released. Dems will return when collective bargaining is off the table. That could be soon based on the growing public opposition to the bill and the recall efforts against Republicans. Unfortunately, the WSJ fished for the quote they wanted, skipping this key step in logic: we won't come back until worker's rights are preserved.

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