Friday, they were beat to the punch.

Yet officials with the state Democratic Party and United Wisconsin, a grass-roots organization created to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, say despite the fact that David Brandt, a Muskego resident and modest campaign contributor to Walker, filed paperwork Friday to launch Walker’s recall, they are sticking to their plan to start what they say is “the real” recall effort Nov. 15.

On that day several members of United Wisconsin will file paperwork with the state Government Accountability Board, says Meagan Mahaffey, spokeswoman for the group. They hope to recall Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.

“We encourage real supporters of this movement to recall Walker to remain focused on Nov. 15, when the recall will begin,” Mahaffey said Friday.

When that happens, hundreds of residents who have participated in training sessions sponsored by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin will be ready to hit the streets, clipboard and stacks of petitions in hand, to begin the never-before-performed task of collecting enough signatures to trigger a recall election against a state governor.

Roughly 540,000 signatures must be collected for Walker, another 540,000 to recall Kleefisch. The last day a petition can be signed is Jan. 14. Those petitions then need to be turned in to the state Government Accountability Board by Jan. 17, giving anti-Walker forces a tight 60-day timeframe to collect more than 1 million signatures.

“Recall trainings are ongoing around the state and the response has been incredible,” Mahaffey says. “Thousands of volunteers have been trained on how to collect petitions, including many people who haven’t been involved with politics before. Walker’s attacks have driven thousands of people to become engaged in this movement to recall him.”

Those “attacks” began in February when Walker first announced plans to strip most collective bargaining rights from public employee unions. The news prompted weeks of protests at the Capitol that at times drew crowds up to 100,000 people. Other actions by the conservative Republican governor in subsequent months have kept the anger alive among a portion of the state’s electorate willing to wait until Walker had been in office long enough to qualify for a recall effort under state law.

More fuel was added to the already heated political landscape Friday by Brandt’s action. Because state law allows political incumbents facing a recall to receive unlimited campaign contributions from the time a committee to recall an elected official is filed until the time an election has been ordered by the GAB, state Democratic Party leaders immediately charged Brandt’s action was “a ploy” to allow Walker and Kleefisch to start fundraising.

Nicole Larson, a spokeswoman with the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said Friday that “the rumors being circulated by the Democrats are completely false.”

In an interview prior to Brandt’s filing, Larson says that although Walker takes the recall effort against him seriously, “he will remain focused on job creation and improving the state for Wisconsin families.”

“Despite attempts by Wisconsin Democrats to block him at every turn, Gov. Walker is fulfilling the campaign promises he made to voters last November,” Larson adds. “He balanced (former Democratic Gov.) Jim Doyle’s $3.6 billion budget deficit without raising taxes, created a better economic environment for businesses, and has given school districts and municipalities across the state the tools to save millions of dollars.”

According to Madison resident Donna Magdalina, the required one-year wait from the date of Walker’s election before a recall could be mounted hasn’t dampened determination in her east-side neighborhood.

Several weeks ago, she and a few neighbors met to discuss strategies to collect signatures in the Schenk, Atwood, Starkweather and Yahara neighborhoods.

She says she sketched the outline of the neighborhoods on a whiteboard, determined how many blocks were within each, and then set out to find a block captain for each block who would be in charge of collecting signatures. She is in charge of a 22-block area and has found block captains for 17 of them, she says.

“We are so organized it is amazing,” says Magdalina, a self-employed graphic artist who attended a Democratic Party-sponsored training session. “We plan to have our whole neighborhood done by Thanksgiving. Then I’m heading out to collect signatures in other parts of the state.”

When she does, she’ll encounter a state that, unlike her neighborhood, which has a strong history of voting Democratic, is nearly evenly split in its opinion of the governor.

A poll conducted by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank that focuses on free-market growth and the economy, and released Oct. 30 found roughly 56 percent of those polled disapprove of Walker’s performance. But those who want to recall him number 47 percent, to 49 percent who don’t. The poll’s margin of error is 4 percentage points.

Then there’s the money factor. Unlike regular elections, campaign contribution limits do not apply when an elected official is facing a recall election. But the same rule does not apply to those who step up to challenge the incumbent.

That means political action committees, individual donors and special-interest groups can contribute as much as they’d like to Walker and Kleefisch. In a regular governor’s race, individual donations are capped at $10,000 and single committee contributions at $43,128 during a four-year election cycle.

State law allows officials facing recall to raise unlimited funds from the time when a committee like Brandt’s registers with the state until the time when an election is ordered and any legal appeals of that order are finalized, according to Reid Magney, a GAB spokesman.

“Gov. Walker definitely has a huge advantage over any challenger because he can engage in unlimited fundraising for a limited amount of time,” says Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending. “He will be rolling in cash.”

This summer alone, when nine of the state’s 33 senators faced recall elections, more than $44 million was spent, with $34.5 million coming from outside interest groups. Now, groups will be looking to influence voters across the state, causing McCabe to speculate spending will be even higher

“I don’t have a good-enough crystal ball to say how much more will be spent, but it will be more than $44 million,” McCabe says.

From Madison.com.