Wisconsin officials announced Friday that critics of Gov. Scott Walker had met the requirements for a recall election, starting a contentious campaign cycle all over again.
Walker, who has battled public employee unions since taking office last year, will become the first governor in the state’s history to face a recall election, set for June.
Friday marked an ending, too: of unlimited fundraising for Walker, who over the politically rancorous past year has raised more than $12 million, more than any candidate for governor has ever collected for a race in Wisconsin.
In a sign of how a state race has already grown into a national fight, more than half of the money from individual donors has come from other states, and in sums as high as $500,000 from a single person.
Lately, Walker, a Republican in his first term, has held fundraisers in Palm Beach, Fla.; Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, including one hosted by Maurice Greenberg, the former chief executive of the American International Group.
“I do think this has national implications,” said C. Boyden Gray, a Washington lawyer who served as White House counsel in the first Bush administration and who gave Walker $25,000 not long ago.
Under a state law that had gone unnoticed even by some of Wisconsin’s campaign finance experts, targets of recall efforts are exempt from ordinary fundraising limits until a recall election is formally certified, as Walker’s was Friday.
So, while Walker will now be held to limits for individual donors — at most $10,000 to a governor’s campaign — he has been able to raise far more from donors like Foster Friess ($100,000), the Wyoming man who has donated heavily to a “super PAC” that has kept Rick Santorum’s presidential hopes afloat; Trevor Rees-Jones ($100,000), the Dallas president of Chief Oil and Gas and an established donor to Republican causes; and Bob J. Perry ($500,000), a Texas homebuilder who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry in 2004.
And that includes only money raised through mid-January, when the last campaign financial reports had to be filed with the state.
“He’s broken the record, and it hasn’t even started yet,” said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.
According to McCabe, Walker collected just more than $11 million in his entire 2010 campaign, which at the time, McCabe noted, was itself a record.
