Did Scott Walker and Donald Trump Deal Away the Governor's Race to Foxconn?

In September of 2017, Governor Scott Walker, Republican of Wisconsin, signed a contract that would make his state the home of the first U.S. factory of Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer. The company, which is based in Taiwan and makes products for Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, among others, would build a 21.5-million-square-foot manufacturing campus, invest up to ten billion dollars in Wisconsin, and hire as many as thirteen thousand workers at an average wage of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. For Walker, whose approval had fallen to the mid-thirties after his aborted Presidential run, the deal was seen as a crucial boost to his reëlection prospects. "The Foxconn initiative looked like something that could be a hallmark of Walker's reëlection campaign," Charles Franklin, a professor and pollster at Marquette University Law School, told me. "He could claim a major new manufacturing presence, one that would also employ blue-collar workers in a region where blue-collar jobs are more scarce than they used to be." The idea of putting the plant in southeastern Wisconsin originated in April of 2017, during a helicopter ride President Donald Trump took with Reince Priebus, a Wisconsin native and Trump's chief of staff at the time. Flying over Kenosha, Priebus's home town, they passed the empty lot that once held the American Motors Corporation plant.