{image1}In the days immediately leading up to an election, candidates -- who don't really have all that much spare time on their hands -- face all manner of speculation and inquiry about the upcoming results. Do you expect to win? What will the margin be? How big a margin will satisfy you? And on and on. But the truth is, even candidates with up-to-date polling and comfortable expectations of victory are only worried about one thing: pulling out a victory -- any victory (yes, a one-vote margin will do just fine, thank you very much!) -- on Election Day. And then when the results come in, all candidates want the same thing: the victors to celebrate, and the losers to recover and evaluate.

For political junkies, though, once the votes have been counted and the speculation over this election is over, we can only think about one thing: the next election.

That speculation can range from the interesting to the absurd.

In the days following Scott Walker's re-election as Milwaukee County executive, that speculations has been ratcheted up a notch, with political observers wondering if he will be the Republican nominee to face Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in 2006.

Of course, this isn't the beginning of the speculation over the 2006 gubernatorial contest. In the day-after newspaper stories proclaiming Doyle's gubernatorial victory in November 2004, there were already paragraphs devoted to prognosticating who would take up the Republican standard and challenge Doyle four years later.

Would Tommy Thompson return to Wisconsin to reclaim his lost throne from his long-time political rival? Would Congressman Mark Green leverage his Fox Valley electoral strength toward his first statewide run? Would Assembly Speaker John Gard actually prove to be a formidable Republican leader with the clout to take on Doyle? Would newly elevated Senate Majority Leader Mary Panzer use her new position to make a play to be Wisconsin's first female governor; and, if so, would any of us be able to believe a single word she said?

If all those questions seem like the premise of a bad soap opera, they probably are. Four years ahead of time is awfully early to start predicting front-runners to a political contest. Things tend to change. I can clearly recall standing with former Madison Mayor Sue Bauman on election night 1999 after she had just won re-election with about 80 percent of the vote...and a reporter asked her if she planned to run for governor in three years. Gee, it seemed like a reasonable question at the time.

This month, though, the speculation is all about Scott Walker: is he the Republicans' best hope to take out Jim Doyle?

In short, the answer is no.

Despite his second election in as many years to the post of Milwaukee County executive, there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support the case that he can expand his appeal statewide and mount a serious challenge to the more experienced Doyle. Walker's initial victory had little to do with him and a lot to do with the perfect storm of county government scandal, angry white suburban voters, and an influential right-wing media that decided to play kingmaker. While his re-election numbers would be impressive in a lot of cases, don't forget that he's only been on the job about a year or so, and when voters elect someone part-way into a term, they tend to give that individual another full term to see what they can do. And let's face it, Walker didn't face the most serious of challenges this spring. David Reimer is a good man, proved to be a solid candidate, and a genuinely nice guy, but he was a political novice entering his race, and he faced a serious uphill struggle to draw media attention to a race that was dwarfed by the potentially historic Milwaukee mayoral race, which dominated headlines and voter interest.

In the end, despite all the advantages and all the expectations, Walker couldn't even hit the magical 60 percent threshold, which raised more than a few eyebrows on election night. In fact, he didn't really even get close. Walker won the election, but he under-performed expectations. That's not exactly a great launching pad for a political juggernaut. And now comes a critical story about the Walker administration's own pension problems. What goes around does indeed come around.

Let's not forget, too, that at his core, Walker, a former Wauwatosa state Assemblyman, is a right-wing zealot and a one-note politician. In a statewide election, you eventually have to do something more than call your opponent a tax-and-spender, and Doyle isn't particularly vulnerable to that charge these days. If Scott McCallum couldn't make that charge stick when Doyle was still a relatively unknown commodity to Wisconsin voters (at least in terms of his budgeting proclivities), Walker -- or any other Republican, for that matter -- is going to sound pretty stupid using that same old rhetoric against a guy who has demonstrated, for better or worse, that he is willing to budget from the political middle. Doyle has a record to run on now, and in terms of the standard Republican line, it's a pretty good record.

Of course, all that said, 2006 is still a long ways away. Anything could happen between now and then.

Just ask Howard Dean.

Chris Micklos, of the Madison media group Visuality, is a top Democratic strategist.

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