The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports surprising news from this weekend’s state Democratic convention:

A straw poll of Democrats at their party’s weekend convention is getting most of its attention for who came in last place in the race for governor.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin — one of the better known candidates in a field of 10 — got just one vote.

That means either Soglin or his campaign manager, Melissa Mulliken, didn’t bother to cast a ballot for the longtime mayor during the two-day convention in Oshkosh.

The winner for the Aug. 14 Democratic primary will take on GOP Gov. Scott Walker in November.

Every year, WisPolitics.com asks convention-goers about upcoming races and who they would like to see represent their party. The straw poll is not scientifically significant, but is a good measure of the strength and organization of candidates’ campaigns.

From that standpoint, Soglin’s performance suggests he doesn’t have much of an organization so far. Mulliken did not immediately respond to questions Monday, but she told the Wisconsin State Journal that straw polls are meaningless and that Soglin had fared well in surveys.

Former state Rep. Kelda Roys of Madison handily won the straw poll, getting nearly twice as many votes as her closest opponent.

The straw poll of 789 delegates, alternates and guests showed Roys with a clear lead, many of the candidates bunched together and Soglin trailing badly:

• Roys: 184
• Firefighters union president Mahlon Mitchell: 93
• Schools Superintendent Tony Evers: 91
• Milwaukee businessman Andy Gronik: 89
• State Rep. Dana Wachs: 89
• State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout: 83
• Campaign finance reform advocate Mike McCabe: 81
• Former state Democratic Party Chairman Matt Flynn: 71
• Kenosha attorney Josh Pade: 7
• Madison Mayor Paul Soglin: 1

Pade, who is new to politics and virtually unknown, got seven times as many votes as Soglin.

“A candidate with the name recognition and longevity of Soglin should be able to get a decent showing in a straw poll among political activists just by being listed on ballot,” Democratic strategist Joel Gratz wrote on his blog. “In getting that single vote (Soglin’s, his manager’s, or a random delegate if neither of the other two happened to vote) he’s moved from the top tier position he once had to the bottom tier, just as former Rep. Kelda Roys was boosted clearly into the top tier by winning the poll and garnering.”

Roys’ 184 votes constitutes 23 percent of the total. Put another way, three-fourths of the straw poll participants oppose Roys.

At this point you might well ask: Who? The Journal Sentinel also tells this story:

Near the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol on Aug. 21 of last year, soon-to-be congressional candidate Kelda Helen Roys was clearly feeling the moment. Perched atop a flatbed truck following the 2011 Capitol Pride parade, Roys, currently a Madison-area state legislator, passionately argued in favor of same-sex marriage and other rights for LGBT couples. According to a numerous parade attendees, Roys punctuated her speech by telling a story about how she and her “partner” had fled Wisconsin to marry in Iowa, a state in which gay marriage was legalized by judicial fiat in 2009.

This puzzled many of the 500 in attendance, as Roys’ “partner” is, in fact, a man – a fact she never referenced during her speech. In 2010, she married small business owner Dan Reed, and could have done so perfectly legally in her Madison-area district. “She was clearly trying to represent herself as a member of the LGBT community,” said Katie Belanger, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, the state’s most visible LGBT rights organization.

Two weeks later, Roys, a 33-year old Democrat, would announce she was running for Congress to fill the seat vacated by Tammy Baldwin, who is vying to replace Herb Kohl in the U.S. Senate. Roys’ Democratic primary opponent is fellow Assembly Rep. Mark Pocan, who is openly gay. Pocan followed Baldwin, who is also gay, into the same Madison-area Assembly seat, and is now attempting to follow her into the same congressional seat.

But Roys’ attempts to out-gay Pocan in order to receive the imprimatur of the Madison LGBT community have fallen flat. Belanger said she began hearing from outraged LGBT activists immediately after Roys’ Capitol Pride speech.

“Going public with your sexuality is one of the most personal and painful things a gay person can do,” one LGBT activist told me, upset that Roys was trying to co-opt the movement. Belanger called Pocan and Baldwin “coura geous” for being openly gay while in public office. “So when you have a candidate trying to mislead or play cute, it’s troubling,” said Belanger.

When asked about the details of her Capitol Pride speech, Roys’ campaign said she would not comment, as she would not respond to “gossip.”

Pro football TV broadcaster Dan Dierdorf once said of the Detroit Lions and their rotating quarterbacks of the day that if you have three quarterbacks, you really have no quarterbacks. If you have 10 candidates for governor, do you really have any?

Speaking of Evers, Madison.com reports:

Christian Schneider:

In 2013, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the floor to support shutting the federal government down. At the time, Cruz thought threatening a shutdown would force the authors of a new spending bill to delay implementation of Obamacare. But hitting the snooze button on Obamacare was a fever dream; the bill would have needed the signature of a president whose name was on the health care plan.

Cruz peddled this impossibility to voters, raising expectations to a level Congress could never satisfy. In response, GOP voters selected an erratic, bombastic presidential nominee who claimed he could achieve far-fetched accomplishments simply by virtue of his personality. Yet even with a Republican House and Senate, President Donald Trump couldn’t undo Obamacare.

Last weekend, Journal Sentinel reporter Patrick Marley asked the leading Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidates whether they favored repeal of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature accomplishment — the virtual elimination of collective bargaining for government employees. Every one of them pledged to overturn Walker’s “Act 10” law, which passed in 2011 amid nationally publicized protests at the Capitol and around Wisconsin.

In making this pledge, the Democrats vying to face Walker are selling primary voters a product they can’t possibly produce.

For one, overturning Act 10 would mean defeating Walker, something no Democrat has been able to achieve in three tries — even during a 2012 recall election when the state was engulfed in tumult. And Democrats would have to win control of both houses of the Legislature — not an impossible feat, but an unlikely one.

Suppose Democrats were able to overcome Republican majorities in 2018 and found themselves in full control of state government. If they wanted to repeal Act 10, they would face a public that still supports Walker’s reforms. Over the span of four polls conducted by the Marquette University Law School between 2012 and 2014, Wisconsin residents favored keeping Act 10 reforms in place in every poll; in October of 2014, respondents favored retaining Walker’s union law by a margin of ten percentage points (52% to 42%.)

And even if they went ahead with repealing the law, Democrats would have to deal with the effects of reversing the myriad proposals under Act 10’s umbrella. One of Walker’s primary initiatives was to require state and local employees to start paying towards their pension and health care benefits, which saved both levels of government money. This allowed him to reduce aids to local governments and school districts, knowing they would be able to replenish those funds by having to pay less for employee benefits.

If Democrats reinstate Wisconsin as a union utopia and teachers and local government employees once again start to collectively bargain, it will certainly increase the cost of providing services, and thus push property taxes significantly upward. That is, of course, unless the Democratic candidates want to move back to a system in which the state provides aid to local governments and school districts to subsidize these benefits. If that is the case, Democrats should be willing to provide examples of which state taxes they would raise to provide the billions of dollars it would take to restore this aid model.

In practice, it’s not even certain teachers and other government employees would move back to a system of mass unionization. Under Act 10, employees were perfectly welcome to remain in unions, and many have. But thousands of others have gotten used to not having dues automatically deducted from their paychecks and have begun to recognize they can get along fine without having to belong to a union. Even if Act 10 is reversed, union organizers may not see potential brothers and sisters lining up to re-enlist.

The Democratic candidates for governor will forge ahead, each trying to prove they are more vigilant in opposition to a law that has saved taxpayers billions of dollars and gotten the state budget back into working order. And when they can’t make good on their promise, a new candidate from the fringes will emerge, vowing only he or she can make the changes the progressive base craves.

Accordingly, Democrats would be wise to heed the lesson Republicans have learned — with unrealistic promises come unpredictable results.

Proof that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers is out of touch with the schools he supposedly supervises is his parroting the Democrats’ Act 10 position. You will not find a school district administrator — and they are all Democrats — who opposes Act 10 because Act 10 gives more budget control to administrators in the single biggest spending item of any school district budget, employee salaries and benefits.

Repealing Act 10 would result in school districts’ spending money on their employees instead of their students.