Gwen Moore is the only person ever to beat the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, in an election. The five-term congresswoman bested Walker in a 1990 state representative race in Milwaukee.
She has one regret about that race, she says. She “feels tremendously guilty about not beating him well enough” to end his political career.
The liberal congresswoman has a visceral contempt for Walker, who launched his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination on Monday. But she said her feelings did not stand on partisan grounds. Instead, Moore said, she viewed Walker as the personification of everything wrong with US politics.
She told the Guardian that Walker “doesn’t care who he maims, cripples, or kills to get where he wants to get”.
Moore contrasted her opinion of the Wisconsin governor with her feelings regarding a conservative House colleague from the state, Paul Ryan. Of the Republican congressman, a leading budget hawk who was Mitt Romney’s pick for vice-president in 2012, Moore said: “We have disagreements but he has a core, a moral center.”
Moore claimed that Walker did not have “any firm views” at all. Instead, she saw the Wisconsin governor as “not ideological”, prepared to “move to the left or the right … depending on who is bankrolling him”.
As proof, Moore cited Walker’s back and forth shifts on immigration reform.
Although Walker has indicated his support for comprehensive immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship in the past, he told Fox News earlier this year that he had changed his mind.
It is unclear how genuine that switch is. Walker allegedly told New Hampshire Republicans that he backed allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and a top Republican policy wonk told the New York Times that Walker had confided in him that he was “pro-immigration”.
That wonk later recanted his story after the Walker campaign faced pressure from the right.
On Monday, the Walker campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Moore’s statements.
Walker’s rise to popularity in the Republican field stems from his 2011 crackdown on public employee unions in the Badger State, a visceral issue which led to his surviving an attempted recall. He has been bolstered by his electoral success, winning statewide election three times in four years despite Wisconsin’s slight Democratic leaning.
However, some in the GOP have been skeptical about Walker’s relative inexperience in foreign policy and comparative lack of charisma.
Moore told the Guardian her disdain for Walker was born during his 1990 campaign against her. The African American congresswoman was then running for a second term in the state legislature, representing a majority white district in the racially polarized city of Milwaukee.
Moore said Walker accused her of “supporting urban decay” and repeatedly used racial dog whistles. She described this cynicism as continuing in future campaigns and said Walker was willing to “use any kind of wedge issue he can” in order to win.
In this aspect, Moore said she saw Walker as similar to another Republican candidate: Donald Trump. She believes that like Trump, Walker is trying to claw away for a narrow victory by appealing to “angry white men … who blame immigrants for their job losses”.
To Moore, Trump’s high-profile and controversial campaign was “very similar to the way Scott Walker has run in the past”.
At the end of the interview, Moore warned Iowa Republicans about Walker, who is currently the frontrunner in the early-voting state.
“Don’t trust him,” she said. “He will stab you in the back.”
