With Wednesday’s second presidential debate hours away, Gov. Scott Walker promises to come out swinging in an attempt to combat his sagging poll numbers.
Walker has gone on the offensive in the past week in an effort to reverse this downward trend, including a Tuesday New York Times/CBS poll which shows him at 2 percent nationally. He’s made stops in several key battleground states and promised to “wreak havoc” on Washington, D.C. if elected.
The governor also unveiled a proposal Monday that would bar federal unions from collective bargaining, disband the National Labor Relations Board and institute a nation right-to-work law. Walker said that these reforms, similar to those he championed in Wisconsin, would make the nation stronger.
"We must take on the big-government union bosses in Washington—just like I took them on in Wisconsin," Walker said at a town hall in Las Vegas, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Federal employees should work for the taxpayers, not the other way around.”
The new tone is a change of pace after a start to the campaign that many pundits considered to be lackluster at best. Walker, then a frontrunner, put in a performance in the first debate that was widely considered unspectacular.
Other candidates—notably ex-neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina—used the platform to improve their standing in the polls.
But when asked Monday what his style would be in Wednesday’s debate, Walker didn’t hesitate to emphasize a more aggressive approach.
"Be aggressive, show passion, show the kind of energy that got us to that recall victory in Wisconsin," Walker said of his debate goals in an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly.
Meanwhile, business tycoon Donald Trump has taken a double-digit lead in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The eleven frontrunners for the GOP nomination will take CNN’s stage at 7 p.m. CT tonight at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
