Lori Compas is a wedding photographer from Fort Atkinson, Wisc., who participated in last year’s protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to end collective bargaining rights for public-sector union employees. She then spearheaded a signature drive to recall her local state senator, Republican Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald—and ended up running against Fitzgerald herself, as a Democrat. Though her candidacy sparked sparked grassroots excitement and won her media attention beyond Wisconsin, Compas lost to Fitzgerald Tuesday night. The following day, she spoke to msnbc’s Lean Forward.
LF: I’m sorry things didn’t go better last night. Can you talk first about your own race and your experience?
LC: Being a politician isn’t who I am, so it’s nice to be back to normal life with my kids and dog… I’m not as crushed as you might think. I actually did get the number of votes that we thought I needed to win—we thought I needed 33,000 votes and I got that.
LF: So turnout was a lot higher than you expected?
LC: It was astronomical. I don’t know how [Republicans] turned out their people in the northern part of the district where they are so strong, but they did a great job.
LF: Do you think you’ll run for office again?
LC: I really don’t know. I doubt it. This is such a conservative area and I’m not really into wasting my time.
LF: How did you get into politics in the first place?
LC: I was really shocked when Gov. Walker, in his words, ‘dropped the bomb’ on the state. I went to the protest and discovered that the ring-leader in the legislature was my own state senator in a rural district between Madison and Milwaukee. I didn’t even know the guy’s name when the whole thing started, but I soon realized that our state senate member was the majority leader and he was really Gov. Walker’s right hand man. I just assumed that he would be recalled, but when the time came, the state Democratic party said he was untouchable and they were going to focus their resources on three easier targets.
I just thought that he deserves it more than Gov. Walker did and that something needed to be done and that he should be called to account. He abused his power and betrayed our trust and I just thought he needed to be recalled. So when no one else signed the papers, I just did it myself.









