Of course, if the GOP loses the Senate and Walker loses, too, I have no illusions that the GOP’s moderate reformers will suddenly win out. The party that rallied around Ted Cruz and ousted Eric Cantor partly over his supposed liberal heresies isn’t tacking to the political center any time soon. But, in a way, that’s exactly the point. What makes Walkerism so dangerous is that it puts a moderate face on what’s actually a pretty extreme set of policies. A politician working from Walker’s playbook can always say he or she is out to save taxpayers money and make government more efficient even as they’re really out to upend a decade-olds arrangement between workers and employers. (If you think Walkerism would stop at public employees unions, I have a beautiful timeshare in Green Bay to sell you…)

But if Walker loses and the GOP has to look elsewhere for a way out of the wilderness, it will likely be left with candidates who espouse radical policies that lack Walker’s moderate veneer—the Ted Cruzes and Rick Perrys of the world. That sounds like a much better deal if you’re a Democrat, since it’s much easier to fight nuttiness when it looks nutty than when it goes down as smooth as a Wisconsin dairy product. (Er, so to speak.) Anyone who disagrees need only look to that moderate former president, George W. Bush, who, with a few noble exceptions, somehow didn’t manage to raise many alarm bells until after he was elected.

So, long story short, this Wisconsin election is an enormously big deal. The problem is that almost no one has an incentive to tout it as such. Burke, for her part, understandably wants to keep the focus on local issues, having learned from the recall that Wisconsin voters don’t view their state as the place where Liberalism and Conservatism should slug it out. The national media is, naturally, preoccupied with federal elections. And even when it turns to gubernatorial races, it tends to hype those in bigger states, or those with more vulnerable incumbents. (To his credit, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has been one of the few national reporters to grasp the potency of Burke’s challenge.)

Then there are progressives, who pine for a candidate more in the mold of Elizabeth Warren than a former business executive like Burke, with her relatively centrist record on labor and education. Some also feel burned by the 2012 recall and are wary of raising the stakes in Wisconsin all over again, particularly in a non-presidential year when the electorate skews right. Many of the national progressive groups I reached out to for this piece either passed on commenting or put me in touch with local allies in Wisconsin, suggesting it’s not a race they’re particularly consumed by, even if they would love to see Walker go down. (The exception is Jim and Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, which, according to spokesman Neil Sroka, sees the race as a "priority.") Their energy is quite reasonably trained on the Senate.

All of that makes sense on some level—I too would love a more progressive candidate in Wisconsin, and I worry about the skew of the midterm electorate. But the logic happens to be wrong in this case. Wisconsin is where it’s at these days, whether or not progressives go all in.

Conservatives certainly appreciate this. It’s time the left did, too.