Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin has been working hard to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) for over a year, and despite the polls leaning strongly in Walker's favor, the family planning provider is fired up and optimistic about Tuesday's election.

"The enthusiasm on the ground is amazing," said Stephanie Wilson, a spokesperson for PPAWI. "This election is going to be to a lot closer than people are anticipating."

Wilson told The Huffington Post that it has canvassers going door to door all over the state to motivate people to vote. Based on their reports, polling locations are running out of ballots and voter registration forms in Milwaukee, voters are bringing to the polls friends and family members who have never voted before, and women's issues are playing heavily into people's decisions.

"People are talking about and motivated by the attacks on women's health," Wilson told HuffPost. "We are hearing that on the doors time and again."

Walker has been an extremely polarizing governor on women's issues since he took office. On the eve of Easter weekend in April, he quietly signed four bills into law that repealed Wisconsin's equal pay law, ended a ban on abstinence-only education, banned the insurance coverage of abortions under state health exchanges and restricted women's ability to get abortion care.

Walker also decided in late 2011 not to renew a state contract with Planned Parenthood to provide cancer and multiple sclerosis screenings to low-income women, leaving four counties without such services.

Women's rights groups have been campaigning against Walker all year, and a May 30 poll conducted by Marquette University showed a significant gender gap between Walker and his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D): While men favor Walker by a margin of 58 to 36 percent, women prefer Barrett 52 to 42 percent.

Barrett and his supporters have been hammering home the "war on women" issue, repeatedly reminding voters about Walker's decisions on equal pay laws and Planned Parenthood.

Walker, on the other hand, is keeping the focus of his campaign on jobs.

"You know what the biggest concern for employers is?" asked Walker at a campaign event on Tuesday. "The biggest thing that's holding people back from creating even more jobs? The recall!"

Below, more on the history of the Walker recall effort:

Wave Election Sweeps In Conservatives
1  of  11
PLAY
FULLSCREEN
ZOOM
SHARE THIS SLIDE 
In 2010, a surge of Tea Party momentum and backlash against Democrats helped elect conservatives including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who became the state's first Republican governor since 2002.

Walker promised to cut taxes and create 250,000 new jobs, but a deeper look into his past also showed a politician who had inflamed tensions with unions before.

The Washington Post reports on his time as Milwaukee County Executive, during which the collective bargaining rights of unions already appeared to be one of his most ambitious targets:

During his eight-year tenure in Milwaukee County, Walker never raised property taxes. He cut the county workforce by 20 percent, improved its bond rating and gave back hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own salary as part of the effort to trim spending. But he also saw his relations with local unions deteriorate.

Union leaders say Walker never negotiated in good faith and had a singular solution to every budget problem: cut. Under his watch, the county privatized public jobs, laid off workers and placed others on furlough.

[...]

Walker argued that collective bargaining was the biggest hurdle to balancing the budget and that unions had little incentive to give ground because they almost always prevailed in arbitration. He said that the cuts he proposed were intended to prevent layoffs and accused union leaders of being uninterested in compromise.

Related on HuffPost: