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Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin at an event in Greenville, S.C., last week, a few days before he announced he was quitting the presidential race.Credit Chris Keane/Reuters

MILWAUKEE — For the last 25 years, Representative Gwen Moore has sought to relinquish her claim to being the only politician ever to defeat Scott Walker.

On Monday she learned that her wait would continue, as Mr. Walker, the Wisconsin governor, ended his presidential campaign, bowing to plummeting poll numbers and a Republican electorate that seems to vastly prefer explosive outsiders to a lifelong political operative.

Ms. Moore, a Democrat from Milwaukee, was fine with that. “I’m great,” she said.

Old political adversaries of Mr. Walker greeted his dour denouement as a fitting result for a politician who they say began and furthered his career here with a divisive style, a penchant for turning out conservative supporters rather than working with opponents, and tacit racial appeals in one of the nation’s most segregated cities. But the irony is that Mr. Walker was eclipsed by candidates who have ignited the Republican base with more overtly nativist and, their critics argue, racist appeals.

Mr. Walker first registered on the radar of African-American voters here in September 1990, when The Milwaukee Star, a black newspaper, reported that Ms. Moore, the first African-American woman to hold the Seventh D^{istrict Assembly seat, was “expected to face formidable opposition in the general election” from Mr. Walker, “who is said to have well-financed and organized support.”}

That was an overstatement. Mr. Walker was 23, a Marquette University dropout. He had limited funds and enjoyed the help of only a couple of fellow college Republicans. But as he ran for Wisconsin office for the first time by mostly appealing to white college students at Marquette and wealthier white residents near the suburbs, he also advertised in papers catering to the district’s heavily black population.

“Tired of the violence?” read an ad in the Nov. 3 Milwaukee Courier. “Scott Walker has a plan.”

Mr. Walker had left Marquette as a student that spring, only to return to the campus dorm room of John Hiller, a friend who became his campaign treasurer. They and Mike Anani, another student who was running for the State Senate, developed a tough-on-crime platform.

The issue was a no-brainer: The college paper, The Marquette Tribune, read like a crime blotter. “MU Student Killed in Random Shooting,” ran an August headline; “Sexual Assault, Robberies During Weekend” ran one that September. A series debated whether the school’s public safety officers should carry weapons. Racial tensions, meanwhile, surfaced on its editorial pages: “Black Power Threatens Society” read one essay, alongside “African American Students Outraged by Racist Opinions.”

Steve Loucks, a former Republican Assemblyman in a neighboring district, who as a Marquette alumnus had kept track of the college Republicans, recalled Mr. Walker as unusually ambitious for his age.

As it happened, Mr. Loucks and Ms. Moore, who had no car, drove to Madison, the state capital, together each week. Ms. Moore recalled that she learned on those drives that Mr. Walker was someone to keep an eye on, that he polished his speeches in front of a mirror, and that he intended to “persuade white Democrats to just vote color.”

Mr. Loucks said he did not recall the substance of those conversations, but said Mr. Walker’s candidacy was seen by state Republicans as a way for him to “build his chops.”

Mr. Hiller, meanwhile, described Mr. Walker’s campaign as a ploy to distract Ms. Moore from working on behalf of other Democrats. They acquired lists of likely voters and knocked on doors. Some people did not appreciate the fliers they handed out.

“I vividly remember the picture of a revolver pointed right at the reader,” said Dale Dulberger, who lived in the district and later ran for and lost a state legislative seat to Mr. Walker. “It was shocking.”

Ms. Moore said she believed that Mr. Walker was making a tacit racial appeal to her constituents, and it had worried her. “I was scared that the white people would listen to him,” she said.

Mr. Walker’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the 1990 election, about which accusations of race baiting have been raised in the past.

But Mr. Hiller said there was no racial overtone to the flier, and suggested that Ms. Moore was exaggerating.

“If there was a gun, there was a gun,” said Mr. Hiller, but he said there was no racial undertone to the flyer. Ms. Moore, he said, was “making it sound like some racial thing — her memory of it now is just over the top.”

Mr. Walker returned to the Marquette campus the day before Halloween for a sparsely attended candidate forum about campus safety. In The Marquette Tribune, which incorrectly identified him as a graduate, he called for more affordable housing, saying “the problems of abandoned and run-down housing leads to drug trafficking and crime in neighborhoods.”

But the district’s voters, a majority of them white liberals, roundly rejected Mr. Walker’s ideas.

On election night, Mr. Hiller picked him up and drove to Gov. Tommy Thompson’s re-election party in Madison. On the road, a radio announcer mistakenly said Mr. Walker had won, prompting the two to pull over in a state of shock. Then the announcer said he had transposed the results and that Mr. Walker had lost badly. At Mr. Thompson’s party, Mr. Hiller recalled, people kept coming up to Mr. Walker and congratulating him on a tough race, saying he had “helped the cause.”

“It gave him some credibility and inroads into the party apparatus,” Mr. Hiller said. “It opened doors with various people and power players.”

Those connections paid off as Mr. Walker moved to the suburbs of Milwaukee. From his overwhelmingly white and Republican politician base in Wauwatosa, he sought and won seats in the Assembly, the State Senate and as county executive.

In 2006, he ran for governor before bowing out with little support. But he ran again and won in 2010, and then beat Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, in a recall election in which Mr. Walker’s old adversaries found his tactics familiar: running against Milwaukee as a murderous, crime-ridden place that should not infect the rest of the state.

In his office last week, Mr. Barrett, a Democrat who has been mayor since 2004, grew upbeat at the mention of Mr. Walker’s in the polls.

“I’ve really enjoyed my summer reading,” he said.