As of about an hour ago, the vote in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court race favors challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 235 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast. I’ve spent the morning crunching the numbers and comparing them to earlier Wisconsin votes and have come to the following conclusion:
After all of the political turmoil and excitement of the past several weeks and years—the Iraq War, the rise of Barack Obama, an economic recession of historic scale, and the recent battle over Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill—Wisconsin is essentially back to where it was in 2004.
Remember that in 2004 John Kerry won Wisconsin by the narrow margin of just 11,000 votes. Following the equally close 2000 Gore versus Bush contest, Wisconsin cemented itself clearly in the “swing state” column. Both parties could credibly claim a path to the Badger State’s ten electoral votes and saw Wisconsin as a beachhead for capturing the industrial Midwest, the most competitive region of the country. As this part of the country went, so would the White House.
To get a sense of just how similar things are to 2004 I decided to compare yesterday’s Supreme Court vote with the Kerry/Bush vote on a county by county basis and to also examine how much change took place within each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.
As has been written about exhaustively, yesterday’s vote is being interpreted as a referendum on Republican Governor Scott Walker, despite the fact that judicial contests in Wisconsin are technically non-partisan. The incumbent, Justice David Prosser served as Republican Speaker of the State Assembly before being appointed (and subsequently elected) to the bench by former Governor Tommy Thompson. A judicial conservative, he has been portrayed by his opponents as Walker’s proxy. Kloppenberg, despite never having held elective office, has been cast as the darling of progressives who see her as a potential ally in the litigation that now surrounds the enactment of the Budget Repair Bill.
So what do we find? Looking across Wisconsin’s counties – see Map 1 in the image lightbox above – one sees that all but eight voted exactly the way they did in 2004. Seven of these became “Democratic”—i.e. voted for Kloppenberg while earlier supporting Bush. The remaining county, Buffalo, moved to the “Republican” column but by a miniscule margin of just 80 votes. Interestingly, the counties who switched were all located in the south central and western part of the state.
A recent article by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is prescient in its examination of this section of Wisconsin. Overall, though, there was a tremendous amount of stability in the county vote. After the wide swing to the left in 2008 when President Obama won 59 counties en route to 56% of the vote statewide, Wisconsin has snapped back.
When we look at how the vote transpired within each of the counties we see even more evidence of Wisconsin returning to form as a battleground. In 47 counties, yesterday’s vote was within 3% of where it was in 2004. Overall, 31 counties voted more “Democratic,” 34 voted more “Republican,” and 7 voted exactly as they did seven years earlier. Averaging the partisan change across all the counties results in no change whatsoever compared to 2004.
Overall, only a small handful of counties voted substantially different. On the “Democratic” side, Iowa County had the biggest shift (+11%) while Ashland, Dane, and Richland increased by 7%.
On the “Republican” side, tiny Menominee County saw a 20% increase. This gain should be taken with a large grain of salt, though, as only 382 votes were cast in a county that still gave Kloppenberg 63%. The county is largely made up of the Menominee Indian Reservation, not exactly a Republican stronghold. More interestingly, neighboring Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties voted 8% more Republican while Milwaukee and Waukesha increased their GOP share by 6%.
The last two counties will need to be examined in greater detail once we start to get some data related to turnout. Because spring elections tend to be characterized by much lower turnout, I would expect the normal correlation between such variables as income, race, and education to be present, even with yesterday’s impressive statewide showing.
The increasing “Republican-ness” of Waukesha County is worth noting in this regard. The state’s wealthiest and consistently among the most Republican, Waukesha is now clearly ground zero for the GOP’s efforts to win statewide. High turnout in Waukesha can help mitigate losses in other parts of the state. Given that these voters have characteristics making their turnout the most likely, Waukesha will continue to have an importance that outweighs its size.
Conversely, the fact that Milwaukee County voted less Democratic leads me to think that this change is related to turnout. My hunch is that turnout in the most Democratic part of the county—i.e. among the city’s sizable African American population—was down, something not unexpected when comparing a spring off year election to a presidential race.
When we compare how Wisconsin’s counties voted along with how the vote in those counties changed – see Map 2 in the image lightbox above – it becomes clear that the Badger State is divided not necessarily just by urban versus rural versus suburban counties but rather along an east/west axis as well.
Regardless of how the final outstanding precincts come in, yesterday’s vote is headed to a recount and potentially, litigation. For the sake of Wisconsinites’ collective sanity, one hopes that this doesn’t result in a repeat of Florida circa 2000.
They’ve already been through enough.
The fact that this litigation could end up before the same court that yesterday’s candidates are vying for adds even more irony to the mix.
