MADISON, Wis. — Not since Democratic governor Jim Doyle was elected alongside Republican attorney general J.B. Van Hollen in 2006 has Wisconsin seen two of its top statewide races split their partisan results on the same election night–until this week.
Trump-backed construction executive Tim Michels lost his bid to Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday night, even as Republican Sen. Ron Johnson ultimately fended off by a percentage point a robust challenge from Democratic Mandela Barnes.
The story bucks history: Wisconsin has only elected four governors in the last thirty-two cycles that matched the party in the White House.
In Wisconsin, last night’s story begins in the suburbs.
Performance: Over and under
With unofficial results in on Wednesday night and 99% of the state’s votes counted, Gov. Evers had outperformed his 2018 results: he’d beaten Michels with three times the margin of victory as his win against Scott Walker.
And while Democratic U.S. Senate challenger Mandela Barnes lost his race to incumbent Ron Johnson by a percentage point, Evers outperformed Ron Johnson as well in raw votes: more than 20,000 on Wednesday, according to unofficial results.
“I think a lot of Republicans today and probably a lot of Democrats too feel like Wisconsin sports fans after a weekend where the Wisconsin Badgers win but then the Packers lose,” Republican analyst Joe Handrick said.
The numbers point to a few things: Barnes was a vulnerable candidate who’d been hammered for everything from unpaid taxes to old tweets in attack ads. Evers, a mild-mannered governor known for his scores of vetoes on legislation coming out of the Republican-controlled legislature, had an incumbency advantage.
Plus, a tumultuous political environment and multiple national and world crises have left voters disillusioned and polarized — and evidently, in Wisconsin, at times prone to split tickets.
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But more than perhaps anything else, the numbers tell Republicans that even without former president Donald Trump on the ballot, they have a problem in Wisconsin’s populous and traditionally red suburbs.
Small wins across rural Wisconsin, big losses in packed suburbs
Waukesha County and to a less populous extent Washington and Ozaukee Counties have long been to Wisconsin Republicans what Dane County is for Democrats in statewide races.
The three Milwaukee suburbs reliably churn out tens of thousands of red votes needed to push Republicans over the margin of victory. But just as deep-blue Dane County is still home to tens of thousands of Republican votes, the “WOW” counties have Democratic votes to consider as well.
For Republicans, the problem in Waukesha County is that beginning in 2016–when 20,000 fewer Republicans turned out for Trump than they did four years earlier for Mitt Romney–the Democratic margin is growing as suburbs both here and across the nation edge further left of center.
“We’ve had four cycles now where there’s been this kind of steady erosion in the suburbs around Milwaukee,” Craig Gilbert said, former D.C. Bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Just like the Democratic erosion in the northern and western halves of Wisconsin is significant, these two trends are kind of competing with each other. But I think in this case, the more powerful trend is the trend of suburban decline for Republicans.”
Four years ago, Waukesha County sent 66% of its sizable vote to Scott Walker, and 33% to Evers. Two years later, Joe Biden’s vote share in the county grew by six points–a tally worth about 25,000 more votes than they’d given Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In a state where Biden won overall with about 20,000 votes, those six blue points in the county can’t be ignored.
On Tuesday night, Evers managed to repeat that story — increasing his vote share in the county from 33% to 39%, just like Biden had in 2020. Meanwhile, Michels fell far behind Scott Walker, a cost of well over 10,000 votes in one county alone and a drop of six points — his second worst in the state.
What he lost in the cities and the suburbs, Republican voters tried to give back to him in rural Wisconsin: Michels outperformed Scott Walker from one to several points in the vast majority of rural northern, northwestern, and some southwestern parts of the state.
“As we found out last night, all the rural areas added up together can’t offset a bad night in Waukesha County,” Handrick noted.
Falling behind Scott Walker, Donald Trump
According to a News 3 analysis, Michels dropped points or stayed even with Walker in 24 counties, counties that together account for about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s population. In many of those counties, his margins also fell below Trump’s in 2020, when the former president lost the state to Joe Biden.
Across the state’s population centers, the story of Republican underperformance repeated itself on Tuesday night. For instance:
- In Ozaukee County, Michels suffered his severest drop: 8 points behind Walker’s 2018 performance
- In Washington County, Michels dropped 4 points behind
- In Dane County, Michels dropped 2 points behind Walker
- In Milwaukee County, Michels dropped 3 points behind Walker
- In Eau Claire County, Michels dropped 2 points
Declines in the state’s two major cities and in the historically red suburbs surrounding Milwaukee are possible to offset in the Fox Valley — if Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago throw large enough margins to Republicans.
That didn’t happen on Tuesday, according to Wednesday’s unofficial results with nearly all of the vote counted.
- In Brown County, Michels dropped a point
- In Winnebago County, Michels dropped a point
- In Outagamie County, Michels dropped a point
“In all those places, the biggest vote-producing counties in the state, are places where Republicans lost ground,” Gilbert said. “The gains they were able to make in some of the smaller counties just weren’t enough to compensate.”
At the end of the day, perhaps the story is simply one of incumbency advantage.
“There’s an old saying in politics,” Handrick said. “Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t.”
But as a longtime Republican advisor and analyst in the state (having participated in 2011’s redistricting), he has his own advice for his party. They have to recognize the impact of Roe v Wade’s overturn on last night’s results, he said. They also have to get over the past.
“Republicans had trouble last night in places in the country where they spent so much time questioning the results of the past election and not acknowledging that Donald Trump lost the election,” he said. “Voters are looking for people who are looking to the future.”
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