A few thoughts from Wisconsin's election results

After a way-too-late Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I've had a few days to digest another close statewide election in Wisconsin where Republicans overperformed their poll numbers. And I'll give a few bits of info to look into how Joe Biden won our state.

The first item I'll go into turnout, which is something I was wrong about. I said on Monday that if Biden got 1.6 million votes in Wisconsin, Trump had no chance and Biden would win easily. That wasn't the case, as Trump ended up getting more votes than any Republican has ever gotten in Wisconsin.

Add in the third-party tallies, and turnout was nearly at 3.3 million votes, shattering the state record by more than 200,000, and going up by more than 10% compared to 2016. These increases were widespread throughout the state with one exception - the City of Milwaukee, which didn't see any additional turnout at all.

As a result, the City of Milwaukee had a much smaller share of the total vote compared to recent elections, and the increased turnout in the rest of the state diluted some of the influence of the high-turnout areas of Dane County and the WOW Counties.

As for how those areas voted, it's a repeat of the trends we've seen in the Trump era. Big cities and their suburbs continued to trendi more toward Democrats, and more rural areas trending even more Republican. In fact, only 2 counties in Wisconsin flipped compared to 2020 - Sauk and Door Counties, which went for Biden after going for Trump 4 years ago.

But there were notable shifts beyond those two counties that turned from red to blue. Craig Gilbert broke down some of these changes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and it shows keys to Biden's victory was in Dane and Milwaukee Counties - but not necessarily the big city.

• The city of Madison. Hillary Clinton won Madison by 63 points and about 97,000 votes. Biden won Madison by about 70 points and almost 113,000 votes. That’s a net gain for Democrats of almost 16,000 votes. • The Madison suburbs. Clinton won the rest of Dane County by 32 points and about 49,000 votes. Biden won these mostly suburban voters by 37 points and about 68,000 votes. These are blue suburbs getting bluer (and increasing in population). They generated a net gain for Democrats of more than 19,000 votes. • The Milwaukee County suburbs. Setting aside the city of Milwaukee, Clinton won the rest of Milwaukee County by 10 points and more than 19,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won the same turf by 17 points and almost 37,000 votes. That’s a net gain for Democrats of more than 17,000 votes.

There was one other area where Biden improved from Clinton - the red-voting WOW Counties, where Biden ended up with nearly 38% of the vote, compared to the low 30s figures that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Tony Evers pulled in the 2010s.

In the rest of the state, Biden did worse than Barack Obama did in President 44's 2 sizable wins in Wisconsin. But he did improve on Clinton's results in 2016, and ended up in line with what Evers did in the Fox Valley and in Racine/Kenosha. However, Biden did lose ground outstate vs what Evers did in 2018.

So what did we find out? That Trumpism repelled a lot of people in higher-population and highly educated parts of Wisconsin, but that it works with far too many people in all other parts of the state. And even though I'm glad that we don't have to be slurred as a red state for the next few years, knowing that there are so many that went along with this destructive, incompetent ogre is something I am not going to forget nor forgive.

The arrogance and refusal to admit facts with Wisconsin GOP voters went to a new level with Walkerism, got worse in the Age of Trump, and it's going to require a lot of deprogramming and direct confrontation for us to ever get back to the great state we thought we had a decade ago. But at least we know there's slightly more of us than there are them, and that's a start.