Saturday, November 14, 2020

More Wisconsin election reflections

I wanted to forward your attention to Dan Shafer's excellent rundown of details in Wisconsin's votes in his Recombobulation Area blog, and some of the links/tweets he has embedded.

First off, let's start with the statewide picture, where Shafer uses Marquette Law pollster Charles Frnaklin's charts, where you can see that few counties had drastic changes But given that Trump won by less than 1% in 2016 and Biden won by less than 1% in 2020, even a small shift meant a lot. Shafer also puts more numbers behind an assessment I and many others have made regarding Biden's 20,500 vote win - that the Milwaukee suburbs played a major role in putting Joe over the top.
Biden improved upon Clinton’s 2016 margin in Waukesha County by 5.5%, and in Ozaukee County by nearly 7%. Trump still won those counties — +21 in Waukesha, +12 in Ozaukee — but cities like Mequon, Elm Grove, Port Washington, Waukesha and Brookfield came within single-digit margins between Biden and Trump — and Biden won outright in Cedarburg. Milwaukee County suburbs that were once evenly split or had a slight Republican advantage have almost all gone blue since 2012, sometimes in huge margins, and Greendale and Greenfield flipped for the Democrat from 2016 to 2020.
Shafer also includes two tweets that contain data illustrating just how big and thorough this shift was, including a contrast with another close statewide Dem win over an incumbent - Tony Evers' defeat of Scott Walker in 2018. And this Tosa East graduate is especially heartened by one particular result from last week.
No Milwaukee County suburb shifted more toward Biden than Wauwatosa -- a 12-point swing from the last election. From 2016 to 2020, the city increased its vote total in the presidential election by about 4,500 -- nearly all of which went for Joe Biden. Nearly a quarter of the statewide margin of just over 20,000 votes came from Wauwatosa alone. Its impact on this election was huge.....

‘Tosa not only swung hard for Biden, but it is now responsible for electing two Democratic representatives to the State Assembly.
Downticket, the shifts in the suburbs might lead to Republicans changing their redistricting strategies. They already can get their maps blocked by Governor Evers, but the blue shifts in the burbs might mean that WisGOP will stop trying to have Waukesha County GOPs "represent" sizable areas of Milwaukee County. Heck, they can just copy what I did in the Dave's Redistricting app a few months ago.
The other place that won it for Biden? The place I call home today - Dane County, where the population and Dem margins continue to grow with each election.
Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Dane was more than 181,000 votes — about even to the roughly 182,000-vote margin in much more populous Milwaukee County, and up by about 35,000 votes from Clinton’s margin in 2016. The Biden-Harris ticket was able to fuel this Democratic powerhouse, winning more than 75% of votes in the county.
You're welcome, America.

But as a Dem, there are also trends in the election that make me worry. Note all of the counties in Northern, Central and Western Wisconsin that went stronger for Trump than they did for Walker, or even for Trump in 2016. Outstate Wisconsin allowed Trump to expand his already-large margins in 2016, not only because of higher percentages, but because those areas turned out to vote in significantly higher numbers than they did 4 years ago. If you take out Milwaukee County, the WOW Counties, the BOW Counties in the 920, Dane County, and Racine/Kenosha Counties, and look at the other 62 counties in the state, turnout went up by more than 150,000 votes from 2016. It was also significantly higher than any of the previous 3 presidential elections.
This strong GOP outstate performance also led to the flip of 2 state senate seats, along with GOPs holding every Assembly seat that didn't include parts of Milwaukee County. The higher turnout is especially "interesting" given that many of these counties have stagnant or even declining populations, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe Trump/GOP has found a way to target and activate previously indifferent citizens in rural areas and small towns, and if so, Dems better catch up. My unscientific theory is that GOPs use Facebook, AM radio and other media to personally target those populations, and use cultural/social messages to stir them up. For some reason, Dems don't do nearly enough to try to break through that Bubble of BS and maintain a presence and counter-narrative to the constant barrage of right-wing memes and messaging outstate.

This is something that needs to be changed going forward, and quickly. If Dems can't make gains outstate, they can't win either house of the State Legislature (even with fairer maps), which means if Dems don't stay in the Governor's Chair, we return to unblocked GOP rule. In addition, Ron Johnson's Senate seat comes up in 2022, and while it offers a major opportunity for Dems in both Wisconsin and DC, there also is the possible backlash that happens in the first midterm of a new president (especially if Biden doesn't spark major change in 2 years).

So Dems need to be out in the sticks NOW, getting their messages out NOW, and not just showing up every 2 years right before elections, when voters are already exhausted and tuning out because of the firehose of (mis)information. And those messages need to be appearing in places beyond TV ads.

That being said, Wisconsin played a major role in getting the Biden/Harris team in the White House, despite the struggles outstate, and that's something to be happy about. But let's not celebrate and relax for long, because there is a lot to fix in both DC and in our state, and you know the bad guys are going to be doing their part to block any kind of repair so they can shove the blame for any stagnation onto Dems that are allegedly "in charge". So get ready to gear up, even as everything else shuts down in our Winter of COVID.
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6 comments:

  1. MALNovember 14, 2020 at 10:16 AM

    Northeastern and the Fox Valley will remain Republican until Dems learn: Bars and restaurants are good. Identity politics are bad. Clear and authentic communications are good. Posturing is bad. Bureaucrats and officious clerks are bad.
    Central Wisconsin is a big problem, on the other hand, with no apparent solutions.
    All Dems need to drop off use of the term "conservative," a continual positive branding of radical rightwingers.
    Black lives matter.
    Finally, State Sen Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee) needs to recant and publicly apologize to the two innocent Black Lives Matter workers whom the narcissistic and dishonest Democrat is persecuting with the collusion of the Dane County District Attorney (D).http://malcontends.blogspot.com/search?q=Tim+Carpenter

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    1. Jake formerly of the LPNovember 14, 2020 at 10:36 AM

      I agree that Dems do not attack GOPs nearly enough for being bad people that believe in bad things that hurt this state and country. Vos and Trump Trash needed to be used as anchors around the neck of EVERY Republican, and it seems telling that Knodl (who barely won Assembly District 24 ion the burbs) challenged Vos/Steineke for a leadership role this week.

      But saying "identity politics are bad" and "Black Lives Matter" are contradictory ideas. BLM needs to be framed as "no one should be subjected to racial violence and unequal treatment" (most would agree, or at least want to be seen agreeing), but instead GOPs clearly used "defund the police" and riots as a cudgel in communities that don't come into contact with People of Color.

      And Dems don't need to back down ONE BIT on being anti-racist, and they shouldn't be defensive on GOP smears against it. Reverse those smears and ask why GOPs DON'T care about these things.

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    2. MALNovember 14, 2020 at 5:11 PM

      Identity politics is not the same as liberation politics. Identity politics, broadly, is practiced by a thin sliver of the population, and is mostly composed of taboo morality explicitly embracing theoretical underpinning of racism, for example. Black Lives Matter, a liberation movement, on the other hand rejects racism as nonsensical, irrational and unscientific, to borrow from Norman Cohn. Speaking of Dems not backing down is absurd. Dems virtue-signal while at the same time they degrade and destroy black lives with as much viciousness as any overt racist. Fighting racism is not a concern or objective of the Democratic Party. Consider Wisconsin, for example. How many bill and inittives from elected Dems on t decarceration, decriminalization, police violence and police defunding since the Floyd murder? Zero. Liberation movements being opposed by Dems at every level.

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  2. KrissNovember 14, 2020 at 10:18 AM

    This is really great. As an outstate candidate in a winnable seat, I'm really committed to working with partners to address the messaging and communication problems in rural counties.

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    1. Jake formerly of the LPNovember 14, 2020 at 10:39 AM

      I'm fairly certain this is Kriss Marion, a great Dem candidate in rural SW Wisconsin that lost a close race to Todd Novak in an area that was blue for Evers in 2018, and not so much in 2020.

      Although if I may add - I couldn't understand why a State Assembly race 30 miles from Madison was spending so much ad money on TV ads. Kriss (or someone else) could speak to this better, but I would think billboards, local radio ads and Facebook is a better use of time/money here.

      Also, I do think COVID helped Trump/GOP. Dems wouldn't go door-to-door because they respect what the virus can, and GOPs did doors and community outreach because they deny science. And guess which areas have had the worst COVID breakouts in the last month.

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    2. KrissNovember 18, 2020 at 10:18 PM

      You are correct, it's Kriss Marion and I'm as dismayed as you by the rural red shift. We did invest heavily in local radio and newspaper, as well as billboards. We did TV at the last minute because I can fundraise and because the Rs went for a hard attack on TV and we felt the need to be in that space. Madison is the 51st television market. We feel targeted digital was the one space we should have invested more in. COVID was tough - we didn't do doors, and relied on phones and retail outreach (farmers markets, fairs). We also believed that voters would eventually feel that the GOP had dropped the ball on COVID, and took a calculated risk to use that messaging, but I think the majority still aren't taking it seriously out here, in spite of huge outbreaks. Strategy suggestions are welcome. Dems going forward need to take a holistic approach to messaging priorities and language, since they'll need rural seats to move any legislation forward.

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