While GOPs spread Big Lies on 2020 elections, it's their red counties that packed ballot boxes

As WisGOPs pass their latest voter suppression bills to try to keep the Big Lie going (thank God we have a Governor who will veto this trash the moment it comes to him), I wanted to go back to a story that the Journal-Sentinel's Craig Gilbert did last week.

A dive into the WI voter file:
Of 3.3M 2020 voters, 800K didn't vote in 16
Some didn't live in WI then or were too young
But >1/3 were irregular voters who sat out 16
They were a bigger share of the turnout in places where Trump gained ground in 2020.https://t.co/hPSd4tg75G

— Craig Gilbert (@WisVoter) June 14, 2021

The data show that lower-frequency voters made up a larger share of the turnout in places where Donald Trump gained ground between 2016 and 2020. Many of these were small, rural Wisconsin counties that saw bigger than average spikes in turnout last fall....

“The rural areas were almost the hero that Trump needed them to be,” said Brian Kind, a Republican data strategist based in Wisconsin.

“There were new voters on all fronts,” Kind said. But in his analysis, he found that rural areas made up a larger share of the statewide vote in 2020 than they did in 2016 — a difference he called small but significant.

(A Journal Sentinel analysis found that turnout — total votes cast — in all Wisconsin cities combined grew from 2016 to 2020 by 7.9%, while turnout in all Wisconsin towns combined grew by 13.6%).

This is something I've touched on in the past. If you look at the vote totals by county and the City of Milwaukee, you'll see that Dem areas didn't have the turnout burst that a lot of GOP areas got. And the City of Milwaukee had a significantly smaller share of the electorate than it had in the past (7.5% vs 9.4% in 2012), while the outstate counties made up more of the voters, with a huge leap in 2020.

Yet many of these areas aren't growing in population, which makes the overperformance in rural, Trumpier places all the more....interesting. Seriously, can you imagine the complaints on RW hate media and other areas of WisGOP BubbleWorld if Dems overperformed like that and squeaked out a win by less than 1%? Especially now that we know that Trump benefitted from a lot of new voter registrations?

You may remember that I created a stat that looked at the growth in voter turnout in 2020 vs 2016, and then adjusted for the growth in population a county had between 2016 and 2019. Then I created a chart to show whether that county shifted more toward Joe Biden vs Hillary Clinton's result in 2016 (in blue) or if turned towards Trump (in red).

Keep in mind statewide average in this stat is just below 10%, and its bar would be blue.

Lotta red on there, isn't it?

I'll throw in that Brown County's turnout vs population increase was below the state average (9.69%), which I bring up as context to this absurd piece of garbage sent out by a GOP State Rep today.

Liberal activist election officials in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and other liberal strongholds did everything in their power to put ballots in the hands of Democrats during the 2020 election

— Rep. Gae Magnafici (@RepMagnafici) June 22, 2021

So where is Rep. (Not So) Magnafici from? Amery, in Polk County. Which is on the chart above, finishing 8th out of 72 counties for increased turnout vs population. In all, Polk County saw its turnout jump by nearly 16% in 2020 vs 2016, while its population only grew by 1.3%.

Donald Trump won Polk County by 27.5% in 2020, not much different than the 27.7% Trump won that county by in 2016 by percentage, but the added turnout allowed Trump to win Polk County by an additional 1,000 votes last November. This type of result explains why GOPs continue to promote the Big Lie for two different reasons.

1. If Trumpism gets a certain type of Wisconsinite (I'm being kind) to go to the polls and vote GOP, then GOPs are looking at that data and doubling down on that type of strategy. Which shows they don't care how much wreckage to our state and political system happens, as long as they get to be in charge of it.

2. And/or GOPs found a way to stuff the ballot box with "new voters" in November 2020, and they're spreading lies about "fraud" to distract people from the scumbaggery they pulled in 2020.

I'm not saying I believe Number 2, but I am saying that maybe we should audit places like Polk County to make sure no funny business was going on. I'm sure WisGOPs like Rep. Magnafici would agree, out of the interests of fairness and to clear up "concerns" over the odd vote totals from the last election.