Turnout and outcomes - what to look for in Tuesday's election totals

Ahead of Tuesday's election for Supreme Court and the direction of the state for the next few years (you may have heard about it). I checked out some voting results to give you and I an idea on what to look for as Tuesday's returns come in. I'm going to use 3 elections as guideposts.

The first is the 2019 Wisconsin Supreme Court race that conservative Brian Hagedorn won by 0.5% over liberal Lisa Neubauer, to see what an April election with a GOP win might look like. The second is the 2020 Supreme Court race when Dan Kelly got drilled by Jill Karofsky by 11%- this will give an indication what a higher-turnout election with a big liberal win might look like. And the last is the 2022 November Senate election where Republican Ron Johnson won by 1% over Dem Mandela Barnes, as that's the most recent election with a GOP winner, and a large turnout of 2.65 million total votes.

As usual, I am going to look at these elections from two sides - turnout (and if there are differences in turnout among certain counties/areas of the state), and the percentage results from those places. And both have stories to tell.

Let's start with turnout among the 10 counties with the highest vote totals in each of the last 2 Supreme Court elections, and I will further divide Milwaukee County ionto the City of Milwaukee (population around 590K) and the rest of the County (population around 345K). These turnout numbers indicate that the high-turnout counties of Dane and Waukesha as well as suburban Milwaukee had even more importance in the April elections than they did in last November's midterm.

In addition, the County Exec and Mayor's elections in Milwaukee 2020 had little effect on the statewide turnout share in the Supreme Court, and the City made up a smaller share in the April elections than the November 2022 one. And that the Green Bay Mayor's election gave a boost to Brown County's share of the electorate in 2019, and couod well do so again on Tuesday.

These 10 counties accounted for just over half of the state's votes in each of those 3 statewide elections. But I'll note that the other 62 counties are also a lot of the state's electorate, and got a share in November 2022 that was nearly 4% larger than they got in the April elections of 2019 and 2020.

Now let's go to the other benchmarks, the percentages that GOPs were able to grab in their two razor-thin victories in 2019 and 2022. What is interesting is that there are variances between the areas that helped Hagedorn and Johnson to victory. For example, Hagedorn was able to run up huge numbers in the suburban GOP strongholds of Waukesha and Washington Counties, hold his own in the Milwaukee County suburbs, and even pull more than 1/4 of the votes from the City of Milwaukee. By comparison, Johnson did noticeably worse in the Milwaukee area, and he needed a stronger performance in the swingy Fox Valley "BOW" counties, better numbers in blue-collar higher-population counties such as Rock and Marathon, and pulling more than 58% of the vote in the smaller counties to squeak out his win.

Now compare those numbers to when Kelly got boat-raced by double-digits in 2020. Not only did Kelly do even worse than Johnson in the Milwaukee area and got destroyed in Dane County, but he also lost all 3 BOW counties, and even lost the outstate, smaller counties to Karofsky.

And my guess for Tuesday is that the situations pictured are on the edges of the outcomes - between some BS Kelly win by 1% or less, or a Protasiewicz win by 10-11%. I'd also guess turnout ends up above the 1.5 million in April 2020, but closer to that than the 2.65 million in November 2022. Which indicates to me that the "win number" will be somewhere around 975,000, which also would translate to a turnout that is double the February primary vote total of 961,665.

I'm not going to go too much deeper at this point, or try to read tea leaves into early vote totals. I'd just recommend having easy access to these bits of information as returns come in 48 hours from now, because I think a glance at the turnout and results in key areas will let us know quickly whether we are looking at a tight race, or a short night.