Post-election presidential numbers in Wisconsin. Looks like the bros showed up.

Sure, percentages and margin of victory are the main thing people observe, but I couldn’t help but notice this reality when it came to the total votes.

That’s right, Kamala Harris got over 37,000 additional votes from Wisconsinites than Joe Biden did in 2020. That surprised me when I first looked at it. But it didn’t win our state because Trump found 87,500 more votes than he got in 2020.

Which begs the question as to where those votes came from. A great resource is a map that has been produced by Marquette professor John Johnson. This map not only shows the overall outcome of Wisconsin’s votes in the presidential and Senate races, but also ID’s the shift in votes from the presidential election in 2020 to the one in 2024.

I was especially interested in this ward-level map because I wanted to see if the exit poll findings about Latinos turning towards Trump (aka, the guy who has promised mass deportations) actually happened here. And if you look at where the votes shifted in Milwaukee, that certainly seems to be the case.

See that red on the near south side of Milwaukee? Those areas are majority Latino, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel also noticed that trend.

In Milwaukee's predominantly Hispanic voting wards (where over 70% of adults are Hispanic), Harris picked up about 7,600 votes, or nearly 72% of the votes cast in those wards, according to unofficial results. Trump won nearly 2,800 votes in those wards, or about 26% of the vote.

Harris received hundreds fewer votes than Biden did in those wards four years ago, around 800 less, according to Johnson's data. Meanwhile, Trump gained about 500 more votes in those wards.

And given that Trump/GOP only needed to pick up less than 1% to flip the state, and in a race that was decided by less than 30,000 votes, anything like this shift in Latino-majority parts of Milwaukee matter.

Another big help for Trump in Wisconsin is that he made progress on college campuses throughout the state.

...[College students] turned out Tuesday, and the overwhelming majority still voted blue. But a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of election results in campus-heavy wards show the Democratic margin of victory shrank, playing at least some contributing role in why Trump won Wisconsin by about a point.

In Eau Claire, Trump netted 29% of the vote from Ward 20, which serves a number of university dorms. That's up from the 21% of votes Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels got in 2022 and the 12% of votes Republican state Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly received in 2023.

In Milwaukee, Trump's share of the vote roughly doubled in four wards serving Marquette University students. In Madison, his margins increased by as many as 10 points among some wards on and near UW-Madison.

And in La Crosse, Trump flipped one of the wards serving voters who live in the UW-La Crosse dorms or nearby campus rental properties that voted blue in the past two elections. He ran just a few points behind in the other campus-heavy ward, still getting about 47% of the vote.

I worked a polling place in Madison that was overwhelmingly UW students, and I did notice a lot more dudes in the voting population than I saw at an on-campus site in the April 2023 Supreme Court election. Based on the GOP shift in the ward I worked in and at UW campuses statewide, it seems that Trump/GOP’s strategy of targeting young bros apparently worked.

College bros also may have allowed Derrick Van Orden to slip by Rebecca Cooke in Congress, as UW-La Crosse, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Platteville, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Stout are all in that district. That red, on-campus shift might well have accounted for much if not all of Van Orden’s 11,000-vote margin of victory. I hope they regret that when a GOP House helps to wreck aid to higher education and they pay higher taxes as lower-wage workers when they’re starting out in their post-college careers.

Although the bigger damage might be when a lot of 20-something women won’t date their self-absorbed, Trumpy asses after they find out who they voted for (and the damage that resulted from their broey-ness). As a straight white guy who was in college in the mid-90s, I get the allure of being "anti-PC", and feeling singled out when my privilege is named. But at some point, me and others grow up and start realizing that other people have experiences beyond yours, and you try to learn something from it. And at least we had good alternative music in the '80s and '90s, unlike the bros of today.

It also looks like the Bucky bro vote held down the margins in Dane County. I was thinking that population growth alone would allow Dems would win Dane by nearly 195,000, with a goal of a 200,000-vote win for Harris. And while Kamala added to Biden's margins in the state's fastest-growing county, it wasn't as much as I and other Dems hoped.

Dane County
2020
Biden 260,185, Trump 78,800 (+181,385)

2024 Harris 273,954, Trump 85,449 (+188,505)

It's odd that getting outvoted more than 2-1 for additional votes can be considered a "win" for Trump/GOP. But given how blue Dane County is, it was.

My final thoughts are that I'd like to know where all of these extra voters showed up in the state. It wasn't just on college campuses, but vote totals were generally up throughout the state (other than Milwaukee, which is its own concern). And given that enough of those new and added voters backed Trump, I'd like to know what they think is going to happen under Trump that made him a better option than the strong economy and stable government that we had under Biden-Harris.

If we have fair elections in 2026, I would bet we will have some serious buyer's remorse from these Trump bros, and others in Wisconsin that decided it was OK to put THAT back in charge.