About last (Tuesday) night in Wisconsin: a GOP upset in Wausau, Nikki Haley's ghost haunts Trump, and Dane County goes goblin mode

This past Tuesday, Wisconsin had its spring presidential primary election. If there's one thing Wisconsinites love, it's shouting, "ahhhh, I'm vooooooting!" in the springtime.

Ahem.

The broad result was a bit of a mixed bag, with good and bad news for both parties. Let's discuss some of the results - I have broken this post up into sections in case people just want to read about a certain result, like the uninstructed campaign in the Democratic presidential primary or our statewide election referendums.

Local races: Public education posts some wins, a GOP upset in Wausau

First, at the local level, school and county boards were up for election, as well as executive offices like mayor. In the Eau Claire area, where I reside, the pro-public education, pro-LGBTQ candidates for school board handily beat back a challenge from conservative, homophobic candidates - one of whom openly ran on bringing "biblical values" to schools. As it turns out, running people who sound like Jerry Falwell isn't a winning message in an area where Joe Biden won big. Go figure.

Some exposition on this before I move on, because I think it's edifying about broader trends in the country: for the last 3 spring election cycles here in Wisconsin, conservative candidates have targeted Eau Claire's school board aggressively with anti-LGBTQ candidates who have run on things such as "parental rights" and "opposition to critical race theory." Parental rights is conservative code for things like "teachers being forced by school district policies to disclose the sexuality of their students to students' parents." Particularly infuriating to these people was a teacher training presented by UW-Eau Claire's LGBTQ resource center, which claimed that parental knowledge of a student's sexuality or gender identity must be earned by parents proving themselves to be trustworthy of knowing this sensitive information. And thus, a teacher should not share this knowledge with a parent. Children having privacy and rights, including on very private matters such as their own sexuality and gender? Outrageous. Break out the smelling salts.

This gave Eau Claire the dubious distinction of ending up in the national spotlight back in 2022, and with it the discord that often attends such a thing: our school board president, Tim Nordin, got a death threat that was considered by our local police department to be quite serious. Said death threat claimed that "Marxist teachers" like him needed to die “for promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda.” The sender also threatened to shoot up the next meeting of the school board. Nordin was thus assigned a police detail for his and his family's protection. The California man was later convicted in court of sending similar threats across the country. Just another notch for the idea that virulent transphobia is an essential principle of the far-right and its supporters.

Thankfully, these efforts have failed in Eau Claire and across the country, but they haven't failed everywhere. When people with bad, prejudiced intentions win power over education policy, communities and the schools within them lose, especially LGBTQ kids who are still trying to explore who they are.

On another positive note for public education, most referendums across the state to increase taxes to pay for investments in schools passed - about 61% of them in all, including in Milwaukee, the state's largest school district. Part of the reason schools even need to do this is because the state has provided less and less support to schools in recent years, shifting the burden of funding public schools onto local residents. If we want to reduce the broader tax burden on residents, the state government in Madison - particularly the Assembly Republicans, who have often blocked Governor Evers from doing anything about many issues facing Wisconsin, from gun violence to reproductive rights - should do its job and give more state support to schools.

Meanwhile, about 100 miles east of Eau Claire in the central Wisconsin City of Wausau, its liberal mayor, Katie Rosenberg, lost in something of an upset to Doug Diny, whose candidacy was boosted aggressively by the Wisconsin Republican Party. Though technically serving in a nonpartisan role, Mayor Rosenberg was seen as a rising star in the state's Democratic Party, and was backed heavily by it in her bid to stay in office. She also made headlines for trying to make Wausau more welcoming to newly-arrived refugees in the state.

An issue that loomed large over the Wausau mayoral race in particular was that of water quality, since Wausau's wells, like many others in the state, were discovered to be contaminated with PFAS (that's short for per and polyfluroakyl substances). The City of Wausau took measures to address this, including the installation of a fancy new filtration system - but not without cost (literally): water bills skyrocketed as a result. The Republicans seized on this, and narrowly won 52-48 in a city that Joe Biden carried 53-45 in 2020.

My main takeaway here is that this is a lesson on the power of persuasion in politics. Turnout gets most of the press and most certainly the vast majority of the anxious hand-wringing, but Wisconsin's Democratic voters, as will be shown shortly, turned out plenty this past Tuesday. It's likely at least a few Democratic voters decided to vote for the Republican-backed candidate in this case owing to the water bill issue, making all the difference. Persuasion: it matters!

The Elections Referendums

If there's one thing the Wisconsin Republican Party loves, it's spending taxpayer money to make the lives of hard-working election officials' harder and to waste time on 2020 election lies.

Take, for example, the Gableman investigation, commissioned by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, which wasted about $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars and broke Wisconsin's public records laws to confirm something we already knew: Joe Biden won Wisconsin. Donald Trump lost Wisconsin. Gableman also repeatedly threatened to imprison officials who refused to cooperate with his sham investigation.

Republican fiscal responsibility at its best, am I right?

That certainly doesn't stop our former president from lying about his 2020 election defeat as recently as this past Tuesday when he was in Green Bay. But the fact of Biden's victory in Wisconsin was even confirmed by election denier Senator Ron Johnson in a privately recorded video back in 2021, where he notes Trump did badly relative to other Republican candidates in the state in 2020 - something he's refused to acknowledge publicly.

Birthed out of the election conspiracies and lies peddled by Trump and his cadre of people who are really good at getting indicted for criming, Wisconsin had two election-related referendums on the ballot last Tuesday. Both won comfortably. One made it so private funding of elections is prohibited, and the other made it so only election officials could administer elections. It's one of those things that, on its face, may sound reasonable enough, but election officials have expressed concern that these measures will bind their hands needlessly and make running elections a lot more difficult. Ultimately, the vagueness of the language makes it so the courts, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court, will likely have a large role in interpreting the precise limits of the amendments.

The Republican primary - Nikki Haley's ghost haunts Trump, Dane County goes goblin mode

As expected, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden won big in Wisconsin. But as the saying goes, the devil's in the details.

Let's start with the Republican primary first. For the entirety of this primary cycle, former president Donald Trump (helluva phrase) has always been the overwhelming favorite to secure his party's nomination again, but he's been the effective nominee since Super Tuesday, when Nikki Haley suspended her campaign after winning only 1 state - tiny Vermont - that day.

Still, her ghost very much haunts Trump, and points to potential weak points for him in November. Despite being out of the race for a month, she still got a decent portion of the vote in several Wisconsin counties. Counties where she got about 15% or more of the vote include: Ozaukee (suburban Milwaukee), Milwaukee, La Crosse, Iowa, Green, and Dane (Madison and most of its metro area). Overall, Trump got 79% of the vote statewide to Haley's 13%.

Dane is perhaps the most notable county there, since it's the 2nd largest by population and fastest growing county in Wisconsin - and Haley got 24% of the vote there, with Trump posting up only about 64%, a far from unanimous victory. Trump notably turned in the worst performance ever for a Republican in Dane County back in the 2020 general election against Joe Biden, garnering just shy of 23% of the vote there to Biden's 75.5%. And if the Republicans think it's impossible he can do worse there this year, just remember: both governor candidate Tim Michels and Senator Ron Johnson in 2022 did worse in Dane than Trump did there in 2020. I think the free-falling vote share of the Republicans there has resulted in a subtle-but-real shift in the Wisconsin GOP's anti-city rhetoric: instead of whining about "Madison" not representing the real Wisconsin (whatever that means), they now say "Dane County."

Yet as former four term Republican governor Tommy Thompson has noted, the GOP needs to staunch the bleeding there if they want to continue to be competitive. But there's seemingly no other place that loves going goblin mode for Democrats at higher rates than Dane County. Milwaukee County still gives Democrats the highest number of raw votes on net for now, but the margin they win it by is smaller (Ex: Joe Biden won Dane County 75.5-23 to Milwaukee's 69-29). In fact, the only county that gives Democratic candidates in Wisconsin a higher vote share is small, heavily rural Menominee County, an Indian reservation for the Menominee Nation that serves as an island of blue in a sea of red in the state's northeast.

So Dane County goblin mode is very much real. And its representative of the type of voter that the GOP has done progressively worse with in the era of Trump: highly-educated voters who usually live in cities or suburbs. As recently as 2014, the GOP was able to manage around 30% of the vote in Dane County, but no longer - they now risk slipping below 20% of the vote there on a regular basis.

But if Republicans think their problems in Wisconsin are limited solely to all those damn libs in Dane County, they are mistaken. Another county where Haley punched pretty hard for someone no longer in the race is Ozaukee - containing very ritzy north Milwaukee suburbs such as Cedarburg, Port Washington, and Mequon. Here she garnered her second highest vote share in the state at just shy of 17%, or one in six voters in the Republican primary there. Ozaukee is considered one of the WOW counties, which, for those unfamiliar with Wisconsin politics terminology, stands for Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington. These are Milwaukee's heavily white, suburban counties that have historically voted for Republicans by huge margins and powered their statewide victories. See Scott Walker for one example, where he regularly cleared 70% or more of the vote in these counties in his several election victories in the early 2010s.

But in the era of Trump, Ozaukee in particular has started to become a lot purpler. Demographically, it's not that dissimilar from Dane County (although it's whiter): it's highly educated, with just a bit over a majority of the adults living there having a 4 year degree (the statewide average is 31%). Mitt Romney won it 64-34 in 2012, Trump won it 56-37 in 2016, and he then won it 55-43 in 2020 - the lowest margin of victory for a Republican there since 1948, when it was Dewey vs Truman.

Joe Biden even carried the very wealthy City of Cedarburg there by 20 votes - a place that gave Republican Mitt Romney 62% of the vote in 2012. And in 2023, Judge Janet Protasiewicz got 48% of the vote in Ozaukee as part of her statewide victory against former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, winning many municipalities there in the process. The times-they-are-a-changin'.

There is little reason to suppose, given Trump's relatively poor performance (he got 75% of the vote there in a primary where nobody was still running against him), that a place like Ozaukee County has much enthusiasm for the return of Trump. He'll likely still win it in the fall, but I would expect him to do even worse there than he did in 2020.

With that said, Trump still has a large base of support in much of the state, especially its rural areas, where his numbers tended to be a lot stronger in the primary than in the city's urban and suburban counties. It's quite easy to find rural counties where he easily exceeded his statewide vote % (one example of many, just to show my point: In Langlade County, in the state's vast, rural north, Trump got 85% there on Tuesday, and in 2020's general he won it 66-32). So Trump's ability to squeeze legions of votes out of rural Wisconsin like some sort of giant orange remains formidable, and should not be underestimated by the Democrats.

I've left out my home county of Waukesha, as this section is already getting rather wordy and numerical, but don't worry, crucial county watchers, I will have more to say about Waukesha later - a lot of what I said about Ozaukee could also apply to it.

In short, Nikki Haley's ghost should have Trump scared. His problems in Wisconsin's large cities and their suburbs are real.

Uninstructed cometh? Notes on the Democratic Primary

We close this piece with an analysis of the Democratic Primary, and the "uninstructed" movement in Wisconsin (our version of "uncommitted" - which I wrote about in a previous piece last month regarding Michigan's presidential primary).

Israel's war on Gaza has been dominating the news for about half a year now. In response to the 10/7 attacks by the militant group Hamas on Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis - most of them civilians - Israel has been intensely besieging the Chicago-sized strip of land, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine to it, and bombarding it relentlessly with airstrikes and drones. The result has been tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, most of them civilians (around 32,000 in total). Famine is taking place in the harrowed north of Gaza, where Israeli bombardments and ground military operations have exacted a staggering toll on Gazans living there. Just this week, a convoy of 7 aid workers from the humanitarian group World Central Kitchen was killed by an Israeli military strike on them. These everyday heroes were in the process of delivering badly-needed food supplies to famished Gazans.

The war has drawn much scrutiny and fury toward President Joe Biden's policies regarding the US's arming and staunch diplomatic support of the Israeli government. One way in which this has manifested itself is the "Listen To Michigan" movement, which encouraged residents of the state to vote uncommitted in their Democratic primary back in February as a means to pressure the president into changing course on his policy of staunch support for Israel's war. Similar movements have sprung up in other states, such as Wisconsin. The groups involved have generally set the bar pretty low for their vote goals, only to easily clear them. In the case of uninstructed here in Wisconsin, they easily exceeded their goal of 20,000 votes (about the raw vote margin Biden won Wisconsin by in 2020), garnering just shy of 48,000, or about 8% of the total vote to Joe Biden's 89%. So while Biden had some dissent against him, his performance was much closer to unanimity than Trump's here.

I am sympathetic to the goals of these movements as a way to peacefully engage the democratic process in order to register dissent and demand a change in policy. Some may see the people promoting these efforts as wreckers, inadvertently enabling Trump, but I am not among them - I believe that for many, many reasons, the war on Gaza's civilian population needs to end and that President Biden should do everything in his power to achieve this. Notably, after Biden warned of consequences for Israel should it not change course, Israel just the other day agreed to open a border crossing to allow more much-needed aid into Gaza.

I will say, however, that the the numbers overall show that the president turned in a much stronger performance in Wisconsin's primary than he did in neighboring Minnesota or Michigan. While uncommitted won several delegates to the Democratic National Convention in both Minnesota and Michigan - the people who ultimately vote on the presidential nominee - uninstructed did not win any delegates here.

And while uncommitted has done fairly well in heavily Democratic areas in other states, even in Milwaukee and Dane County, Wisconsin's 2 most populous counties and its biggest vote-getters for Democrats, Biden still did pretty well - winning 84% in Dane and and 85% in Milwaukee to uncommitted's 15% and 12%, respectively. With that said, there were some notable sources of strength for it within these counties: in student-dense, downtown precincts in Madison, such as ward 46, where uninstructed and Biden tied at 292 votes each, it's been made clear that many core Democratic voters - like college students - are not happy with Biden's policies on Gaza.

But though uncommitted got a hefty 19% of the vote in Minnesota and 13% of the vote in Michigan statewide, its more modest performance of 8% statewide here shows that Biden mostly enjoys strong support with Wisconsin's democratic voters. Notably, in contrast to other primaries in swing states such as Michigan, the president also got more raw votes than Trump did - winning 511,000 or so votes to Trump's 476,000 votes. Nikki Haley's vote total, meanwhile was about 77,000 - a group of voters that has expressed at least some openness to supporting Joe Biden over our former president in November. Primary voting numbers should in general be treated with a grain of salt - they can give you a vague sense of where the political headwinds are blowing, but they are themselves not strongly predictive of much.

I say all of this to contextualize the broader primary result on Tuesday - frankly, relative to other states, uninstructed just didn't do that well here. But then again, Biden's margin for error here is much smaller than it is in Minnesota or Michigan - he won Minnesota by 233,000 votes, Michigan by 154,000 votes, and Wisconsin by just 21,000 votes. So I also want to emphasize the broader coalitional nature of politics - especially in a state like Wisconsin where elections are a knife fight for every vote, Joe Biden is going to need people who voted for Haley in the primary and people who voted uninstructed. Every vote is going to matter. Yours included.

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Edit note 4/7/24: edited my paragraph on Dane County goblin mode to clarify that technically, Democrats still win a greater number of raw votes from Milwaukee County, Wisconsin's most populous county. Joe Biden got 183,000 net votes from Milwaukee County in 2020 versus 181,000 from Dane. However, the vote share Democrats get in Milwaukee County is decently smaller. Additionally, Milwaukee County is not trending Democratic as quickly as Dane is. Dane County goblin mode thus remains quite real.