Jill Stein of the Green Party (left) and Libertarian Gary Johnson collected more than 137,000 votes combined in Wisconsin.
Donald Trump couldn’t have won the White House without Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes. Our winner-take-all general election system awarded Trump the state after he took 47.9 percent of the vote over Hillary Clinton's 46.9 percent.
Out of 2,944,151 total votes cast for president by Wisconsinites, Trump edged out Clinton by 27,359 votes.
That difference is less than the 30,981 votes Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein garnered statewide to get 1.1 percent of the total. Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson took 3.6 percent of the statewide total or 106,434 votes. Another 15,531 people cast votes for the three other third-party candidates, Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party, Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party and independent Rocky De La Fuente.
And although Dane County unsurprisingly voted for Clinton over Trump by a margin of more than 3 to 1, a total of 20,320 votes were cast here for third party candidates and write-ins.
Verona resident Scott Bogen pointedly blames Trump’s win in Wisconsin on Democrats who “felt they had the luxury to vote their conscience this election” by voting for someone other than Clinton, the establishment candidate, in the general election.
Democrats who voted for Stein are now “undoubtedly heartbroken at the outcome, as Trump has vowed to gut or eliminate the [Environmental Protection Agency],” Bogen says. “Had they voted for Hillary in Wisconsin, Democrats would have likely won the state. Just look at the numbers.”
Like thousands of Madison-area residents, Bogen enthusiastically supported independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent primary campaign against Clinton. But after Sanders lost the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Bogen swallowed hard and voted for Clinton on Tuesday as leading Democrats and Sanders himself urged his followers to do.
“Our obligation to ensure Trump wouldn't become president meant some Democrats needed to look at the bigger picture, set aside their Bernie resentment or their utopian dreams, bite the bullet, and vote for the only qualified candidate that had a chance to become president,” Bogen says.
Bogen has at least two friends who supported Sanders early on — one living in Madison and the other in Illinois — that went on to cast ballots for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson as “their protest vote.”
Madison Ald. Rebecca Kemble says it’s unfair for people to attribute Trump’s victory to third-party voters. “For Democrats to blame third-party voters is disingenuous and a remarkable demonstration of their unwillingness to look at their own failure and anti-democratic process,” says Kemble, who won election to the Common Council in 2015 endorsed by the Green Party and Progressive Dane.
“The Democrats made a huge strategic error by actively working against the candidate (Sanders) who held the populist ground,” she says, citing revelations that the Democratic National Committee actively undermined the Sanders campaign to help ensure Clinton won the nomination. “They ceded the populist ground to the Republicans.”
Unlike the Democratic Party, Kemble says the campaign of Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka “was all about forging community, going to where people are suffering and responding to people’s real needs. They knew they were not going to win the presidency. Theirs was a vehicle for organizing at the grassroots.”
She pointed to the vast number of people who could have, but chose not to vote. “Why didn’t they? Because the election was between the worst two candidates for president I’ve seen in my lifetime,” says Kemble, who voted for Jill Stein.
Barry Burden, UW-Madison political science professor and founding director of the Elections Research Center, says third-party interlopers might not have made that big a difference on Nov. 8.
“In theory it is possible that Johnson and Stein could have affected the outcome in Wisconsin, although it seems unlikely,” Burden says. “Had they not been on the ballot, some of their voters would have chosen Clinton, some would have chosen Trump, and others would not have voted at all. The exact mix of those three options determines whether Clinton might have won in their absence.”
Studies of past presidential elections, specifically those involving third-party candidates Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, suggest that between one-third and two-thirds of their supporters would not have voted if their third-party candidate wasn’t on the ballot, Burden says.
So if Stein and Johnson had not appeared on Wisconsin ballots, “let's assume that half of their 137,000 voters would have stayed home,” Burden says. “That leaves 69,000 voters for Clinton and Trump. For her to have made up the 27,000-vote deficit, she would have needed more than two-thirds of those votes.
“Such a lopsided distribution is a stretch, given that she lost the state overall,” he adds. “Perhaps most of the Stein voters would have gone to Clinton but many of the Johnson voters would presumably be conservatives who had more in common with Trump.”
Another compelling dynamic of the race is the number who didn't vote at all. After such a long and ugly campaign, the Clinton-Trump matchup just didn't move a lot of people, literally. Consider the fact that 3,000 people voted for a Senate candidate but on the same ballots opted not to vote for any presidential candidate.
Only 66 percent of the state's 4,449,170 voting-age population turned out, the lowest voter turnout in a presidential election since 1996. Turnout was at or near 70 percent in 2008 and 2012, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
But did voters stay home because they were uninspired by their choices, or did the state’s new, confusing voter ID requirement suppress turnout? Burden says that’s unclear.
“We don't yet know the precise effect of the voter ID requirement on turnout. There is circumstantial evidence that it might have mattered,” he says. “Exit polls indicate that groups such as blacks and young people turned out at even lower rates than others in 2016. We know that those groups were less likely to have acceptable IDs when the law was passed, so the requirement was more burdensome for them.”
Voter turnout in Dane County was comparable to that in 2012, says state Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison), who was easily re-elected. But she notes far fewer voters went to the polls in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin communities than when Barack Obama was elected four years ago.
“This was a change election and Hillary Clinton was not viewed as a change agent. Democrats did not communicate that we are the party of the working people,” Taylor says.
But there was no one reason for Clinton’s loss, she says. “It’s never one thing. It’s always a multitude of factors that converge when you see such a shocking result like this that nobody predicted.”
A lack of enthusiasm for Clinton compared to Trump, last minute spending by special interest groups and voter ID laws may have suppressed voter turnout, Taylor says. “So even if Hillary Clinton had gotten all Jill Stein’s votes, which was never going to happen, I still don’t think she would have won.”
“We really need to throw out all of our assumptions about candidates and campaigns and start building again,” she says. “Obviously there needs to be a different approach. Obviously what we’re doing is not working.”
Editor's note: This article has been updated to note that Ald. Rebecca Kemble voted for Jill Stein.
