David Michael Miller
As Wisconsinites pore over yesterday’s election results, there’s a lot of attention being paid to undervoting. Around 75,000 people who voted for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders didn’t vote for Joanne Kloppenburg for Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Bernie voters are taking a disproportionate amount of the scorn for this undervoting. There’s an exit poll result that says 15% of Bernie voters didn’t vote for Kloppenberg compared to only 4% of Hillary voters. Exit polls are notoriously inaccurate — the exact same exit poll put Kloppenburg in the lead — so I would take these results with a grain of salt.
But, even if this exit poll is mostly accurate, I believe a Hillary Clinton-only Democratic ballot would have produced a landslide victory for Rebecca Bradley, who was appointed to the court by Gov. Scott Walker in October. There is an enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats this primary season. It’s a nationwide gap that won’t necessarily translate to Republican victory in November, but it is providing huge down-ticket benefits to people like Bradley.
A competitive Democratic primary brought out a lot more Democrats than would have voted if Hillary Clinton’s nomination was a certainty. The vast majority of them voted for Kloppenburg. Some of these Bernie voters maybe don’t pay as much attention to local and state elections as Hillary Clinton voters, who tend to skew older. That’s natural — it’s easier to care about local elections when you are of an age where you’ve set down roots in a community.
What’s far more interesting to me than blaming Bernie voters is looking at the undervoting oddity that is Milwaukee County.
Across the state, the Democratic presidential candidates combined received about 75,000 more votes than Kloppenburg did. That's approximately an 8% drop-off. Looking at the individual county level, those percentages more or less than hold out. In La Crosse County, there was around a 9% drop; Brown County, 11%; and Rock County, a slightly more than 7% drop.
In Dane County, undervoting was around 5% — but we are obsessed with state politics. In Marathon County, a mere 2%. Liberal-leaning Wausau-neans are apparently well-informed voters.
But Milwaukee County is an aberration. In Milwaukee County, you had almost 189,000 voters for Clinton and Sanders combined. Kloppenburg took home only around 149,000 votes from the county. That’s 40,000 votes. Clinton won the county by a few points, so you can’t put this all at the feet of Bernie voters.
Slightly more than 20% of Milwaukee County voters who voted for a Democratic presidential candidate didn’t vote for the liberal state Supreme Court candidate. Milwaukee County, responsible for about a fifth of the total Democratic primary vote, alone produced more than half of the statewide undervoting drop-off for Kloppenburg.
To put things in perspective, Dane County’s undervoting rate of 5% ended up with a little more than 7,000 lost Kloppenburg votes. If the drop-off had matched Milwaukee percentages, it would have been 30,000 votes.
That’s not even the weirdest part. Bradley got almost 120,000 votes out of Milwaukee County, even though fewer than 106,000 county residents voted for the Republicans. That’s 14,000 people who voted for a Democratic presidential candidate and Rebecca Bradley. In my look over the map, there’s no other decently populated county in the state where Bradley outperformed the GOP presidential candidates like this.
14,000 people.
This number absolutely confounds me. There’s a lot of things about Milwaukee County elections that are confusing, but I can usually make some sense of them. I even sort of understand how Sheriff David Clarke gets reelected. But this result makes my head hurt.
To try to explain it, I crowdsourced some theories from fellow armchair analysts on Twitter: Republican voters who crossed over to vote in the Dem primary, moderate to conservative Democrats who were turned off by the reporting on Bradley’s personal life, voters who thought they were voting for liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.
While all of these factors account for some of the gap, that still doesn’t explain why Milwaukee County would be such an aberration. You would think we’d see some signs of similar phenomena in other counties.
Which leaves me with one other result — advertising. Milwaukee is the state’s media market, and groups that supported Bradley ridiculously outspent the groups supporting Kloppenburg. Did all of the pro-Bradley, anti-Kloppenburg advertising meant to boost turnout in Milwaukee’s conservative suburbs affect Democratic voters in Milwaukee? After all, judicial elections are technically nonpartisan. For a lower-information voter, it is easy to vote for the candidate with all the “tough on crime” messages, even if the voter is a Democrat.
Political advertising only moves the needle marginally in big elections, when we pick presidents and governors. But it can have a much larger impact on quieter elections, including races for state Supreme Court and the Legislature.
Did dark-money move the votes of the better part of 14,000 Bernie and/or Hillary voters in Milwaukee? There’s no way to be sure. But I don’t have a better theory at the moment.
