There’s no question that Dane County played a major role in the just concluded 2022 elections.
Turnout was very high, at 80.4 percent.
To be clear, while that was significantly higher than Milwaukee County’s 69 percent, and strong enough to cause Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell to order more ballots by early afternoon on Election Day, it did not equal 2018 when 88 percent of registered voters came out. But the population has been growing, so raw numbers of votes here went up.
A large majority of the county’s 302,575 votes cast went for Gov. Tony Evers — 78.6 percent, compared to only 20.7 percent for Evers’ Republican challenger Tim Michels. Evers also got 4,759 more Dane County votes than Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes, who was trying to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. That, plus low turnout in the city of Milwaukee, helped Johnson eke out his 1 percentage point margin of victory statewide.
One big takeaway from Dane County’s show of strength is that Republicans can’t win if they don’t try to compete here.
“I think that Dane County is a problem for us,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told conservative radio host Jay Weber. “They had a presidential-level turnout and most of the rest of the state did not.”
A Wisconsin State Journal story analyzing how Barnes and Michels lost their statewide races quoted several influential Republicans blaming the Michels campaign for not making more of an effort in the liberal Madison environs.
Evers and groups that supported him spent nearly $57 million on ads after the Aug. 9 primary, compared with a little over $30 million spent by Michels and groups supporting him, the piece notes.
“The Michels campaign really didn’t have any ads in the Madison market for the entire general election,” GOP strategist and Michels supporter Bill McCoshen told the State Journal. “I’ve never seen that before. I thought it was a bad strategy at the time, and I think it had an impact.”
Michels did worse in Dane County than any Republican gubernatorial candidate over the last decade and a half.
“Republicans look sideways at me when I tell them they have to stop ignoring Dane County during elections,” conservative radio host Vicki McKenna tweeted. “But notice what happened this time around. And since the vaunted WOW counties are getting less red, the (Republican Party of Wisconsin) had better pay attention.”
It will be interesting to see what Republican candidates’ pitch to Madison area voters looks like.
Republican legislative leaders are suddenly talking about working across the aisle with Evers ahead of the next legislative session. Their ideas include using part of the state’s record surplus to increase funding for public schools, but only if the state adopts universal school choice— so much of the money goes to cover private school families’ tuition. They also plan to propose a regressive flat tax, so Wisconsin’s highest earners pay the same share as low-income taxpayers. So far not very promising.
Vos has also floated a “compromise” on Wisconsin’s harsh 19th century abortion ban that would add exceptions for rape and incest — but said he’d be open to a requirement that rape and incest survivors produce a police report to prove the sex was not consensual in order to qualify. That’s sure to please no one.
Still, the idea that there’s any pressure at all on politicians in our super gerrymandered state to talk to people who aren’t part of their hardcore base is refreshing.
Both sides seem to recognize that, in a closely divided state, where both rural and urban voters are necessary to put together a winning coalition statewide, they have to talk to all of the people some of the time. Evers won reelection not just by turning out Democrats in blue areas, but also by making headway in Republican districts — both in the suburbs of Milwaukee, which have been turning away from the GOP year after year lately, but also in rural areas of the state.
That, combined with Republicans’ recognition that they need to up their game in Dane County, could open the door a crack between the parties.
There are plenty of things that should be achievable if rural and urban voters worked together to defend their common interests. Among them: getting toxic chemicals out of our drinking water and investing in basic infrastructure maintenance — i.e. fixing the damn roads. There should also be bipartisan agreement on restoring drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants, which would increase highway safety and end the needless harassment of the people who make up 80 percent of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms.
And then there’s the issue of gerrymandering itself, which a majority of Wisconsinites of every political stripe says should be replaced by fair maps. It’s absurd that Republicans can dominate the Legislature in our purple state just because they’ve rigged the maps.
Dane County might have something to say about that, too, very soon. The April Supreme Court race could change the ideological tilt of the court, just before that body takes up Wisconsin’s gerrymandered political maps. That election, usually a low-turnout affair, will be decided by a handful of motivated voters.
If you want to know what elections might look like with fair maps in a politically divided Midwestern state, check out Michigan, where Democrats just swept every statewide race and captured both houses of the Legislature for the first time in 40 years. Michigan adopted nonpartisan redistricting in 2018. The rest is history.
Ruth Conniff is editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
