Waukesha County, WI
It's been a bit of a slow news day, but I just picked up an article on the election results in Wisconsin that's quite fascinating to me personally. I've lived, worked, and visited in the Milwaukee and Waukesha County areas of Wisconsin for a large part of my life and this article highlights the anomalous character of the election results--so far--in those areas:
The author, Margaret Menge, a Madison, WI, native first surveys the remarkable numbers for Biden in a range of suburban areas of Milwaukee County. She offers this overall assessment:
It’s as if someone manning the central controls turned the dial up, adding 10 to 40 percent more votes for Biden in community after community.
She quotes the chairman of the Waukesha County GOP, also, regarding the results in the Milwaukee County suburbs:
“The answer is I don’t know,” Dittrich says when asked why he thought the numbers were so high.
No one knows who these added voters are and won’t know for a few weeks as county clerks have 45 days to get the voter data for this election entered into the system.
“The bottom line is that it’s just incredible that this guy could get this big of a bump, in New Berlin, Brookfield, Elm Grove, Menomonee Falls, and even some of our strongholds in the county like Hartman and Sussex,” said Dittrich.
Admittedly these are impressionistic expressions, but for anyone familiar with the area they ring very true.
The impact was especially strong in Waukesha County, long considered the Republican heartland of WI, and one of the most Republican areas of the entire US. Somehow Red State's Scott Hounsell seems to have missed the stunning nature of what transpired--or is supposed to have transpired--in Waukesha County. To give you an idea of just how Republican Waukesha is, this is how Wikipedia describes Waukesha County :
Waukesha County is the largest Republican-leaning county in Wisconsin and has been one of the GOP's most solid suburban strongholds for many years. It has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964, and has only supported a Democrat four other times since 1892. While other non-Southern suburban counties have moved towards Democrats since the 1990s, Waukesha and other Milwaukee suburbs have continued to vote solidly Republican. Underlining this, Lyndon Johnson's narrow win in 1964 is the last time that a Democratic presidential candidate has even garnered 40 percent of the county's vote.
The county is split between 10 state assembly districts, all but one of which is held by a Republican, and six state senate districts, all held by Republicans.
In 2008, Senator John McCain carried the county by a 25.7% margin over then-Senator Barack Obama, when Obama won Wisconsin by 13.9% over McCain.
With that in mind, consider this:
In Waukesha County as a whole, Biden got 103,867 votes this year, compared to 79,244 votes for Clinton four years ago — an additional 24,623 votes, a 31 percent increase.
Biden won the state of Wisconsin , according to the unofficial numbers, by just 20,540 votes.
That's right. According to the "unofficial numbers," one of the most Republican counties in the entire US is supposed to have given Biden a 31% increase over Clinton and accounts for Biden's entire winning margin in the state .
"Just incredible." "Someone turned up the dial." "Just doesn't look right." Sure looks that way.