While the race for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin is officially non -supporter, the Democrats and the Republicans both chose parties and pour fortunes in their efforts. While the votes are recorded on Tuesday evening, the ability to claim a political momentum in the upheaval of President Donald Trump’s second term will be at stake.
What is tested, however, is not as long as the large number of voters changed their minds in the five months who followed the presidential election. Regarding Trump himself, Wisconsin is a particularly polarized state, with three consecutive presidential elections decided by less than one point. More likely, the result depends on the question of whether the pro-Trump side has engaged more in an election like this than so far.
It’s a clear advantage that Democrats have pruned In the Trump era. During the autonomous elections for offices with a lower profile, in which the participation rate is much lower than that of the races for the president or even the governor, they had more motivated voters. This was true in Wisconsin, where the candidate supported by the Democrat won the last elections of the Supreme Court in 2023 by 11 points. And this has been true nationally, where the Democrats have displayed a series of victories and outperformances in the room’s special elections in recent years.
Energy does not come from all corners of the democratic coalition. Instead, it is concentrated among a largely white set of voters with high levels of education, higher income and intense anti-Trump views. They are found in most of the abundant in university cities and metropolitan areas, but even in places where they are few, they struck over their weight during drop-down elections.
On the other hand, Trump in his three campaigns has generated a participation rate and support for white and white voters, mainly in rural areas and small cities. Many of these voters had been on the political touch before Trump arrived, while others had voted democrat. They maintained a strong loyalty to Trump, but were not so interested in low profile competitions such as the races of the Supreme Court of the State.
Two private parts of the Wisconsin capture this dynamic clearly and will be looming on Tuesday evening.
Dane County is among the most female terrains for Democrats across the country. Hosting both the capital of the State and the University of Wisconsin -Madison, it has – by far – the highest concentration of adults educated in the college in the state. It is also the fifth richest county in the state, and with nearly 600,000 inhabitants, it is the second more populated. And in lower profile breeds like this, its levels of participation were the highest of all the counties.
Then, there is what is known locally as the “area without drift”, a widely rural and small town that extends and inside the Mississippi lands from the border of Iowa to the south of the suburbs of the twin city of the county of St. Croix. The name stems from a lack of glacial coverage there are tens of thousands of years, but politically, the area without drift is full of white and blue voters who emerged en masse when Trump ran for the White House in 2016. It is the cultural and political opposite of the County of Dane.
Consider now what happened during the 2023 Supreme Court elections. If we use the presidential race from last year as a reference, the participation rate in Dane County for the judicial race in 2023 was 66% higher. This is an astronomical sum given the office at stake. And the candidate aligned by Democrat won by 64 points, a much greater spread than candidates for the Democratic presidential election which generally enjoy.
On the other hand, the participation rate in the 14 counties that make up the area without drift was only 51% of the presidential level, which means that many of these voters who materialized for Trump simply did not participate. And without them, the candidate supported by Democrat in fact won the area without drift, a return to the pre-trump era.
This summarizes the challenge for the Republicans in Tuesday’s race: they found a way to reach pro-Trump voters in places like the region without drift and to convince them that it is a test of their loyalty to the president?
