On Monday, Wisconsin released the results of its Presidential Primary and the results of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. There were no surprises on the Democratic Presidential Primary as Joe Biden defeated Bernie Sanders by a margin of 63% to 32%. However, in the vote for the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, the Democratic candidate prevailed by a margin of 55% to 45%. The mainstream media has portrayed this as a huge surprise and as a harbinger of the fall 2020 election. Indeed, The New York Times led with the following headlines: “Upset Victory in Wisconsin Supreme Court Race gives Democrats a Lift” and then the next day “Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump.”
We disagree. In fact, we think the Supreme Court race tells us very little about what will happen in the Fall. How can we say this? Well, first, let’s explore the argument put forward by most commentators. Running up to the election, Democrats were seeking to delay the election due to coronavirus, while Republicans sought to go ahead with the election. The conventional wisdom was that a low voter turnout would favor Republicans. Hence, the attempt by Democrats to delay until after the coronavirus.
We think this entire argument is flawed because it ignores the reality that the Democrats were holding a contested Presidential primary between Biden and Sanders, while Republicans had an uncontested primary. If you look at the turnout in the Democratic Primary, 924,000 Democrats turned out for the primary. That is slightly less than the 1 million of Democrats who turned out in the 2016 Democratic primary. On the Republican side, 617,000 voters turned out for the Republican primary, compared to 1.1 million in 2016. Thus, to recap, Republican primary turnout was about 60% of 2016 while Democratic turnout was over 90% of 2016 — all of which is entirely expected given the uncontested Republican primary. Indeed, the turnout on the Republican side for an uncontested election was surprisingly high.
So how did this translate to the Supreme Court race? The Democratic candidate won 856,000 votes to the Republican candidate’s 693,000 votes. If you just look at the Supreme Court race by itself, it looks like the Democrats won convincingly, but when you compare it to the Presidential primaries, your interpretation of the result changes completely. The democratic candidate won 70,000 fewer votes than the votes cast in the Democratic primary while the Republican candidate won 70,000+ more votes than votes cast in the Republican primary. That is a truly amazing result.
The reality is that holding a relatively low turnout race such as a judicial race at the same time as Democrats were holding a contested Presidential primary determined the outcome. It’s that simple. The fact that the Republican candidate outperformed the turnout in the primary highlights that in a neutral election when there was no primary going on, the Republican candidate may well have been victorious. What does this all mean for 2020? We don’t think it tells us that much. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election is not the “clarion call” for Trump claimed by the New York Times. Rather, Trump won Wisconsin by a very narrow margin in 2016 and has about a 50-50 chance to win in 2020.
NewEnglandPolitics.com 