Apr.08

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Democrats Go 1-for-2, Have a Very Good Night

As any reader of this site knows, since we've written a lot about it, there were two elections of interest last night. They went as expected, with Georgians picking a Republican to replace Marge Greene and Wisconsinites placing another Democrat on the state Supreme Court. But the real story is the margin of victory in the two elections.

First up, Georgia, where Republican Clay Fuller won the right to head to Washington, defeating Democrat Shawn Harris. Fuller may come to regret his "prize," because the House does not seem to be a fun place these days, especially if you are in the minority, which Fuller might well be as of January of next year. Fuller triumphed handily, taking 56% of the vote, as compared to 44% for Harris. However, the margin there is 12 points. Greene won her last election by 29 points, and Donald Trump won the district by 37 points. So, that's a shift of 17 and 25 points, respectively. This is consistent with the big swings toward the Democrats that we've seen in the great majority of special elections this year and last.

And then there is the Wisconsin judicial election. Here are the margins of victory in the past five of those, prior to tonight:

You can certainly see how the Democrats gained control of the state Supreme Court. Other than that 2019 outlier, they've been winning these things by low double digits for the past decade.

Also, given this context, it would not be out-of-line to call last night's result historic, or perhaps epic. The officially-nonpartisan-but-everyone-knows-she's-a-Democrat Chris Taylor crushed the officially-nonpartisan-but-everyone-knows-she's-a-Republican Maria S. Lazar by more than 20 points, 60.1% to 39.8%. The last time a Wisconsin state Supreme Court election was this lopsided was back in 2009.

There's no obvious extenuating circumstance we are aware of that would explain such a lopsided result. Taylor and Lazar are both sitting judges, so they are about equally qualified. Lazar doesn't have any giant skeletons in her closet, like having been caught exchanging text messages with Ghislaine Maxwell.

So then, what happened? You can't really compare this election to the one from 2025, because of the Musk factor, and because partisan control of the Court was in play. However, if you compare this election to the two before that, it's clear that Republicans just weren't motivated to get out and vote. In 2023, 800,000 members of the red team cast ballots. In 2020, it was 700,000. Yesterday, it was fewer than 600,000. Democratic turnout was also down relative to those past years, but not as much as Republican turnout.

If a low level of Republican enthusiasm carries over to the general election later this year, that will be happy news for the Democrats, indeed. The governorship will be open, and the blue team would like to lock that down and have an incumbent to run next time around. All the other executive offices are up too, as is control of the state Senate (currently 18R, 15D) and the state House (currently 54R, 44D+1I).

The entire U.S. House delegation is on the ballot too, of course. And despite Wisconsin's obvious purple-ness (or even purple-blue-ness), the delegation is currently 6R, 2D. In even a small blue wave, the R+3 seat occupied by Bryan Steil (R) and the R+4 seat occupied by the crazypants Derrick Van Orden (R) could be in danger. In a bigger blue wave, the R+10 seats occupied by Glenn Grothman (R) and Tony Wied (R) could be threatened, and maybe also the R+12 seat that Tom Tiffany is vacating to run for governor. The other Republican-held seat, at R+14, and the two Democratic-held seats, at D+19 and D+25, are not likely to be in play.

At very least, barring deaths or early retirements, the liberals will control the Wisconsin state Supreme Court through the next presidential election, and any of the wacky lawsuits that election might produce. (Z)