The 6 questions the Nov. 8 midterm elections answered about Wisconsin politics

Like every election, the 2022 midterm taught us some things about the political landscape.

It taught us that the polls can still be pretty good.

It taught us that when voters are broadly unhappy, they don’t always take it out on the party in power.

And it taught us that the partisan realignment behind Donald Trump’s historic 2016 victory is still ongoing.  But in big statewide elections, the voting trends that helped carry Trump to victory here six years ago may now be hurting Republicans in Wisconsin more than helping them.

In a column last month, I offered six political questions that the Nov. 8 election in Wisconsin would clarify.

Let’s revisit them now that the voters have spoken:

Is 'right direction/wrong track' a good election barometer?

Answer: not so much.

This is not just a nerdy polling question.

It gets at something essential about this election — and how it was that an unpopular president, persistent inflation and a very unhappy electorate didn’t produce big losses for the party in power.

Only a third of Wisconsin voters thought the state was going “in the right direction,” according to the last two pre-election polls by the Marquette Law School.  Only 42% approved of President Joe Biden’s performance in office.

Despite those headwinds, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers got re-elected with 51% of the vote and won a bigger victory than he did in 2018 when he had the benefit of running with an unpopular Republican (Trump) in the White House. In the Senate race, Democrat Mandela Barnes came closer to defeating GOP incumbent Ron Johnson than expected.

When you consider how midterms are “supposed” to work, this is kind of backward.  History suggested Democrats would take a bath, here and nationally.

Why didn’t they?

One explanation embraced by many strategists on both sides is that the Supreme Court’s abortion decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the flaws and fringe quality of some very “Trump-y” GOP candidates, and Trump’s capacity to mobilize Democrats and alienate independents all leveled the playing field in this midterm.

In the Wisconsin exit poll, as many voters (30%) cited opposition to the former president (Trump) as a factor in their vote as cited opposition to the current president (Biden). That is not a “normal” phenomenon.

More:'He's the past': Wisconsin Republicans distance themselves from another Donald Trump candidacy

While Biden’s approval has been mired in the low 40s, his job ratings turned out to be a deceptive election barometer.  Pollster and political scientist Ken Goldstein flagged an unusual polling trend weeks before the election: that voters who disapproved of Biden included many who were only mildly negative toward the president (these were people who said they “somewhat” disapproved of his performance rather than “strongly” disapproved); and many of these voters were Democrats or independents who still planned to support Democratic candidates for Congress or governor.

In the national exit polls, these “somewhat” Biden disapprovers broke very slightly FOR Democrats, accounting for the gap between Biden’s approval and how his party performed in many statewide elections.

In a similar way, the “right direction/wrong track” number turned out to be a poor election barometer, too.  Around 60% of Wisconsin voters thought the state was on the wrong track, according to Marquette’s pre-election polling — the highest levels of pessimism that Marquette has ever recorded.

But some of these “wrong trackers” were Democrats upset with Trump and the GOP.  Almost 40% of Democrats in Wisconsin thought the state was on the wrong track. And these “wrong trackers” were pro-Evers, not anti-Evers.

The “right direction/wrong track” numbers have long been seen as a predictor of how the party in power will do at election time.  But the last two elections for governor in Wisconsin have badly shaken that notion.

Republican Gov, Scott Walker lost his 2018 reelection bid even though more than 50% of voters thought the state was going in the right direction.

And Evers won reelection this month even though fewer than 40% of voters thought the state was going in the right direction.

We are living at a moment when voters in each party have grievances, fears and anxieties, driving up the “wrong track” number to the point where it’s an erratic election barometer because it reflects discontent on both sides.

Will Wisconsin voters vote the same way for governor and senator?

Answer: no.

But it was a close call.

The decline of ticket-splitting has increased the odds against “split outcomes” at the top of the ticket. That’s when voters back one party for U.S. Senate and the other party for president or governor. It hadn’t happened in Wisconsin since 1998.  In that election, more than 20% of voters split their tickets for governor and Senate, according to exit polls. In this election, fewer than 5% did.

But it doesn’t take much ticket-splitting to get a split outcome if both elections are close.

And that’s exactly what happened.

These elections were historically tight. Evers’ 3.4-point victory was the second-closest race for governor in Wisconsin since 1964 (the closest was Evers’ previous victory in 2018). Johnson’s 1-point victory was the closest race for US Senate in Wisconsin since 1914, the first year that senators were elected by popular vote.

There was only a 4-point gap in the margin of victory in these two races. The vast majority of voters backed the same party in both contests.

According to the Wisconsin exit poll, only 1% of those who voted Democratic for U.S. Senate voted Republican for governor (meaning there were almost no Barnes-Michels voters). And just 7% of those who voted Republican for Senate voted Democratic for governor (meaning there was a small group of Johnson-Evers voters).  Ticket-splitting didn’t roar back. But there were enough ticket splitters to prevent the same party from winning both races.

How will the political map change?

Answer: The Trump Realignment continued.

Beginning in 2016, Wisconsin’s smaller and more rural counties have gotten redder and its bigger metropolitan counties have gotten bluer, reflecting a widening education gap, a widening gap between religious and secular voters, and a chasm between more densely populated places and less densely populated places.

These trends did not abate in 2022.

Of the 15 counties that produced the most votes, 12 of them moved in a Democratic direction from the 2018 race for governor to the 2022 race for governor. Of the 40 counties that produced the fewest votes, 37 of them moved in a Republican direction.

But the effects were not symmetrical.

The vote shift in the 40 smaller counties produced a net Republican gain of about 17,000 votes over 2018.

The vote shift in the 15 biggest counties produced a far larger net Democratic gain of about 87,000 votes. Most of this came from just three counties — the state’s largest: Milwaukee and Dane, which got bluer, and Waukesha, which got less red.

The growing gap between metropolitan and rural Wisconsin helped Trump win Wisconsin in 2016, because the rural shift was so dramatic in that particular election.

But the same fundamental divide helped defeat Trump in 2020 and helped Democrats win the Wisconsin governor’s office in 2018 and 2022, because of the GOP’s unchecked erosion in suburban Milwaukee and suburban Madison.  Johnson survived this pattern in 2022, but his Senate victory margin was much smaller in 2022 than it was in either 2010 or 2016, and that change was driven by what happened in the state’s biggest red and blue counties.

More:Wisconsin's unusual split election was driven by some very familiar trends

Can turnout soar any higher?

Answer: not this time.

Midterm turnout fell a little short of the record levels of 2018, when more than 59% of voting-age adults voted in Wisconsin, the highest since at least the 1940s.

But it didn’t miss by much.

It appears that almost 57% of voting-age adults turned out this time, which makes this the second-highest mid-term turnout in at least 70 years, and far higher than in 2014 or 2010.

It also appears that both sides were highly mobilized. That was a victory of sorts for Democrats since the party in power often suffers a turnout deficit in midterms. The Supreme Court’s decision on abortion and Democratic fears about pro-Trump election deniers figured into that.

The biggest turnout question on the Democratic side involves the city of Milwaukee, where the number of ballots cast declined by 17% (around 36,000 votes) from 2018.  Statewide, the decline was just 1%.  Population decline played a role in that, but it’s hard to say yet what else did.

Democratic margins in Milwaukee city and Milwaukee County were even more lopsided this time than they were in 2018. But did a drop in turnout in the city of Milwaukee cost Barnes the Senate race against Johnson?

That appears to be a stretch. If Milwaukee had matched 2018 and cast an additional 36,000 votes, and Barnes had won those votes by the same 60-point margin he enjoyed in the city this year, that would have generated a net Democratic gain of 21,600 votes, still leaving Barnes short of victory.  Johnson won the Senate race by more than 26,000 votes.

Which party has a bigger gender problem?

Answer: it’s probably a draw.

According to the exit poll in the governor’s race, Republicans won men by 8 but lost women by 13, suggesting their weakness with women cost them in that contest.

According to the exit poll in the Senate race, Democrats won women by 9 but lost men by 11, suggesting their weakness with men cost them in that contest.

Michels, the GOP candidate for governor, took a hard line against abortion rights, and it’s possible that cost him with women voters in particular.

But when you look at the long-term partisan trends in Wisconsin, the GOP edge among men has grown more than the Democratic edge among women. And that has turned what was an overall Democratic edge in party identification in Wisconsin a decade ago into a very small GOP advantage today.

Over the course of Marquette’s 2022 polling here, Republicans enjoy a 19-point edge in party identification among men while Democrats enjoy a 15-point advantage among women.

Will the polls be right?

Answer:  it’s complicated.

Let’s start with the Marquette Poll, which I have written about a lot since it was launched in 2012.  (Disclosure: as a fellow at the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center, I work with Marquette pollster Charles Franklin).

The final Marquette poll showed Johnson with a 2-point lead for Senate. He won by one. That’s really close.

It showed the governor’s race tied. Evers won by a little over 3 points. That’s well within the poll’s margin of error.

In the 14 major November races in Wisconsin that Marquette has polled on since 2012, the average difference between the margin it captured in its final survey and the actual result is 2.2 points.

The biggest discrepancies came in the presidential cycles of 2016 and 2020, when Marquette understated Trump’s final vote by 7 points and 4 points, respectively. (It captured the Democratic vote very closely in those races).

A lot of other polls also understated Trump’s support. One possible explanation is that certain kinds of pro-Trump voters were less likely to respond to surveys than other kinds of voters, even other Republicans. Pollsters are still debating and studying what happened.

But in the past two midterms, during and after the Trump presidency, the Marquette poll has come very close to reflecting the final vote.

If you based your expectations in Wisconsin this fall on the Marquette Poll (or all the polling taken together), the biggest surprise was that Evers’ victory was bigger than Johnson’s victory. But there was nothing shocking about who won these races.  Most people in politics thought the governor’s race could go either way and most thought Johnson would win.

More:'Heads exploded in both parties': Marquette pollster Charles Franklin's takeaways from the 2022 midterms in Wisconsin

Polling is far from perfect and faces lots of challenges, due to the vanishingly small rate at which people answer surveys. It’s harder and harder to generalize about the performance of polling because there are so many polls done by so many different kinds of pollsters using so many different (and sometimes opaque) methods.

But the false expectation this fall of a “red wave” was not really a polling problem. The polls were never emphatic about a red wave. The movement in the polling this fall was never dramatic.

The “red wave” scenario was the product of exaggerated Democratic fears, exaggerated Republican expectations, classic narrative-building in the media, and the fact that at election time, a lot of people just find the word “wave” irresistible.

More:More of a ripple than a wave. How Wisconsin defied a GOP sweep.

The “red wave” narrative legitimately drew on the history of midterms, which are usually bad for the party in power, especially when there is a lot of public discontent.

But one thing that was lost was the fact that in today’s polarized world, the playing field has gotten very narrow. Relative to the past, there aren’t that many voters in play, so big swings in races are more improbable. And there aren’t that many states or districts in play, so big swings in Congress are more improbable.

Small shifts can have huge consequences in this world, but “waves” are hard to come by.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 2022 midterm elections answered 6 questions about Wisconsin politics