Conservatives shine in Wisconsin spring elections
What the spring elections say: There’s a big, big enthusiasm gap, but there’s a warning in there for the GOP
All in all, as a vehicle in which to ride to the fall, the Wisconsin spring elections Tuesday provided a pretty good trip for the state’s conservatives.
There were more wins than losses—though there were some of those, too—but the biggest take-away from the election is that the Democrats are in big trouble heading to the November elections—at least right now. More about that in a second but first a look at some of the results.
Most noteworthy, Maria Lazar toppled an incumbent appointed by Gov. Tony Evers to win a seat on the Second District appellate court, while GOP state lawmaker Samantha Kerkman became the first Republican in a long time to be elected the Kenosha County executive. A conservative was also elected county executive in another heavily Democratic stronghold, Portage County.
Over in Green Bay, conservatives won two of three hotly contested seats and a council majority. I haven’t independently verified it, but the state GOP is reporting—and no is challenging it—that conservatives nearly doubled their seats on the 30-person La Crosse county board, going from seven seats to 13, and actually flipped county boards in Calumet, Door, Kenosha, Marathon, Rock, Adams, and St. Croix counties.
In school board races, conservatives were touting their wins in three Menomonee Falls races and in another three in the city of Waukesha, and in a variety of smaller races.
After the election results, Democrats and liberals were clearly trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They pointed to wins in Beloit, La Crosse, and Eau Claire, but those are Democratic strongholds. They were heavily contested but the big news would have been if the liberal candidates had lost. So while Republicans were touting flips and breakthroughs across the state, the Democrats were left to crow about the places they managed to keep in a shrinking political geography.
In the end, the left was reduced to singing about how good the turnout was, and to acknowledging a few school referenda wins, as A Better Wisconsin Together did:
In many communities, voters turned out to support their public schools, students, and teachers by rejecting the divisive tactics of some conservative politicians and supporting referendums to provide additional resources to keep their schools running in the face of the continuing failure of the Republican controlled legislature to support public education funding.
In other words, if I can translate, we really fell on our face Tuesday.
But what do the spring results really tell us? Is this all we need for November?