Walker-Evers down to wire; Baldwin retains Senate seat
Democrats retake U.S. House; GOP holds on to Senate
On a night of major wins and losses for both parties, the most closely watched and consequential election contest in Wisconsin went down to the wire, with the race between GOP Gov. Scott Walker and Democrat Tony Evers too close to call.
At stake: an eight-year reign of Republican dominance and political muscle in this state, and the future of one of the nation’s best-known and most polarizing governors.
Across the nation, voters delivered their mid-term verdicts Tuesday on a president they elected two years ago, Donald Trump, and his party’s control of Congress.
It was a good night for Democrats nationally, but it fell short of their highest hopes and was punctuated by some big disappointments. It was not a tsunami. Democrats captured the U.S. House. They lost ground in the Senate in a year when many contests were fought on very Republican turf. They made in-
roads in races for governor but failed to capture huge races in Florida and Ohio.
Walker’s contest was one of the most closely watched nationally, featuring a one-time national star of the party, whose bid for the presidency shot out of the gate in 2015 before it was eclipsed by Trump.
Exit polls showed Walker lost ground with at least two key groups of voters compared with his 2014 re-election victory. One is independents. Walker had won independents in each of his three statewide victories, including the recall, by margins ranging from 9 to 14 points. But in the 2018 exit poll, he was trailing among independents by 7 points.
A second group was college graduates. Walker won voters with college degrees by 1 point in 2014, according to the exit poll that year. He was losing them by 13 points this year.
Walker was winning men and losing women by high single digits, according to the exit poll — which is a smaller gender gap than in 2014 when Walker defeated Democrat Mary Burke.
Boosting Evers in this race was an unprecedented blue landslide coming out of Dane County, where Walker’s losing margin was far bigger than it was in 2014. Walker also ran behind his 2014 numbers in the suburban base counties outside Milwaukee, such as Waukesha. But he performed strongly in many smaller counties to the north. The exit poll suggested that roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats voted.
Also too close to call, mirroring the race for governor, was the contest in Wisconsin for attorney general.
This was a midterm election fight waged in a strong economy but also a shrill, overheated and bitter political climate, generating huge turnouts in many places.
In Wisconsin, a state Trump had carried by less than a percentage point in 2016, U.S. Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin cruised to a commanding victory over GOP challenger Leah Vukmir, piling up landslides in the state’s bluest places while also winning a number of counties carried by Trump in 2016.
Democrats failed in their bid to pick up two U.S. House seats in Wisconsin, but the Republican makeup of both districts — the 1st represented by House Speaker Paul Ryan and the 6th represented by Glen Grothman — made a partisan change unlikely.
The brightest story for Democrats nationally was the takeover of the U.S. House, a final setback to Ryan, the Wisconsin lawmaker who is retiring after 20 years in Washington.
Baldwin’s U.S. Senate victory followed a very powerful historical pattern. Incumbent senators in the opposition party — the party that doesn’t occupy the White House — hardly ever lose. It hasn’t happened in Wisconsin in 56 years. These senators enjoy the upside of incumbency — money, name recognition, political experience and skills — without the downside, which is the baggage of being in power.
In Wisconsin, a state Trump had carried by less than a percentage point in 2016, U.S. Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin cruised to a commanding victory over GOP challenger Leah Vukmir, piling up landslides in the state’s bluest places while also winning a number of counties carried by Trump in 2016.
Baldwin easily outspent Vukmir, but she was also the target of lots of early attack ads. She appeared to be on her way to winning by a bigger margin than other recent U.S. Senate victors in this evenly divided state. She ran hard on the Democrats’ biggest weapon in 2018 — the issue of health care. She also effectively mixed in populist themes (like “Buy American”) and parochial issues, like dairy.
According to the exit poll, among white voters, Baldwin won women with college degrees by 33 points while losing men without college degrees by 13. Similar gender and education gaps surfaced in races across the country. In the governor’s race, among white voters, Walker lost college women by 21 points but won non-college men (a much larger group) by 20.
When Wisconsin elected Republican Ron Johnson and Baldwin in consecutive elections in 2010 and 2012, it gave the state the “oddest” political odd couple in the Senate, Johnson well to the right and Baldwin well to the left of most of their peers. That might have seemed like a fluke. But now Wisconsin has re-elected each of them.