All 99 Wisconsin assembly districts swung left in 2026, in the sense that David Crowley improved over Kamala Harris’ 2024 margin in each one. But the size of the swing varied by an order of magnitude.

The smallest swing of them all was just 2 points, and the location should be easy to guess. It came in Tom Tiffany’s district of residence, the 34^th, home to Northwoods towns like Minocqua, Rhinelander, and Eagle River. Here, Trump won by 20 points in 2024 and Tiffany by 18 points in 2026.

If you’ve been following the national analysis of this election, you probably won’t be surprised by where the largest swings in a Democratic direction came, either. Two districts stand apart from any other. They are the adjacent 8^th and 9^th districts, both on Milwaukee’s near south side and the only two districts where Latinos make up a plurality of adult citizens. In both of these districts, Crowley improved over Trump by 26 points.

Southern Milwaukee County, generally, swung especially hard to the left. Besides the 8^th and 9^th districts, the next three largest swings were the 7^th district also on Milwaukee’s south side (+19), the 21^st in Oak Creek (+17 and a Democratic flip), and the 20^th in South Milwaukee (+16).

In the City of Milwaukee, David Crowley was more popular than any other candidate for governor, president, or US Senate since at least 2000. He won 85% of the vote in the city. By comparison, Herb Kohl won 81% in 2006; Obama won 78% in 2008 and 79% in 2012.

Zooming out a bit, this map shows the size of the swing in each district of the state. Although every district moved left relative to 2024, the lightest shade shows where the shift was considerably smaller than the statewide 9-point shift. This category includes the Northwoods and also much of suburban southeastern Wisconsin.

There is a subtlety worth noting here. The Northwoods counties had previously moved pretty hard to the right, while the three major suburban WOW counties actually gave Harris more of their vote than Biden in 2020. So the relatively small leftward tilt of the suburban counties this year is at least partly a consequence of those counties having already moved to the left, even in 2024. They are colored the same way on this map, but the suburban southeastern counties and the rural Northwoods counties are moving in opposite directions when viewed on a longer timescale.

The next-lightest shade of blue shows where the swing about matched the state result, plus or minus a few points. This includes most of the Madison and Driftless area in the southwestern part of the state, along with most of the Fox Valley. The bigger swings shown in dark blue happened in districts covering some major cities—La Crosse, Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Green Bay, Kenosha, and the southern Milwaukee suburbs.

Finally, the three districts shown in green stand wholly apart from the rest. These districts, discussed above, are where Crowley improved by more than 18 points over Trump. Not coincidentally, they are home to the three most-Latino districts and they are also some of the districts where Trump in 2024 improved the most over Trump in 2020. In other words, Trump made big inroads with these voters two years ago, but they abandoned his party on Tuesday.

The Declining Premium for Assembly Republicans

Over the last quarter century, elections for state legislature have become extremely closely correlated with the race at the top of the ticket. But some ticket-splitters remain, and, more often than not, these voters with split loyalties have picked the Republicans further down the ballot. The basic problem for Democrats has been that their state legislative candidates are consistently less popular than the Democrat at the top of the ticket.

Take Donald Trump’s 3 presidential elections by way of illustration. Across all three of them, the local Republicans did between 3.5 and 4 points better, on the margin, than Trump. A meaningful number of voters were willing to vote for the local Republican but not the man at the top of the ticket. This is not just a Trump thing, either. In 2018 and 2022, assembly Republican candidates also ran ahead of their gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Tim Michels.

Much, but not all, of this can be attributed to incumbency advantage. In the recent past there have always been more Republican than Democratic incumbents, so even if incumbents from both parties benefit from their experience and name recognition equally, the net effect will surely benefit the GOP. However, in 2024, it wasn’t just Republican incumbents who ran ahead of Trump. In open seats, with no incumbent running, the local Republicans ran 2 points ahead of Trump across 23 races.

But this once-reliable advantage for assembly Republicans faltered in 2026 and even disappeared in a few key races. Take the three most surprising Democratic legislative wins—the 85^th (Wausau), the 92^nd (Menomonie), and the 30^th (River Falls) districts. Each of these voted for Trump in 2024, and in each place the Republican assembly candidate performed as well or better than Trump. All three of these incumbents were seeking reelection in 2026. When I saw that they had lost their races, I assumed that Crowley’s strong performance was enough to overcome their own strength as incumbents, but in reality, each of these Republican incumbents actually ran behind Tom Tiffany.

Take the 30^th district, for example. Here, a local Democratic schoolteacher named Kevin Knoke challenged the Republican incumbent Shannon Zimmerman in a seat covering Wisconsin exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Trump won this district by 4.5 points in 2024. Meanwhile, Zimmerman nearly doubled Trump’s margin, winning his race by 8.5 points. In 2026, David Crowley squeaked out a 1-point win in the 30^th district. With a top-of-the-ticket margin this close, I would normally expect Zimmerman’s track record as an incumbent to save him. Instead, Knoke beat him by 6 points.

In other words, quite a few voters in this district voted for Tom Tiffany for governor and the Democratic challenger for assembly. That’s a big deviation from the way things normally go in Wisconsin.

Similarly, in the 92^nd, the Democratic challenger Jeremiah Fredrickson defeated incumbent Republican Clint Moses by 7 points in a district Crowley won by 4. In Wausau’s 85^th seat, Democrat John Kroll defeated Republican incumbent Patrick Snyder by 8 points to Crowley’s 7—this after Snyder won by 6.5 points to Trump’s 1-point victory in 2024.

Here are the numbers from across every contested assembly race. In the aggregate, Republicans in open assembly races still ran better than their standard bearer, but the size of their advantage fell by 62%. The advantage to Republican incumbents fell by 73%.

You could interpret these results in a couple ways, both of which are probably true. It’s getting tougher for local candidates to differentiate themselves from the national party’s brand. Republican incumbents, as a whole, were still more popular than Tiffany, but their advantage over Tiffany was much smaller than their advantage over Trump.

In a few cases, like the 30^th and 92^nd districts, the local Democratic challengers were actually more popular than Crowley, and this local appeal was instrumental in helping flip those seats. Here, Democrats succeeded in recruiting uniquely popular candidates. The parties always say they are doing this, but this time it seemingly worked. We have some insight into what happened in the 92^nd, thanks to reporting by Dan Shafer.

Fredrickson explained his decision to run this way: “[US Senator] Tammy [Baldwin] called me back in December and said, ‘you’re a farmer, you’re a former teacher, and you’re a small business owner — you’re like the trifecta as far as a candidate goes.’ So, her voice carries a fair amount of weight…It was that one phone call that pushed me over the edge.”

In a wave election, everything goes right. Wisconsin’s Democrats in 2026 paired an incredibly favorable national environment with high-quality candidates where it mattered most. The result is multi-seat majorities giving them at least a little bit of breathing room in the state legislature.

Here are a few files for readers who want to dig deeper into the results.

• This is an interactive map of every assembly district. Click on a district to compare the 2026 assembly and governor results with past elections for president and governor going back to 2016.
• This 11×17 graphic compares how the assembly margins shifted from 2024 to 2026 in each district with contested elections in both years.
• This 11×17 graphic compares how the top-of-the-ticket margins (president to governor) shifted from 2024 to 2026 in each district.
• This 11×17 graphic compares the governor margin with the assembly margin in each district with a contested election in 2026.

Yesterday, Democrats ran the table in Wisconsin. They won every statewide race–Governor (+8), Attorney General (+9), Secretary of State (+5), and Treasurer (+4). They flipped both competitive Congressional seats. Rebecca Cooke took down incumbent Derrick Van Orden by a 7-point margin. Mitchell Berman defeated Bryan Steil by 4 points.

I was especially interested in the state legislative races where, for the first time in 16 years, control of both chambers was truly up for grabs. Back in July, I gave myself the task of rating the battleground districts in each chamber. I came up with 14 districts–5 in the senate and 9 in the assembly–which I thought would determine the outcome. Democrats won 13 of them.

In the State Senate, the 17 odd-numbered districts held elections. Democrats needed to flip 2 of them for a majority. They flipped 3–two in the Milwaukee suburbs and one in the Driftless Area. They will have 18 seats to Republicans’ 15 in the next session.

In the State Assembly, Democrats needed 5 flips to win the chamber. Instead, they flipped 8 seats, for a total of 53. The locations of these districts indicate the great reach of this blue wave. Two are in the Milwaukee suburbs, two in the Fox Valley, one in the rural Driftless Are, and three are in the tier of small cities running across the northern half of the state.

It was these last three races that surprised me the most. All of the other seats Democrats flipped were actually places where Kamala Harris won the vote en route to losing the state in 2024. But the three northern districts were Trump seats featuring Republican incumbents. It didn’t end up mattering. In River Falls, along the border with Minnesota, Kevin Knoke defeated Shannon Zimmerman by 7 points, this in a seat that Zimmerman won by 8.5 points two years ago. In Menomonie, near Eau Claire, Jeremiah Frederickson defeated Clint Moses by 7 points, after Moses won in 2024 by 7 points. And in Wausau, John Kroll defeated the incumbent Republican Patrick Snyder by 8 points. Snyder had won the seat by 6 points in 2024.

This was a uniform swing election. Every contested assembly seat saw Democrats improve their margin relative to 2024. The biggest swing came in the 21st district in the Milwaukee County suburbs. Here the Democrat, Oak Creek mayor Daniel Bukiewicz won the seat left open by longtime Republican incumbent Jessie Rodriguez’s retirement by 25 points.

Assembly Democrats Relative to Crowley

Thanks to the 2024 redistricting, the state’s legislative districts closely match the political division of the state itself. The 2024 election returned a split result in Wisconsin, as the state voted for Donald Trump and simultaneously reelected incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. The state’s new assembly districts captured this split, with each candidate converting their respective narrow statewide victories into a majority of the vote in 50 of the state’s 99 districts.

In 2024, actual Democratic candidates only won 45 Assembly seats, meaning they significantly trailed both Tammy Baldwin and Kamala Harris. This time, 38 assembly Democratic candidates ran ahead of Crowley and 52 won less of the vote than he did.

Most incumbent Democrats did better than Crowley; although, 14 of them were still a bit less popular than him. Democrats running in open races or against Republican incumbents tended to be less popular than Crowley.

This time, the blue wave was large enough that small amounts of incumbency advantage were no longer sufficient to save Republicans in marginal seats.

Crowley Performance by Assembly

The rest of this article uses Wisconsin’s 99 assembly districts as a lens through which to understand the gubernatorial election results. It’s more common to do this using the state’s 72 counties, but assembly districts have several advantages for this purpose. There are more of them, so they offer more detail. They are, by definition, about the same size, each holding about 1% of the state’s total population. With caveats, assembly districts tend to follow locally meaningful boundaries. They combine sparsely populated counties into coherent regions. They divide large cities along recognizable neighborhood lines.

Conveniently for elections analysis purposes, the Census Bureau publishes demographic statistics for state legislative districts. For every Assembly district, we know the income, education, race, and age of the citizen, voting age population who lives there.

The next series of graphs uses assembly districts to divide the state into four, equally-populated tiers by income, education, and age. For each quartile, I show the percent of the vote won by the Democratic candidate in the last three elections for governor and president. I use two-party vote, just Democrats and Republicans, to avoid the confusion of third party vote shares, which vary from one election to the next. District boundaries changed twice during this period, so when necessary I reallocated results from former ward boundaries into the current districts based on the share of voters in each overlapping section.

There will be a consistent theme across these charts: Democrats improved in every single kind of district, often by similar amounts. This was a wave election, by any standard you might choose.

by income

Here are the state’s 99 assembly districts, binned into quartiles by median income. Over the last decade, Democratic performance has generally declined in the poorest quarter of the state and increased in the highest quarter. From 2022 to 2026, Democratic performance jumped everywhere. Still, you can see some quite significant longer term trends. In the poorest parts of the state, Crowley did about as well as Evers in 2018. But in the wealthiest fourth of the state, Crowley won 50% of the vote in 2026, compared with Evers’ 43% in 2018.

by education

Education and income go hand-in-hand. This graph bins the state’s assembly districts into quarters based on the percent of adult citizens with a college degree. In the most educated parts of the state, Crowley won 8 percentage points more of the vote in 2026 than Evers did in 2018, while in the least-educated parts of the state, Crowley won 2 points less than Evers eight years ago.

by age

When dividing the state by age, Crowley’s improvement over Evers was lowest in the oldest places and higher in younger districts.

by race

When counting just the adult, citizen population, 91 of Wisconsin’s 99 assembly districts are majority non-Hispanic white, 4 are majority Black, 1 is majority Latino, and three have no majority. All of the non-white majority districts are in Milwaukee. Here we see an interesting divergence in the trends between presidential election and midterms. In presidential years, the share of the vote going to the Democrat has declined in non-majority white districts. The drop has been quite modest among Black voters and much steeper in the state’s sole majority Latino district. However, in the lower-turnout midterm election, the exact opposite has occurred. David Crowley did much better in these non-white districts than Evers, particularly in his 2018 race.

This divergence reflects, I believe, differences in who shows up in a midterm versus a presidential election. With all but tiny Taylor County reporting, turnout in Wisconsin’s 2026 midterm stands at about 2,650,000. That is slightly down from 2022 or 2018, and it is 776,000 fewer voters than showed up in November 2024. I suspect those missing three-quarters of a million voters are mostly disillusioned Trump supporters.