Voter Turnout Bucked the National Trend in Wisconsin

Voter turnout in Wisconsin this year was very high—among the highest ever in presidential elections in Wisconsin. Unofficial returns show 3,422,802 votes cast for president, up from 3,298,041 in 2020.[i]

About 125,000 more people voted in 2024 than 2020. Meanwhile, the state’s over-18 population grew by an estimated 56,000 between 2020 and 2023.[ii]

We won’t know the 2024 population estimate until sometime next month. If the over-18 population increase is fewer than 69,000, that will indicate that the share of adults voting in 2024 exceeded 2020, which was already an exceptional year.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission calculates that 72.9% of adults voted in 2020, which is the third highest rate since their data begins in 1948. In 1966, they estimate 72.0% voted and in 2004, 73.2%.[iii] Depending on the 2024 adult population estimate, the 2024 election will likely join this group of extremely high turnout elections where just shy of 3-in-4 adults participated.

Keep in mind that turnout as a share of the voting eligible population is even higher. Here are some estimates from the University of Florida Election Lab.

In 2024, the Election Lab estimates that 76.4% of eligible voters in Wisconsin cast a ballot, compared to 63.5% nationally. In 2020 it was probably 75.0% in Wisconsin, compared to 66.4% nationally. Turnout in Wisconsin is usually higher than US average, but this year the gap grew especially large. In 2020, turnout was 8.6 points higher in Wisconsin, growing to 12.9 points higher in 2024.

The true voter turnout rate can only be estimated because the denominator (actually eligible citizens) is unknown. At least in a month or two, we’ll have more recent data for the state adult population, from which we can further refine these estimates of the eligible share.

Estimates for the adult population of counties and municipalities will become available later in 2025. The kind of granular data needed to estimate ward-level adult population turnout rates won’t be available until the 2030 census.

The absence of high-quality data will not prevent the creation of turnout statistics, nor should they, necessarily. We cannot wait for the 2030 census to begin figuring out which voters were inspired by the last campaign and which weren’t. My point in elaborating these difficulties is to warn you that the first turnout statistics you see will not be the final word on the matter.

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Here is what the limited data we do have can tell us about voter turnout around Wisconsin.

  • The number of votes cast for president increased in 71 of 72 counties. Only tiny Menominee was the exception (18 fewer votes cast).
  • The number of votes cast grew by more than the 2020-2023 increase in the adult population in 65 of 72 counties. The 7 counties where vote change lagged adult population growth are Bayfield, Vilas, Forest, Ozaukee, Menominee, Ashland, and Burnett.
  • In Milwaukee County, the number of votes cast grew by 4,346, despite the adult population falling by about 11,900 between 2020 and 2023.
  • In Dane County, the number of votes cast grew by 21,153, compared with an adult population increase of about 15,600 between 2020 and 2023.
  • In Waukesha County, the number of votes cast grew by 7,756, while the adult population grew by an estimated 6,900 between 2020 and 2023.

The Census Bureau’s Population Estimate Program doesn’t provide adult population estimates for individual municipalities, so we’re stuck with total population estimates.

  • In the City of Milwaukee, the number of votes cast grew by 560 votes, while the total population fell by about 15,800 between 2020 and 2023.
  • In the City of Madison, the number of votes cast grew by 11,740, while the total population grew by an estimated 5,100 between 2020 and 2023.

It is not the case that turnout fell in Democratic-leaning communities and increased in Republican ones. There is no correlation between a county’s change in turnout and the share of the vote received by Donald Trump. There may be a slight correlation between the increase in turnout and the increase in Trump’s share of the vote relative to 2020.

High turnout helped Trump because a group of infrequent voters showed up and disproportionately supported him. These “low propensity” voters were spread evenly across the state, contributing to Wisconsin’s small but remarkably uniform 1.5-point swing toward Trump.

Note: This post was updated to include a new analysis of the correlation between turnout and partisan vote share.

[i] The number of votes cast for president is slightly lower than the total number of ballots cast, which I have not collected. In 2020, 10,764 voters turned in a ballot but declined to vote in the presidential contest.

[ii] These numbers are from the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program and are estimated for July 1st of each respective year. The estimates for July 1, 2024 will be released in December.

[iii] The WEC numbers use total ballots cast as their denominator (not presidential votes), and they use a slightly different estimate of the over-18 population. Their estimate comes from the Wisconsin Department of Administration which uses a somewhat different methodology and calculates their annual estimates for a different date than the federal Population Estimates Program.

Continue ReadingVoter Turnout Bucked the National Trend in Wisconsin

How Wisconsin Split Its Ticket Once Again

What Ward Data Shows About Shifting Support by Education, Race, Age, Income, and More

Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s 2024 presidential election by just shy of 30,000 votes, after losing the state by 21,000 in 2000 and winning by 23,000 in 2016. Meanwhile, Tammy Baldwin won reelection by a similarly slim 29,000 votes. This, after Ron Johnson won his 2022 reelection campaign by 27,000 votes.

While other parts of the country (e.g., New York, New Jersey) saw big swings to the right, Wisconsin shifted more modestly. Trump eked out a win, but not by enough to pull Eric Hovde along with him. Republicans won most of the competitive seats in the State Assembly, likely keeping a comfortable 9-seat advantage. But Democrats swept all 4 State Senate targets, making them marginal favorites to win the chamber in 2026.

What the 2024 Republican swing lacked in magnitude it made up in its breadth across Wisconsin. Communities of all kinds moved toward the Republicans. Trump improved over 2020 in all but 4 of the state’s counties.

Trump increased his vote share since 2020 in 70% of the state’s municipalities and 62% of its wards. Here are 5 graphs showing how Wisconsin wards have trended since 2016.

Click here for an interactive map of all Wisconsin wards.

Education

As everyone knows by now, our electorate is increasingly polarized by education. The least college-educated places vote more for Trump and the most educated places have shifted toward the Democrats. That was the trend between 2016 and 2020 anyway.

A big part of why Trump won Wisconsin in 2024 is that he continued to make gains in the wards with the lowest levels of college education, while Harris only matched Biden’s performance in the most educated wards.

Still, the net gap has expanded from 22 points separating how the most and least-educated wards voted in 2016 to 33 points in 2020 and 36 points in 2024.

graph showing trends in party support by education

Age

Young people are more liberal and old people more conservative, but in recent years these differences haven’t grown much—at least at the ward level. The oldest wards moved toward Trump by about 1 point in 2024, similar to the state average. Notably, the youngest set of wards, while still very Democratic, shifted 3 points toward Trump.

Graph shows trends in partisan support by age

Population density

You can guess a lot about a ward’s political lean just by knowing how densely populated it is. But the gap between sparsely and densely populated places didn’t grow in 2024. Trump’s performance improved by a point or two in both the least and most dense places.

Trends in partisan support by population density

Race/ethnicity

Wisconsin doesn’t collect race in its voter registration data, so, to make this graph, I aggregated 2020 census block data into ward boundaries. By my count, there are 153 majority Black wards, 53 majority Hispanic/Latino wards, and 3,063 majority (non-Hispanic) white wards.

Taken as a whole, the majority white wards lean slightly Republican. Trump’s 2024 vote share fell halfway between his 2016 and 2020 performance. Baldwin’s vote share fell 9 points from 2018, but improved by 2 points over Mandela Barnes’ 2022 senate run.

In the majority Black wards, the Democratic vote share remains very high but has slipped by 1-3 points in each of the past elections.

The big change is in the relatively small set of majority Hispanic wards. The Democratic margin of victory fell from 61 points in 2016 to 52 in 2020 and 42 in 2024.

This sort of correlation runs the risk of the ecological fallacy, but the patterns here are consistent with trends in other cities and survey data.

Trends in partisan support by race/ethnicity

Income

My final graph is possibly the strangest out of this set. It shows partisan support by per capita income, with the poorest wards on the left and the wealthiest on the right.

It is exactly these two kinds of places that are the base of the Democratic party. Democrats are strongest in the poorest fifth of wards, followed by the wealthiest fifth. Lately, Republicans have won everything in between.

Setting aside their baseline level of support, this graph also shows which places are growing more or less enthusiastic about the parties. Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton tied in the wealthiest fifth of wards in 2016. Biden and Harris each won them by 6 points.

Meanwhile, the Democratic margin of victory in the poorest fifth of wards slid from 19 points in 2016 to 16 in 2020 and 12 in 2024.

Trends in partisan support by income

About this data

Throughout this article I use “wards” to refer to what are technically “reporting units.” In Wisconsin, municipal clerks in small towns are allowed, under certain circumstances, to combine multiple wards into larger reporting units. This reduces administrative load and helps protect voter privacy.

Ward data is published on election night by most county clerks, but it is not collected and standardized by the Wisconsin Election Commission for several weeks following each general election. Lacking data on the state’s 3,500-odd wards, most election analysis relies on the totals from Wisconsin’s 72 counties—a limitation which makes analysis like the above impossible.

To fill this gap, I have collected and standardized ward-level returns for the Presidential and US Senate race in (currently) 69/72 counties, covering 98% of voters. You can download a GEOJSON file with these ward boundaries, unofficial 2024 election results, and disaggregated past election results from 2012-2022.

Special thanks to Anna Balliekova, Charles Ruleis, Mitchell Henke, Charles Franklin, Marybeth McGinnis, Ben Welden, Kevin Goldfarb, Alex Ballwanz, Ben Iberle, and Dwight Maynor for their help tracking down ward files on election night.

Continue ReadingHow Wisconsin Split Its Ticket Once Again

An appreciation of walking to the polls

map showing a subset of Milwaukee polling place isochrones

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During my years in Milwaukee, I’ve lived in 4 different neighborhoods. The walking distances to my wards’ polling places have been as follows: 0.2 miles, 0.2 miles, 0.3 miles, and roughly 400 ft. Walking has always been the simplest way to cast my ballot.

This is true for many Milwaukeeans. Compared to most parts of America, including most major cities, Milwaukee excels at making the polls convenient to access.

Over 56% of houses are within half a mile, or a 10 minute walk, of their designated election day polling place. And I’m not counting distance as the crow flies. This is the distance it takes to walk on streets and paths accessible to pedestrians.

Specifically, I calculate that 12.4% of Milwaukee houses are located fewer than 5 minutes from their polling place by foot. Another 44.1% are within a 5-10 minute walk; 27.4% are a 10-15 minute walk away; and just 16.1% are further.

For these calculations, I assume that it takes 1 minute to walk 80 meters, or 262 feet. This works out to 5 minutes per quarter mile, a common standard for walkability.

For instance, here are Milwaukee wards 240 and 285, both of which vote at the Humboldt Park Pavilion in the Bay View neighborhood. Together, these two wards have about 2,300 registered voters living in 1,600 housing units.

  • Because the polling place is in the middle of the park, only a tiny sliver of houses, about 1%, are within a 5 minute walk. This area is shown in purple.
  • Over half, 54%, are in the blue area, which is a 5-10 minute walk from the pavilion.
  • Another 39% are 10-15 minutes away, shown in green.
  • The remaining 6% of houses are in the yellow fringes of the two wards, where walking to the pavilion takes 15 minutes or more.
isochrone map of the Humboldt Park Pavilion

Here is another polling place, the Clinton Rose Senior Center, near the intersection of King Drive and Burleigh St. This location also serves about 1,600 homes, but more of them are apartments. In fact, 12% of the housing units are within a 5 minute walk, 71% are within 5-10 minutes, and the remaining 17% are 10-15 minutes away.

isochrone map of the Clinton Rose Senior Center

Click the image below to open an interactive map with statistics for each ward in the city. From the interactive map, you can click the ward name in each tooltip to open a png file with each polling place, as mapped above.

As you might expect, polling places are closest together in the most densely populated sections of the city. Many of the areas which appear poorly covered on the map are not actually populated—this includes the industrial Menomonee Valley, the port, the airport, and many large parks and cemeteries.

Exceptions include the far north and northwest sides, where few residents live within convenient walking distance of their polling place. Here the normal street grid breaks down, and many people live in subdivisions with poor pedestrian connectivity. The population is also less dense, so individual wards are larger.

map with link to interactive map of each ward's isochrone

The citywide map also reveals some wards which are physically much closer to a different polling place than their own. In these cases, it might be possible to better optimize ward-to-polling place assignments.

Overall, access to polling places is fairly even across the city’s racial or ethnic groups. Using 2020 census data, I estimate that 52% of Black, 57% of white, 63% of Hispanic, and 52% of Asian residents live within a 10 minute walk of their polling place. Conversely, those living 15 minutes away or further includes 18% of Black, 16% of white, 11% of Hispanic, and 22% of Asian residents.

Proximity is highest for Latino Milwaukeeans because their numbers are highest in the densely populated near south side. In contrast, much of Milwaukee’s Asian population lives in the less dense far north and northwest sides of the city.

table showing the proportion of different race or ethnic groups by proximity to their polling place

My methodology is too detailed to easily replicate across the United States, but fortunately the federal government collects information about polling places after each election through the biennial Election Administration and Voting Survey. I downloaded the 2022 data and compared the number of registered voters with the number of polling places in each jurisdiction.

Among the largest 500 jurisdictions in the country, Milwaukee ranked 51st for the most polling places per registered voters. There was one polling place for every 1,661 registered voters in 2022. The median, across the largest 500 jurisdictions, was one polling place for every 3,073 voters.

There is a lot of variation in this metric. Cities in Pennsylvania score especially well, holding 9 out of the top 10 spots. Philadelphia County had 630 voters per polling place, Allegheny County 710.

In contrast, most California cities have few polling places for their size. Los Angeles County had just 640 election day polling places in 2022, one for every 11,581 registered voters. For San Diego County it was one for 11,002 voters, for Orange county 11,267.

Milwaukee also provides proportionally more polling places than other cities in Wisconsin. By necessity, small towns often have higher rates of polling places per capita. But Milwaukee has a higher rate of polling places than all of the other 30 largest cities in the state. The largest community with more per capita than Milwaukee is Stevens Point (pop. 26,000).

Election administration is an increasingly difficult job, subject to conspiracy theories and threats of violence. It’s worth remembering and appreciating that, in Milwaukee, voting is still made admirably easy. For most Milwaukeeans, their polling place (and the opportunity to register) is just a short walk out their front door on November 5th.

How I did this

See this GitHub repository for detailed code and data.

I downloaded data from OpenStreetMap, subsetted pedestrian-friendly streets and paths, then converted these paths and their nodes into a network. An advantage to using OSM data (in addition to its being free) is that it includes informal paths, not just strictly official walkways as Google Maps generally does.

I used Jeremy Gelb’s excellent spNetwork R package to calculate isochrones around each polling place. The original isochrone just consists of lines, so I converted each isochrone to polygons using a minimum concave hull algorithm implemented in the concaveman R package. Finally, I subsetted each of these isochrone polygon sets to just the ward boundaries served by each polling place.

I combined all these individual polling place polygon isochrones, intersected them with the centroid coordinates for each parcel in the city, and aggregated the number of residential units in each.

Continue ReadingAn appreciation of walking to the polls