Tony Evers won reelection as governor by an unusually large margin for a top-of-the-ticket November election in Wisconsin. He received 51.1% of the vote, compared to 47.8% for his challenger, Republican Tim Michels.

Simultaneously, Republican Senator Ron Johnson was also reelected, albeit more narrowly. Johnson won 50.4% of the vote, while his Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes took 49.4%.

Expressed in margin terms, the outcome of the governor’s race was a 3.4-point Democratic victory, and the outcome of the senate race was a 1.0-point Republican win, meaning the two races saw a net spread of 4.4 points. That’s no small thing in a state as narrowly divided as Wisconsin, where the 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020 presidential races were all decided by less than 1 point. (In fact, the last two presidential candidates to actually win a majority of the vote are Barack Obama and Michael Dukakis.)

Many observers were surprised by this gap between Evers and Barnes—the two most prominent statewide Democratic candidates. Some suggested that a wave of racist attack ads accounted for Barnes’ narrow loss. Certainly, publicly available polling showed a marked decline in support for Barnes between the primary and the general election, consistent with the timing of the anti-Barnes advertising blitz.

Still, after comparing the two marquee races to everything else on the ballot, it’s clear that Barnes’ performance isn’t unusual. Instead, Evers’ strong performance and the enduring significance of incumbency advantage are what stand out.

Incumbency advantage is not dead yet, despite the increased nationalization of down ballot elections. Many electors vote a straight ticket, but incumbents of both parties do measurably better than non-incumbents in similar races. This blog post considers the size and impact of incumbency advantage in Wisconsin’s 2022 Assembly races. My analysis finds that candidates running for reelection in wards they already represented improved their vote margin by about 4 points over what we’d expect in an open race.

Incumbents have two main advantages over a typical challenger. We expect them to run better campaigns due to having more experience and resources. Voters are also usually more familiar with them, thanks to years of official mailings, public appearances, and yard signs.

Because the past election took place immediately after redistricting, it offers a once-in-a-decade opportunity to measure the performance of incumbents in two situations. Prior to the 2022 election, the boundaries of each Assembly district were tweaked to equalize population. Consequently, when incumbents ran for reelection, they did so in districts containing areas they previously did not represent. In these new wards, we expect the incumbents to benefit from superior campaign organization, but not from legacy name recognition.