Election Predictions

The other day I made my spring election recommendations. Today, I’d like to take a shot at predicting the outcomes — who I think will win and who I want to win are not necessarily the same.

Here’s my first observation: Please let it be over. The Supreme Court race has been every bit as awful as predicted. Over $76 million, a national record in a court race, will have been spent on mostly television and online advertising trying to convince us that if one or the other candidate wins, they’ll release ax murderers and order them to live in our attics. The message being sent by both camps to voters is this: ‘You are dumb. You don’t even understand what the court does. So, we’re going to play to your worst fears and prejudices.’ 

Okay. So now that my throat is cleared, let’s move on to the three statewide races on the ballot. 

Of course, the big one is the Supreme Court. That’s a dead heat according to at least one poll. If that’s true then this becomes a turnout contest. The side that gets its voters to the polls will win and that gives the advantage to liberal Susan Crawford. 

There’s two reasons for that. The first is that it has long been true that college educated voters are more dedicated voters. That used to give an advantage to Republicans in lighter turnout spring elections. But now that the Democrats have become the party of the college educated, the advantage has switched. The Democrats have a built-in edge in non-presidential elections. 

Now layer on top of that the motivation factor. Liberals and Democrats are fired up and angry. They want to do something, anything, to scream “NO!” at Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They don’t need prompting. They’ll turn out to vote for Crawford to maintain the court’s liberal majority, but they’ll also be voting against Trump/Musk. It’s a two-for. 

Or maybe a three-for since there’s also the abortion issue. That was the whole story two years ago when Janet Protasiewicz scorched Dan Kelly by 11 points over pretty much that issue alone. But, despite Crawford’s best attempts to make this another referendum on abortion, I wouldn’t expect it to pack the same punch this time. Two years ago Roe had just been overturned and the procedure had been shut down in Wisconsin. Now, thanks to a lower court ruling, abortions are again available here. The case that would decide the issue at the high court is still pending, but it will almost certainly be decided before the new justice takes their seat in August. So, abortion’s an advantage for Crawford, but not nearly like it was for Protasiewicz. 

Crawford’s Republican-backed opponent, Brad Schimel, sees all this clearly enough, so his camp is trying to replicate the turnout strategy that Trump employed in November. Let’s call it the Toxic Masculinity Strategy or TMS. 

For reasons I won’t get into here, I actually hate the term “toxic masculinity,” but it applies so well to Trump, Musk and a whole cult surrounding them that I just can’t avoid using it in this case. 

Through TMS, Schimel is trying to get mostly young, disaffected men to show up and vote for him. The Republicans’ problem is that Trump’s voters show up only in elections where he’s on the ballot. But because of Crawford’s advantages in motivation, Schimel can’t win without them. 

That’s why we’ve seen Elon Musk dumping millions into the race and pretty much literally offering to flat out buy votes. (Actually, I think Musk is so unpopular that his involvement is hurting Schimel more than his money is helping.) That’s why we’ve seen Donald Trump, Jr., appear with Schimel on a hard-right podcast. And that’s why Trump himself has now weighed in for Schimel. 

That last development is interesting because it could mean one of two conflicting things. On the one hand, Trump may have been staying out of it to this point because he thought Schimel might not make it and he didn’t want to be associated with a loser. So, getting in now might be a bad sign for Crawford. But, on the other hand, it could be that Trump’s been told that it’s close and that only he can close the deal for Schimel. That would indicate that they’re desperate and needed to pull out all the stops. 

My bottom line: This won’t be like two years ago. It’ll be fairly close, but in the end Crawford’s voters are dedicated and they’ll win the day. TMS will make headway, but not enough. 

My second bottom line: All of a sudden, vote fraud will be a big issue again. Schimel has already teed this up by invoking Trump’s discredited trope from 2020 about vote dumping in Milwaukee. What happens is that Milwaukee reports its final vote tallies late into election night, often in the wee hours of the following day. But that’s because Republicans want it that way. State law doesn’t allow Milwaukee to start counting its absentee ballots until the polls open on election day. A bipartisan bill that would have allowed them to start counting earlier was never brought to a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So, the Republicans blocked a bill that would fix the very thing they complain about. Why? Because it gives them something to blame in every statewide election they lose. 

My final bottom line: Let’s not do this anymore. It no longer works to elect our Supreme Court justices. I’d like to amend the constitution so that the governor would make an appointment from a list vetted by the State Bar Association. That appointment should be for a single 10-year term, although a subsequent governor could reappoint, and with Senate approval. 

Let’s move on to the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. I’m tempted to say simply “see above.” Voters who show up to vote for Crawford will vote for incumbent Jill Underly while those who vote for Schimel will also cast a ballot for her challenger Brittany Kinser. 

I’ll be the rare exception as I’ll vote for Crawford and Kinser. But I’m also rare in that I’ve actually met Kinser. Her campaign reached out to me to see if I’d talk with her, so I took them up on it. I found her to be energetic and smart and she seems to truly care about kids. And she has an interesting background having worked as a special ed teacher in some of Chicago’s toughest public schools. She was once a teachers union member and an opponent of charter schools and vouchers. She came around after seeing those things in practice. 

I pushed her on her political background and concluded that she’s sincere in describing herself as a sort of middle-of-the road Democrat. She’s getting a lot of Republican backing simply because she’s not the Democratic-backed Underly, but I don’t think Kinser’s a Republican and certainly not a Trumpy Republican. 

And she says she’s running for the very reason that I’m looking for an alternative to Underly. Late last year Underly changed the way test scores are reported. The result is that more students look proficient at grade level even though their actual performance hasn’t changed. Even Tony Evers, who once held Underly’s job, said he thought that she could have handled that better then she did. It also looks suspicious to me since Underly made the change only months before her reelection. 

You can read Underly’s explanation here and decide for yourself. But I don’t think most voters will bother. They’ll get the message that Underly is backed by Democrats and teachers unions and Kinser is backed by Republicans and affiliated groups and that’s all they’ll need to know. It’s a simple case of guilt (or virtue) by association. 

All of which is to say it’s very likely it’ll be Crawford/Underly or Schimel/Kinser. But if the court race is very close it’s possible that the Superintendent race could go the other way. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Crawford and Kinser or Schimel and Underly could win, but again, it seems to me that this could only happen if the margin in the court race is razor thin because the number of crossover voters will be very small. 

My bottom line: Underly wins a second term. I’m betting that Crawford will win by two or three points and there just won’t be enough Crawford-Kinser crossovers, like me, to pull Kinser through. 

Finally, there’s a constitutional amendment on the ballot. This one would put into the constitution the same voter identification provisions which are already in state law. You may ask why. Good question. The answer is that Republicans thought they could use this issue to gin up the vote for Schimel. That seems kind of quaint now since nobody’s going to show up to vote on this obscure amendment and since TMS is so much more effective anyway. 

My bottom line: It’ll pass overwhelmingly. The voter ID stuff is popular everywhere except Dane County. The ballot question will go down here and maybe in a handful of smaller counties, but it’ll pass by big margins everywhere else. And nothing will change. And it will have had no impact on the court race. 

So, there you have it, folks. I think the odds are slightly in favor of Crawford and Underly and strongly in favor of the voter ID question. And if I’m right about the Supreme Court, this will be followed by a Trumpian outburst over voter fraud in Milwaukee. 

But the main thing is that it’ll all be mercifully over.

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