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Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court docket election was the costliest U.S. courtroom race in historical past, drawing greater than $100 million in marketing campaign spending.
That eye-popping determine has drawn loads of headlines — as did the hundreds of thousands spent by billionaire Elon Musk to assist Republican-backed Waukesha County Decide Brad Schimel, who misplaced handily to Dane County Decide Susan Crawford, backed by Democrats.
However the race additionally set one other file in Wisconsin for a spring election not that includes a presidential major contest: in voter turnout.
Greater than 2.3 million individuals forged ballots within the election, in keeping with Related Press monitoring. That quantities to almost 51% of the voting age inhabitants, shattering the earlier file for such elections of 39% in 2023.
The excessive turnout is a part of a pattern in Wisconsin politics since President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, Marquette College’s John Johnson wrote in an evaluation final week.
“Wisconsin’s voters is simply plain extraordinarily engaged,” he wrote. “Scour American historical past and also you’ll wrestle to seek out an instance of (a) state as hyper-engaged with, and narrowly divided by, electoral politics as Wisconsin within the current second.”
Final week’s election supplied excellent news for Democrats, except for the top-line figures in Crawford’s 55%-45% win. (The Supreme Court docket is formally nonpartisan, however Democrats backed Crawford, whereas Republicans backed Schimel.)
When evaluating the high-turnout 2024 presidential election to the newest Supreme Court docket race, voting shifted towards the Democratic-backed candidate in all 72 counties.
The most important distinction within the newest election, in keeping with Johnson: “A majority of the million voters who stayed dwelling are most likely Republicans, or at the very least Trump supporters.”
Extra broadly, it’s clear that the excessive stakes of the Supreme Court docket race drove most to forged ballots in an election that additionally included an formally nonpartisan contest for state superintendent of public instruction and a profitable poll measure to enshrine voter ID necessities within the Wisconsin Structure.
Practically 200,000 individuals who forged ballots didn’t select a superintendent candidate. Democratic-backed incumbent Jill Underly prevailed over Republican-backed Brittany Kinser by a 53%-47% margin — nearer than the Supreme Court docket race.
Moreover, about 76,000 voters didn’t weigh in on the voter ID modification.
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