Talk Elections

I'm not sure what if anything else I'm going to do with this thread but I wanted somewhere to post this map of Madison, WI by ward with 2012 presidential results (by 2-party Obama vote):

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Obama won every ward. His strongest areas were the eastern end of the isthmus and near east side.

Romney's best area was the Far West Side and to a lesser extent the Far East Side and campus. Interestingly, Madison is liberal enough that the campus area is relatively one of the more Republican parts of town. There were three wards where Obama was under 60%: two on the far west side and one on campus (and as far as I can tell the one on campus has only dorm buildings as far as residential buildings are concerned).

Nice - I was wondering about a map like this, but all the ward changes after the census made Dave's App unusable for the purpose.

very cool map. I'm not surprised that the campus isn't the most liberal area of the city, probably because there are a lot of college kids there from the conservative areas of Wisconsin. Athens, GA is the same way. The most liberal areas of town tend to be where the native Athenians are, not the college kids.

I know this isn't a presidential result, but this thread still seems like the most logical place to post it.

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Here's the 2013 Supreme Court race that took place last week in the spring election. The incumbent conservative Pat Roggensack won by about 15 points statewide, though the liberal challenger Ed Fallone still easily carried Madison. Unlike in the presidential race, the conservative actually won three wards: a suburban one on the far west side of town, one on UW Madison's campus, and a third with the airport in it that only had 3 votes (which Roggensack won 2-1). The strength of the left was well maintained in most of the liberal areas nearer to the capital, but eroded by low turnout in the heavily minority areas to the south and on UW Madison's campus. Also, the far west side voted more conservatively in this race than during the last presidential election.

Almost all Madison maps are variations of the above, but the 2011 mayoral election involved a very different pattern. The incumbent Dave Ciezlewicz was very narrowly (50-49) defeated by challenger (though former mayor) Paul Soglin. Here Soglin is in red and Cieslewicz is in blue; the deepest shade is 65+ so things are not drastically polarized. Both candidates would be very much on the left in a national context but their appeal split along basically town-gown, class-based lines because of differences in emphasis between traditional D economic themes and more environmental/urbanist ones.

Generally, the overall pattern is basically that:
- academic-oriented areas (most obviously the campus but also the professorial neighborhoods to its west) went clearly for Cieslewicz
- the south side minority neighborhoods and the traditionally somewhat more working-class areas on the north and east sides went clearly for Soglin
- areas that are basically white-collar but only moderately university-oriented (the ultra-D isthmus and west side suburbia) tended to be very close.

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(made with Dave's Redistricting App)

One of the main things this shows is how Madison/Dane County needs to clean up their municipality lines!

Also that ward on campus is home to the two nicest dorms on campus and I think they cost the most too. Not surprising they are more conservative :p

Madison is up there with Columbus interms of messed up municipality lines. Though, Columbus is in a league of its own.

There still are a lot of townships that are slowly getting eaten up. The Town of Madison, which is between Madison and Fitchburg, though an agreement between the two cities, will be gone by 2020. I'm also guessing that a lot of Blooming Grove and Burke to the east of Madison will be gone too.   

Do you have precinct result data from Milwaukee County, or Waukesha County, both of those would be very interesting, also the reason the eastern side is more democratic is because more native Madison people live there instead of Campus kids, on top of that there is more minority vote overall, even though Madison is a white city.

First of all, welcome to the forum! :)

I don't have a map of either on hand, but here are the tabulated results for Milwaukee County (http://county.milwaukee.gov/ElectionResults23729/2012-Election-Results.htm) and Waukesha County (http://www.waukeshacounty.gov/defaultwc.aspx?id=38109). If you want a quick and easy way to look at the political demography, Dave's Redistricting App (http://gardow.com/davebradlee/redistricting/davesredistricting2.0.aspx) has 2008 presidential data for Wisconsin.


This is part of it certainly, except I don't think the minority populations make much difference in the vote totals on the east side. The south side is the area of Madison where the minority vote is most influential. Part of the east-west difference is class-based with the traditionally white collar parts of Madison on the west side and working class neighborhoods on the east side. The east side, particularly on the isthmus and just east of it has a sort of progressive scene atmosphere. The Willy Street area, for instance, is one of the few overwhelmingly white neighborhoods in this part of the country where you'll find where Obama had ~93-94% of the two party vote in 2012.

I think you hit the nail on the head about the west side having more people who aren't originally from Madison living there. The west side has a lot of development in the city that is quite suburban and full of transplants. Of course since it's Madison suburban development, it can mostly be expect to be around 65% D, but that's lower than almost all of Madison. Right now I live on the far west side, and ironically where I live now is more Republican than where I lived before (Cleveland Heights, Ohio). In a few months, I'll be moving over to the east side though, which certainly won't be...  ;)

Actually the main minority neighborhoods in Madison are in the southern part of the city near Fitchburg. Also here is the Wisconsin voting data for 2012:

http://gab.wi.gov/elections-voting/results/2012/fall-general (http://gab.wi.gov/elections-voting/results/2012/fall-general)

Thank you so much for this stuff, really appreciate it. The part just north of Fitchburg has the most Hispanics, but there's also a lot of Hispanics just east of Maple Bluff that I was talking about so thanks for pointing that out. What's ironic about Madison is the Isthmus right between the two lakes is the most liberal part of the city, and quite possibly the most white.

Here's the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary map for Madison:

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Santorum is in green, Romney in red, and Paul in yellow.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, Santorum actually won Madison by a decent sized margin over Romney. Paul and Gingrich also received non-negligible vote totals (Bachmann and Huntsman were also on the ballot but received very few votes).

Romney's strength, unsurprisingly, is on the wealthier parts of the far west side. Romney won all of the areas that are vaguely close to a Republican winning in a general election. Paul won the campus area but with rather underwhelming totals; few students bothered to vote at all.

While Romney and Paul had very little support outside their niche areas, Santorum actually had a fairly strong baseline everywhere. He was in second in most of the precincts he didn't win. Santorum's support is perhaps the most interesting thing about this map: He managed to win most of the blue collar east side neighborhoods solidly and the less wealthy parts of the west side.

Of course, the question is how many of Santorum's voters are actually voting for him unironically? (It is Madison after all :P) If you look at the Willy Street area, the Republican primary has suspiciously oh, maybe 6x the number of voters who actually voted for Romney in November ;). And Santorum won the most liberal parts of the isthmus handily. On the other hand, I have some doubts that Santorum's success in the less hip blue collar parts of the east side is ironic voting, so it's possible he still would have won Madison anyway.

As a rather weird anecdote, the two people I know who live in the Willy Street area would probably be unironic Santorum voters, but then again I have a rather severe sampling bias. It's an area so liberal that one has to simply wonder, who are the Republicans there?

I was visting grad schools during the primary, but if I was back home I would have voted for Santorum. :p

Thanks, I actually use Dave's App 2.2 all the time but I just wish I could find that kind of thing for 2012. Also thanks for explaining a little more on Madison, since you live in Madison you ought to know more...

2014 Spring Primary Non-Binding Marijuana Legalization Referendum:

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Pro-pot in red, anti-pot in blue

Dane County voted again on Tuesday to advise the state of Wisconsin to legalize marijuana. The map of the vote was a little different than the general partisan breakdown in Madison. Some of the hyper-liberal crunchy granola wards only voted ~90% in favor of legalized pot and numerous "suburban" wards actually voted against it, some of them are normally more conservative, but the east side one was unexpected (and had a fairly high turnout). Campus is typically one of the more conservative parts of Madison, but not when it comes to spring pot referendums. Marijuana was over 90% in several campus precincts where Romney had 30-40% of the vote. The 54th ward was still the most conservative campus precinct, but campus was pro-pot overall by a wide enough margin that the 54th doesn't stick out from the non-campus precincts surrounding it.

Edited to add the note that the turnout on campus was incredibly low.

I had no idea there was a marijuana referendum of any sort in Wisconsin (though if this is county-wide only, I suppose that's not a surprise).

How much weight does this carry, TJ?

Absolutely none. Dane County just likes to pass non-binding resolutions like this for progressives to feel like they're making a statement.

I've decided to finally post the 2014 WI Governor results in the city of Madison:

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This election followed most of the general partisan trends within Madison: the most Republican parts being the far west side and the UW Madison campus, while the most liberal areas were still the isthmus and near east side. Burke won every ward in the city.

However, this election was noticeably different from normal in that the far west side usually has the most Republican wards, but this time the most Republican wards were on campus. Walker actually managed to hold Burke under 50% in one of the campus wards (Ward 56). Burke won that ward 656-632 (49.6%-48.0%). Also, in recent years Ward 54, has been the most Republican campus ward (Burke won it with 51%), so that's slightly different.

Here is the 2012-2014 Gubernatorial swing map:

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The total two party vote in Madison swung 0.03% toward Walker, so the swing is basically the same as the trend within Madison. However, distribution was not close to even. The vast majority of the wards swung toward Burke while the campus and surrounding areas swung dramatically toward Walker to offset the marginal changes in the rest of the city. Walker outperformed his 2012 numbers by at least 6% in every campus ward except for Ward 57, which is the one red spot in the middle of the dark blue. I'm not sure what's going on with that ward or why it trended so differently than everything else around it.

Another notable feature is that most of the minority heavy wards trended toward Walker. They also had lower turnout in 2014. The dark red large ward in the northeast is the airport ward, which went from voting for Barrett 4 votes to 1 to voting for Burke 6 votes to 0. So that entire trend is from two voters :P

So overall it was a roughly uniform swing of 2-3 points toward the Dems everywhere except campus, and a swing on campus around 10 points toward Walker that cancelled out the changes elsewhere.

2016 Republican Presidential Primary:

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Any takers for which color is who?

I already know, so I won't spoil anyone else's fun, but this map does a good job of also exposing some of the socioeconomic differences in the city.

Kasick is obviously purple.

And my guess is that red is Trump, and yellow-orange is Cruz. Looking at google map aerials, that is what the housing stock appearance suggests to me.

Actually Cruz is red and Trump is yellow.

Kasich won the campus, downtown, and inner liberal gentry areas. Trump won many of the more working class parts of the city. Cruz won the outer suburban family areas.

The east side vs west side split between Cruz and Trump follows socioeconomic lines fairly well, as does Trump winning the poorer south side of the city. I was a little surprised at how far west Kasich's success extended, he did quite well in some of the upscale family neighborhoods on the far west side. I was also a little surprised that Cruz won the somewhat less desirable SW side, though it certainly helps that the two largest clumps of questionable apartments are excised in their own wards (see the two yellow spots in the SW).

My ward voted marginally for Kasich over Cruz with Trump in a distant third. Trump was barely in double digits across the isthmus and campus areas; they were his worst in the entire city. It does not appear many people ratf-ed us and Trump is incredibly toxic to pretty much every Republican I know in this town (unsurprising since my social connections tend to be heavily educated and my close friends religious).

My old ward on the west side went for Cruz and is basically all apartments occupied by young professionals. I might have predicted Kasich before looking, but, judging by the surrounding wards, Cruz seems to have done better in most of the young professional apartment complexes on the west side.