We had an interesting primary election for our state senate representative
here in Madison, Wisconsin last week. It was a 7-way split with nobody
taking the majority. The winner was a democrat, and the strongest
competitor was a young progressive from a black, Muslim, immigrant family.
Turnout was two times as high as it was for the last state senate primary
election at 38%.
The progressive candidate was endorsed by Ilhan Omar, Democratic Socialists
of America national and local chapters, The People for Bernie, and many
more organizations. Unfortunately she received almost no coverage in the
mainstream Wisconsin press. Madison is heralded as a liberal paradise, but
is home to the worst disparities in educational outcomes and incarceration
between black and white residents. A lot of focus has been paid in recent
years to awareness for this issue with little progress or substantive
measures taken. Despite Madison's outward pro-diversity image, the
progressive candidate was lambasted for her vocal and unapologetic support
of Black Lives Matter. She was present at and spoke at some protests.
A local independent arts and culture news outlet, Tone Madison, summed up
the race and turnout. There is some reference in the text to images of maps
that show the turnout in different neighborhoods, but the results shown in
the images are explained in the text. Also note the introduction says that
the primary winner will be the next state senator, she will be unopposed in
the general. Full text below and here's a link:
https://www.tonemadison.com/articles/mapping-turnout-and-power-in-madisons-big-state-senate-primary
Mapping turnout and power in Madison's big State Senate primary
Andrew Sernatinger
politics
What the results in the 26th District reveal about Madison's political
geography and the chances for upstart candidates.
The votes from the August 11 primary are in and Madison will have a new
State Senator in the 26th District: Kelda Roys. The competitive seven-way
Democratic primary was basically unheard of in Madison politics, and had
candidates genuinely representing different interests in the city.
On the one side you had candidates representing segments of the Democratic
establishment, with its interest in modest socially liberal policies and
capital-friendly economics: Kelda Roys, John Imes, and Amani Latimer
Burris. On the other, you had grassroots “progressive” Madison, represented
by Nada Elmikashfi, Brian Benford, and Aisha Moe. Then there was William
Henry Davis III, an underdog even among underdogs.
For the two “sides” in the election, each candidate represented a subset of
their base: Roys, for example, was able to win the real estate and
technology interests of the Democratic Party, while Benford could tap into
the progressivism of the 1990s that’s been pushed aside as Madison has
tried to lock down a neoliberal development model for the city, and
Elmikashfi appealed more to the younger crowd of millennials and zoomers,
as well as an impressive coalition of local community groups, nonprofits,
unions, and environmentalists. (I am a member of Madison's Democratic
Socialists of America chapter, which endorsed Elmikashfi.)
With so much going on in the race, the voting data can tell us a great deal
about the ongoing showdown between establishment Democrats and leftist
upstarts. Despite COVID-19, it was the highest turnout for the 26th
District in at least 20 years. Just shy of 50,000 voters participated—more
than double the number of ballots cast in 2016, when long-serving State
Senator Fred Risser ran unopposed. This year, Roys took the lead with
19,789 votes (40.2%), followed by Elmikashfi (26.8%), then Benford (9.5%),
Latimer Burris (8.9%), Moe (7.4%), Imes (6.2%), and lastly Davis (0.8%).
Roys took a plurality, but not a majority—60 percent of the votes cast in
the race were for someone other than the winner.
The race came down to Roys and Elmikashfi, who pulled ahead of the rest of
the pack as the only candidates with double-digit support. Roys and
Elmikashfi were the only two candidates to win wards in the district: Roys
55 to Elmikashfi’s 24.
Is this a vindication of establishment liberalism in Madison? If we pick
apart the numbers beyond the overall percentages, it reveals a much more
nuanced picture of Madison's political geography.
The above ward map shows the level of support for either Roys or Elmikashfi
(dark blue is strong Roys, dark orange is strong Elmikashfi). The first
thing you’d see is a typical east-west divide, but east-west doesn’t tell
us anything about the people who voted other than where they live.
Pair that instead with a map of income in the district, and you see
something much more interesting: the lower income wards tended to go to
Elmikashfi, and the higher income ones went for Roys. But there are more
poor people than wealthy people, so shouldn’t that have carried Elmikashfi?
Sure, if everyone voted, but they don’t: the less money you make, the less
likely you are to vote.
If we look at how many ballots were cast by ward, we’ll see something else
interesting: The poorest wards and the wards with the most Black and brown
residents had the lowest turnout in the city. What’s more, the wards
covering and adjacent to the UW-Madison campus had absolutely miserable
turnout: some as low as 48 votes total cast. Whether that’s from COVID-19
keeping students from sticking around or the fact that the primary happened
right before move-in week, it had the effect of suppressing the student
vote. The highest turnout was along the Isthmus (downtown and the near-east
side) and the west side closer to Middleton.
That should give us pause when thinking about the results. Even with double
the turnout, who turned out played out according to your class and race.
This isn’t to say only rich people voted, but the turnout doesn’t reflect
the city—it over-represents white people and people with more money.
Madison’s no different than the rest of the country in this respect.
For those who voted, why did they pick one candidate over another? We don’t
have any polling information to draw from. We could speculate about how the
Black Lives Matter movement, the Presidential election, or attitudes to the
candidates’ policies influenced the outcome, but actually the strongest
determinant of the outcomes was how much money each candidate raised.
There’s a 94% correlation between the money a candidate raised (as a
percent of total funds raised) to the percent of votes won. Basically, the
more money you raised, the more votes you got.
If we sort the candidates by the two sides (establishment/centrist vs.
grassroots/progressive), you notice something else. Grassroots candidates
outperformed compared to the establishment candidates: they won a share of
votes above their portion of the funds raised. The establishment candidates
(Roys, Latimer Burris, Imes) all got a lower return for their money. So
grassroots campaigns are more effective, dollar for dollar, but that
doesn’t matter if you’re running against someone with a shitload of money
to burn. Roys actually had among the worst ratios of money raised-to-votes
won, but she had so much money that she still won out over the other
candidates.
Why should this matter? We like to think that money isn’t everything, and
it is not the only thing; Brian Benford performed exceptionally well
considering his shoe-string budget. But in modern US politics without
publicly funded elections, you gotta pay to play. Money buys exposure and
the appearance of a professionalism that many voters look for to signal who
is a legitimate candidate and who isn’t.
Given the spread, one might ask if the election was “spoiled” by having too
many candidates. Would Elmikashfi have won if this race was just her and
Roys? Sadly, no. Assuming the two-sides dynamic holds up, it would have
been 56-44 for Roys—a much better spread for Elmikashfi, but there’s no
silver medal for second place. This is comparable to the April Presidential
Primary in Dane County, where Bernie Sanders took 40% to Joe Biden’s 55%.
Both Sanders and local grassroots candidates have the same problem: even if
your perspectives are widely popular, it's extremely difficult to activate
the new voters you’d need to win. Still, this is a testament to grassroots
organizing that they could provide a real alternative to business-as-usual
politics.