Can the GOP Win a Statewide Election in Wisconsin?

In this week’s Isthmus, my friend and colleague Marc Eisen explores a very topical point: whether a Republican gubernatorial candidate can win in Wisconsin.  After all, it has been since 1984 that Wisconsin has voted for a Republican presidential candidate, and since 1998 that it elected a GOP governor.

In his conclusion, Eisen posits that it may be ultra-liberal Dane County that decides the election.  He says:

All this boils down to a curious brew in Wisconsin. Republican candidates who pull too hard to the right just can’t win a statewide election. They’re buried by the huge Democratic margin in Dane County…

Dane County’s hyper-Democratic turnout could be a dream killer for conservatives in 2010. What could counter it is a pervasive sense of economic insecurity next fall. Worried voters will look for candidates who they feel can turn things around. That alone could make conservatives triumphant.

But is that true?  Do statewide democratic candidates rack up insurmountable vote totals in the City of Madison and Dane County?

When explaining statewide Wisconsin elections to people, I’ve always simplified things by arguing that liberal Dane County and Conservative Waukesha County cancel each other out.  Then, it becomes an electoral battle between the City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin.  But am I right?

Let’s take a look at Dane vs. Waukesha Counties in the 2006 gubernatorial election, between Jim Doyle and Mark Green:

As can be seen above, Doyle out-polled Green by 40,518 votes in the two counties.  (Doyle won Dane County by 91,359, and Green won Waukesha by 50,841.)  That margin accounts for 1.9% of the total statewide vote.  Doyle eventually won statewide head-to-head with Green with 53.7% of the vote.

Yet there’s an important point to be made here:  2006 was a heavily democratic year. With the War in Iraq still on the minds of voters in the state, Doyle beat Green handily, Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate lost 4 seats (and their majority), and the State Assembly, in which the GOP had once held a double-digit lead in seats, came within a hair of switching to the Democrats.  (It eventually did in 2008.)

If the polling that we’re seeing now is correct, 2010 looks to be more ideologically balanced than the last two elections.  Perhaps Republicans may even have an edge, with the economy still in bad shape and voters turning against sweeping health care reform.

So let’s look at a more balanced election, and how the two counties match up in non-Democratic avalanche years.  Take the last Attorney General election, in which Republican J.B. Van Hollen narrowly edged Kathleen Falk:

In this more balanced matchup, it is clear that the two counties essentially did cancel each other out.  Between them, Falk ended up with a net gain of a scant 3,425 votes – or less than .2% of the statewide vote.

So if we do see a more ideologically balanced election, this seems to be more representative of what we’d be looking at.  Dane and Waukesha Counties duel to a draw, and Milwaukee and Wisconsin face off to pick the victor.

In the 2010 gubernatorial election, this is made even more interesting by the fact that the two most likely candidates are both local government officeholders in Milwaukee (Scott Walker and Tom Barrett.)  So, depending on how they split the vote in their home territory (and Walker should do much better than GOP candidates of years past, seeing as how he’s won 3 countywide elections there as a conservative), it will most likely come down to that last fish fry in Osceola.

(And yes, I am aware that Mark Neumann is still in the GOP field for governor, but there’s a better chance of Liberace showing up and playing at my next birthday party than there is of Neumann winning the GOP nomination.)