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Tony Palmeri, the Green candidate for State Senate in Oshkosh, WI, is running in the heart of the Republican Fox Valley, and apparently having a field day registering new voters in economically-depressed areas of Oshkosh. There is apparently plenty of low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Now, this is not to say he'll win, or even come close, but the point is that the Greens are doing yeoman's work in a part of Wisconsin that the Democrats have largely abandoned. I think it's likely that these new voters will vote Democrat in their presidential preference, even if they vote for Tony in the local race.
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We had our fall primaries yesterday, and in trying to get state matching funds for our State Senate candidates, we knew we had to get 6% of the primary vote. Since the race here in Madison is between a Green and a Dem, neither with a primary opponent, we tried to turn out our base. Looking at past uncontested primary elections involving this same Democrat, it looked like usually about 1,500 people got off their asses to actually vote in the primary. So our target, we thought, was reachable... if we can get about 110 people to vote Green in the primary, we get state matching funds! Easy enough.
The good news is that we got over 400 people to vote for us. The bad news is that we came in just under the 6% mark, because over 8,500 people turned out to vote for the Democrat!! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, people... that's a five-fold increase in voter participation in an uncontested primary!!
I think whatever we know about "likely voters" in this election is going to have to be thrown out the window. I'm just offering this up as one small piece of quantitative data concerning how motivated the Democratic base is in this swing state. Of course, keep in mind this is Madison, home of angry liberals.
