There's been a lot of speculation, much of it wrong, about why Kathleen Falk lost the Wisconsin Attorney General's race to JB Van Hollen. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." So join me to look at the facts in this race, and learn, to the extent possible, the truth about why this was the only statewide race we lost in Wisconsin this election cycle.
This was a Democratic wave election, and every statewide Democrat seemed to benefit except for Kathleen Falk. She significantly underperformed Governor Jim Doyle, and it cost her the race. Doyle received 7.3% more votes than Falk did. Had she been able to perform just one percentage point better she would have won the election. Here are the four main theories I've seen given to explain why Falk wasn't able to pick up those votes:
1. The "Blame Madison First" crowd, which includes a significant faction within the Democratic Party, claims that Falk lost because liberal Dane County (Madison) voters were mad she beat Lautenschlager in the primary, and withheld their votes to get even. This article in the Capital Times makes a slightly broader version of this claim: "Although Falk tried to reach out to Lautenschlager's supporters after the primary, Tuesday's results indicated that many of them did not come back to her."
2. A favorite among progressive bloggers is the belief that Falk lost because she didn't have a strong and consistent message, while Van Hollen did. To quote Folkbum, "The campaigns that won here in Wisconsin on Tuesday were the ones with the clear, unambiguous, crystalized messages... JB Van Hollen ran on a single clear message ... I want to fight crime! I'll get the terrorists! I'll clear out the illegal immigrants!" In Effect made a similar point.
3. The far left favors the "Doyle is so corrupt that voters wanted an AG who will keep an eye on him" theory. See this post from The Nate Report for example. Perhaps this will give away my own ideological leanings, but my belief that Falk wouldn't be able to effectively police Doyle was one of the biggest reasons why I supported Lautenschlager in the primary.
4. Kathleen Falk and her supporters complain that Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) simply bought the race with several million dollars of attack ads. This is a rather ironic claim since, as I showed here and here, the only reason Falk was even in this race was because she bought her primary victory over Peg Lautenschlager.
So let's look at the data and sort out these somewhat conflicting claims. There's a lot to consider, so I'm only going to present a summary here. Please see this post on my blog for the full details.
The map above shows Falk's underperformance relative to Doyle. A couple of things to look at. First, Falk did similarly in both Dane and Milwaukee Counties despite losing the primary in Dane County by 20% and winning it in Milwaukee County by 13%. If you visit my blog you'll see the map below side by side with a map of the primary results, and the patterns don't match. This pretty conclusively proves that the "Blame Madison First" (and all other liberals second) crowd is dead wrong when they try to imply that the left screwed Falk.
The numbers on the map show the seven media (TV) markets in Wisconsin. As you can clearly see, Falk's underperformance varied quite a bit in the different markets. She actually overperformed Doyle in three of the seven counties in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market, which is number 4 on the map. No TV ads ran in this market, so it shows us that Falk probably would have matched Doyle vote for vote in the absence of ads. In the La Crosse/Eau Claire market (#5) Falk did reasonably well, and my guess is that WMC didn't run many ads there, although the Van Hollen campaign did. The other markets clearly reflect the damage WMC's ad blitz did to Falk.
WMC spent more than both candidates combined, and probably more than both candidates and all the other independent groups put together. And all those attack ads ran in the last few weeks of the campaign. WMC just dominated the airwaves at the end, and it shows.
Lots more on my blog, as well as a good discussion in the comments. Check it out!