The DK Elections post earlier today by Steve about the Wisconsin recall election results helpfully featured a table with the results of each recall race side-by-side with the results of the 2010 gubernatorial and senate races in those respective districts. I thought I'd expand a little on that and also throw in the results of the 2011 Supreme Court elections and the 2008 federal Presidential elections in the recall districts, which DK Elections helpfully provided in yesterday's in-depth preview.
The result is this Google Spreadsheet, which compares the results of the recall races with the results of those four preceding elections in the same districts, and calculates by how much the Democratic recall candidates outperformed or underperformed the average of those four races.
There's basically three categories:
1) The Democratic candidate performed relatively strongly - or the Republican candidate weakly, of course! - in the King vs Hopper and Clark vs Olsen races. There, King and Clark did 12% resp. 5% better than the average. In King's case I think we can largely credit Hopper's scandals for that.
2) The performance of the Democratic and Republican candidates corresponded very closely to the average of those four recent races in the Pasch vs Darling and Schilling vs Kapanke races.
3) The Democratic candidate performed relatively weakly (or the Republican candidate strongly), compared to recent history, in the Moore vs Harsdorf and Nusbaum vs Cowles races. Moore and Nusbaum did 8% resp. 10% worse than the average Democratic result mentioned above for their district.
All in all it seems like Clark deserves the most sympathy. He did 5% better in his district than Kloppenburg earlier this year, and 12% better than either Feingold or Barrett in 2010 .. but it still wasn't enough.