Is there hope for winning another Dem house seat in Wisconsin? Now we have new data and an analysis, DisplacedYankee Democrat.
DisplacedYankeeDemocrat raised the issue of winning another House seat in Wisconsin earlier this week in a diary on potential House seats in several states. DYD pinpointed Wisconsin's 5th, 6th, and 8th districts, although DYD noted it was educating guessing without data.
Now we have the data, as reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today in "a revealing portrait of the political makeup of Wisconsin" in terms of how the votes for House seats aligned -- or didn't align -- with the presidential votes.
"The most competitive district" with surprisingly abbreviated coattails was -- and this is not good news -- Democrat David Obey's 7th district in northern Wisconsin, carried by only a percentage point (50 percent to 49 percent) by Kerry. The Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert writes that "Obey's district was one of only 13 nationally that were decided by a point or less.
"The Wisconsin results are in keeping with a national trend in which fewer and fewer districts split their vote between Congress and president," he writes. "Experts say the trend reflects polarization along party lines among voters, and that fact that both parties" -- but the Repug legislature in Wisconsin's case -- have redrawn districts to make them safer for their incumbents."
Or, in this case, for Obey's next challenger.
"Kerry's other two victories came in the state's core Democratic areas," writes Gilbert, both safely liberal districts -- and both held by the only women ever to go to Congress from Wisconsin (the last state with a woman in Congress, and not until the eve of this millennium, I would add, making both of these women even more amazing and worth watching):
Tammy Baldwin's 2nd district (Madison), which went 67 percent to 32 percent for Kerry, and
Gwen Moore's 4th district (Milwaukee), which went 70 percent to 30 percent for Kerry.
However, "Bush carried the four GOP-held House districts" by wide margins as well, although two are districts where DYD holds hope. DisplacedYankeeDemocrat, I hope you sign back on to remind us of what's not in today's Journal Sentinel story toward another interesting discussion!
Here are the four House districts in Wisconsin held by the GOP, with presidential vote percentages:
R. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.'s 5th district, which went 63 percent to 36 percent for Bush.
Tom Petri's 6th district, which went 57 percent to 43 percent for Bush.
Mark Green's 8th district, which went 55 percent to 44 percent for Bush.
Paul Ryan's 1st district, which went 54 percent to 45 percent for Bush.
How does this compare to elsewhere in the country? Gilbert writes that "only 41 districts, many of them in the South, voted Democratic for U.S. House and Republican for president. Only 18 districts, many of them in the Northeast, voted" the opposite. I wish I could add more analysis from Polidata, a Virginia firm that compiled the data and report, but its website is down today after a crash, it says, so I suspect their analyses for other states also sent a lot of other folks to the site.
