Election turnout, election analysis and a recount I knew would happen

I recently came across a Facebook post I’d made four years ago around the results of the 2024 election. One thing that baffled me when I did a little digging is that then mayor-elect Katie Rosenberg tweeted on April 13 her now famous “HOLY BALLS” tweet in response to winning.

I couldn’t square that with what I know about elections in Wisconsin - that spring elections are always the first Tuesday of the month of April. Why did she tweet this first on the 13th? My stories in the archive were from then too.

One thing I’d forgotten: That was in 2020 - there were so many absentee ballots that it took quite some time for them to be added up. Hence why the HOLY BALLS heard round Twitter came on April 13 when spring elections are always held the first Tuesday in April.

But then it led me to other interesting comparisons. This year 10,036 voted in the mayor’s race (adding both candidates plus 16 write-ins).

I looked at my election story from 2020 and Rosenberg defeated Bob Mielke 4,936 votes to 4,467. So there were 9,403 votes cast in the mayor’s race that year. That’s less than this year.

That makes comparisons between 2024 and 2020 interesting.

In 2020, roughly half the ballots were absentee since the city and state were still in lockdown because of COVID-19. And this year, weather was atrocious. Heavy snow flew and made getting to those election night parties a chore (well, only one; Rosenberg’s campaign closed her party to even the press, something I hadn’t seen in 20 years of news coverage).

I haven’t found too many obvious instructive patterns in the ward-level data yet. One theory was that Rosenberg won in high-turnout wards and Diny won in low turnout wards - but that didn’t pan out as Diny won several high-turnout wards. They also didn’t match partisan lean - sometimes Rosenberg won in a ward where a Republican challenger won on city council, and the same with Diny. (And yes, I know they’re non-partisan races but as I’ve argued before, the days of truly non-partisan races are long over.)

I hypothesized that the negative ads and all the statewide attention and money made voters weary. This was the first year I felt that myself - I couldn’t wait for the text messages, the mailbox stuffers and the social media ads to stop. It’s the first time I recall feeling that way about a local race. But that doesn’t explain the high turnout. So we dug a little deeper.