Mar.31

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

There Are Key Elections Tomorrow in Multiple States

Not all regularly scheduled elections happen in November. States and municipalities are free to schedule local elections whenever they please. Only federal officeholders must, by law, be elected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Tomorrow there will be several elections around the country, some with national significance.

• Wisconsin: The highest-profile and most important election is for a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley decided not to run for a fourth term, leaving the Court divided between three liberal justices and three conservatives. The race is nominally nonpartisan, but Democrats are supporting Dane County Judge Susan Crawford and Republicans are supporting former state AG Brad Schimel. Crawford has been endorsed by Barack Obama; Schimel has been endorsed by Donald Trump. Elon Musk has poured over $20 million into the race. That shows you how nonpartisan it really is, but Crawford has also raised plenty of grassroots money.
  
  Wisconsin was the closest swing state last November, with Trump beating Kamala Harris by 0.86%. This is the first time since Inauguration Day that voters statewide in a swing state will get a chance to vote. Virtually everyone is going to interpret the results as a proxy vote on the Musk/Trump administration, not about which judge is better. If Crawford wins in a landslide, as did Janet Protasiewicz in 2023, it will be a black eye for Trump and especially for Musk since his strategy of trying to buy the election will have failed.
  
  Oh, in addition to buying TV ads, Musk is also trying to buy data about potential Republican voters to get them to the polls tomorrow. Any registered Wisconsin voter who signs his petition against activist judges can get $100. In addition, Musk planned to give two lucky signers a $1 million prize at a rally yesterday. Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul (D) said that was an illegal lottery and sued to stop it. Last Friday, Columbia County Circuit Judge Andrew Voight rejected Kaul's suit, but Kaul appealed it. The appeals court turned him down and Musk duly handed out checks for $1 million to people who signed up for his apparently-not-illegal lottery. Expect Musk to use this tactic in every election important to him in the future.
  
  The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to get cases on abortion, gerrymandering, unions, and election rules this year or next, making it crucial who wins this seat for the future of Wisconsin.
  
  And this is not the only election in Wisconsin tomorrow. There is also a statewide one for superintendent of schools. Given how controversial the schools have become, this is also a biggie. The current superintendent, Jill Underly, who is running for reelection, is backed by the teachers' union and Democrats. Her opponent is Brittany Kinser, who has worked for a national network of charter schools. She is backed by Republicans. The two have clashed over public funding for private schools. Not surprisingly, Kinser supports vouchers and Underly opposes them.
  
  We're not done yet. Deep-blue Dane County (Madison) will elect a county executive. Melissa Agard is a former Democratic state legislator running against Stephen Ratzlaff, who claims he is an independent (because no Republican has a chance in Dane County). Agard wants to expand the safety net in the light of all of Donald Trump's cuts. Ratzlaff wants to cut it even more and wants county officials to cooperate with ICE to catch and deport undocumented immigrants.
  
  Winnebago County, a swing county in a swing state, will also elect a county executive. Incumbent Joe Doemel is supported by the Republicans. Gordon Hintz was formerly leader of the state House Democrats. The DOGE cuts have hit the county hard so they could affect the race, as Hintz is blaming the Republicans and Doemel for them.
  
  And there is still more afoot in Wisconsin. There is a ballot measure to enshrine the state's voter ID law in the state Constitution. This would not change the status quo, but would prevent a future Democratic trifecta from modifying or abolishing it. Democrats claim that it disenfranchises thousands of voters who don't have an approved ID. Crawford has long opposed the ID law and Schimel has praised it for clinching the state for Trump.
  
  All four races and the ballot measure are nominally nonpartisan, but that doesn't fool anyone. If either side runs the table, that will certainly be an indication of how the wind is blowing.
  
  
• Florida House Seats: Now on to Florida, where two House seats are at stake. The House is currently 218R, 213D, with four vacancies—two in deep-blue districts and two in deep-red districts. FL-01 is Matt Gaetz' old seat at the end of the panhandle, just south of Alabama and politically indistinguishable from it. The district elected Gaetz, after all. In 2024, Gaetz beat Gay Valimont by 22 points, in line with the R+19 PVI. She is running again, this time against the state's CFO Jimmy Patronis. Valimont's full name is Jennifer Gay Valimont. We are slightly surprised, given today's political climate, that she is not running as Jennifer (or Jen or Jenny) Valimont. She was born in 1973, before "gay" was a widely used word.
  
  The district is home to both Naval Air Station Pensacola and Eglin Air Force Base and is one of the most Republican districts in the state. All four counties have voted Republican in presidential elections for 65 years, except for 1968, when all four went for George Wallace. We did mention Alabama, didn't we? Trump got 68% of the vote in the district last year. An upset here would be earthshaking, but if Valimont can keep Patronis' win to single digits, that would also send a message.
  
  The other race is in FL-06, Mike Waltz' safe seat that he foolishly gave up to become NSA, probably for 2-3 months. It is on the Atlantic Coast and includes Daytona Beach. Republicans have carried all six counties in the past four presidential elections. The PVI is only R+14, but Waltz overperformed the fundamentals, beating Democrat James Stockton by 33 points in November. Nevertheless, a recent poll has teacher Josh Weil (D) only 3 points behind state Sen. Randy Fine (R). If Fine wins by only 3 points, that would be an earthquake, given the nature of the district and its past voting pattern. Democrats across the country have poured millions of dollars into Weil's race and he has outspent Fine 10:1. And remember, special elections are low-turnout wonky affairs.
  
  
• Mayors: Six cities in five states are electing mayors in April, four of them tomorrow. Aurora, the second most populous city in Illinois, is among the places where voters will elect a new mayor Tuesday. Incumbent Richard Irvin (R) is quite Trumpy. He faces a challenge from alderman John Laesch (D), who is a frequent critic. Laesch wants the city to adopt an ordinance protecting immigrants from ICE. Irvin opposes it.
  
  Evanston, IL, also has a mayoral election tomorrow. Like the Wisconsin races, it is ostensibly nonpartisan. And like those races, everyone knows the candidates' party affiliations. Progressive Democratic mayor Daniel Biss wants another term. He is supported by Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL). Housing and zoning are big issues here. His opponent is Democrat Jeff Boarini.
  
  Omaha, NE, is also up for grabs tomorrow. Republican Jean Stothert wants a fourth term. The primary tomorrow has many contenders including Mike McDonnell, a former state senator who switched from (D) to (R) last year. He wants to ramp up policing. Two Democrats, John Ewing and Jasmine Harris, are also running. The top two candidates will advance to a runoff in May.
  
  Jackson, MS, is also holding an election for mayor tomorrow. Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a socialist, has been mayor since 2017 in this heavily Black city. However, he has been indicted on corruption charges for taking bribes. Opponents smell blood in the water, as 11 Democrats have filed to run against him in the primary. And all this is going on in an environment in which state Republicans are trying to usurp local control away from the city.
  
  Later this month, two other cities will elect mayors. St. Louis is the bigger one; it will elect a mayor a week from tomorrow. The city uses a "jungle primary" system, similar to California's except everyone is officially nonpartisan. That said, everyone knows the top two finishers are both Democrats. Mayor Tishaura Jones has the advantage of incumbency, but she nonetheless faces an uphill race against Cara Spencer, who got twice as much support in the March primary. Jones is Black and Spencer is white. They also faced off 4 years ago, when Jones won 51%-47%. St. Louis is constantly fighting off state Republicans, who recently took over control of the local police force. It is a recurrent theme that Republicans strongly support local control—except when a Democratic city wants to do something that the Republican-controlled state legislature does not like. Then local control is bad.
  
  A week later, on April 15, Oakland, CA, will hold an election. One of the top candidates is Barbara Lee, who represented Oakland and Berkeley in Congress since roughly forever until she got the hare-brained idea to run for the Senate against two gigantic powerhouses, now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and former Rep. Katie Porter. Lee wants a universal basic income for homeless people. Lee's main opponent is Loren Taylor, a former member of the Oakland city council.
  
  
• School boards: It used to be that school board elections were sleepy affairs that no one cared much about except maybe the candidates, and maybe not even them. Now school boards are very political. Immoral books in the library! Boys in girls' showers after gym class! Gay teachers! In Anchorage, AK, one of the school board candidates, Alexander Rosales, posted "Ban trans kids" on social media. He also endorsed right-wing positions on LGBTQ+ issues. Why can't the Alaskans focus on local issues, like whether school cafeterias should serve polar bear burgers for lunch? Rosales is running against incumbent Margo Bellamy.
  
  In another school board race in Anchorage, Mark Cox also opposes inclusive policies for kids, although he is not as inflammatory as Rosales. He is running against incumbent Kelly Lessens. The school board is under financial pressure. The incumbents are working to try to get more funding. The challengers want deeper cuts and want to condition funding on performance (e.g. no funding for a kid who tried really hard but failed the tests).
  
  Back to Wisconsin again. There are also school board elections in Kenosha and Green Bay. Conservatives have long wanted to ban LGBTQ-themed books from classrooms and school libraries. There are also battles over DEI language in job descriptions. There are multiple seats up in both cities. Democrats and Republicans have competing slates of candidates in both places. Should be interesting, especially due to the expected high turnout on account of the Supreme Court election.

In short, with elections in multiple parts of the country, we might get some feeling about whether these are elections about the Musk/Trump administration or merely local elections about local issues. (V)