Milwaukee's Worst: How Same-Day Registration Abuse Taints Red Waves

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

I have resolved to continue being a watchman on the wall for America’s elections, and as such, I’ll be issuing comprehensive analysis of the 2024 election once the dust has settled and I’ve had sufficient time to analyze all outcomes.  I have long held the belief that an opportune time to apply 2020 election theft procedures would arise if it were clear Donald Trump would win this year’s election, sending his supporters into a celebration and causing them to ease their scrutiny into down ballot races.

I will not say the F Word (a different one than what you don’t want your kids to say) until I can surmise from statistical analysis that things are off, especially when it matches with behavior and the appearance of impropriety.  First world nations do not count votes in the wee hours of the morning and reverse races, but lo and behold, we are here again.  The first county I want to put on notice in 2024 is Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.

The biggest tell that something is off in Wisconsin is that Donald Trump is on track to win Iowa by more than 13 points.  Aside from my recent dunking on Ann Selzer and her bogus polling of Iowa, I’ve documented the correlation between Iowa and Wisconsin to great detail here.  Outstanding ballots aside, Trump is clinging to a narrow one-point margin in Wisconsin, which puts the Badger State on pace to be more than 12 points left of Iowa.

In the linked research piece above, I noted that in 1960, Wisconsin and Iowa both supported Nixon, with the former coming in 9.8 points left of the latter.  That is the widest gap in any direction between the states in the post-World War II era.  To find a gap wider than 9.8 points between the two states, one must travel back in time to 1936, in Franklin Roosevelt’s blowout reelection win.  In that year, in the middle of the Great Depression, Wisconsin was won by Roosevelt by 33.5%, and Iowa by 11.7%, for a delta of 21.8%.  The two states are linked so tightly together that they both fell off the 1980s GOP train together in 1988 in favor of Michael Dukakis, trended competitive in George W. Bush’s races, blew leftward to become blowout Obama wins, and then transformed into 2016 Trump states together.

In fact, current margins in southwest Wisconsin closely parallel Iowa’s 2024 results, which were overwhelmingly predictable by voter registration by party:

Here is how hard Trump’s performance in southwest Wisconsin has shifted right in a sample of key counties:

Grant County 5.9%

Lafayette County 6.6%

Green County 2.9%

Rock County 3.9%

La Crosse County 4.1%

Vernon County 3.0%

Crawford County 4.0%

Despite these gains in margin, I’m confident that the ballot collection networks were in full swing in Wisconsin, and in other battleground states (especially Georgia from the look of things).  This makes sense given that the media narrative in the weeks leading up to Election Day shifted to “Trump may win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.”

Harris is sitting on 1,666,346 ballots in Wisconsin, up from Biden’s enormous 1,630,866 output in 2020 and just shy of Barack Obama’s ballot count in 2008, when he won the state by 13.9% with McCain over 400,000 shy of Trump’s current totals in a state that is not gaining significantly in population.

In contrast, Harris lags Biden’s raw ballot count in Iowa by 56,544 (-7.4%), but somehow has gained 2.2% over Biden in Wisconsin with Trump himself pushing his total to insanely high numbers (with 46.5% as many votes as there are registered voters leading into Election Day) that had him sitting on a lead of about 4.0%, with over 51% of the vote, on Election Night – or just nine points to the left of Iowa, right about where Wisconsin came in to the left in 2016 (-8.4%) and 2020 (-8.8%).

As for regional metro areas, here are some 2020 to 2024 Harris comps:

Wayne County, Michigan -60,589 (-10.1%)

Marion County, Indiana -26,353 (-10.6%)

Lucas County, Ohio -13,024 (-11.3%)

Cuyahoga County, Ohio -50,415 (-12.1%)