With just days left until Wisconsin voters go to the polls on Nov. 6, campaigns are in are in high gear. When it comes to the race for U.S. Senate between Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin and her challenger Republican Leah Vukmir, most polls suggest Baldwin has the edge.
Between August and mid-October, more than $20 million was spent on television ads for both candidates in the race for U.S. Senate and governor of Wisconsin. But is the money having the impact hoped for?
Chris Murray, a political scientist at Marquette University’s Les Aspin Center for Government, says the ads likely are not wooing people from side to the other.
“One of the things that we’ve been seeing in terms of peoples voting behavior is that it is becoming very, very stable and that people who vote Democratic consistently vote Democratic. And people who vote Republican consistently vote Republican,” Murray says.
He says the percentage of people who are undecided is small and getting smaller. And he says this Senate race — like most races across the country — are more about Democrat versus Republican and not who’s actually on the ticket.
“Normally, when you’re looking at an election, you think about the individual candidates and their particular qualities and the type of campaigns that they’re running and the amount of money that they’re raising. And especially, kind of their connection to the state or the district that they’re from. And those things have kind of traditionally decided who wins. But what’s been happening lately is all of these traditionally localized races have been become nationalized,” Murray says.
He says that because of the partisan nature of things today, what’s going to be most important is turn out. Midterm turnout is typically around 20 points lower than presidential years.
“If you’re Sen. Baldwin, what I think you have to be really heartened by is if you look at the Wisconsin primary earlier this year, in places in Wisconsin where she is very strong, namely Dane County, was much higher than it had been in previous years. So, she needs to count on that continuing. And if you’re Leah Vukmir, what you need to hope for is extremely high turnout in Waukesha County, Ozaukee County, Washington County,” Murray says.
He says counties where Vukmir did well in her primary win, she needs to do even better in to have a chance at unseating Baldwin. Nationally, while Wisconsin isn’t as important as Nevada and Arizona and Tennessee, UW-Madison political scientist David Canon says, people are watching.
“Republicans, if they are going to be hanging on to the Senate — which is looking fairly likely at this — if they would pick up Wisconsin that would pretty much assure the Republican control of the Senate. Whereas if Democrats want to have any hope of picking up majority control of the Senate, they have to hang on to Wisconsin because that’s not even one of their most vulnerable races,” Canon says.
Now, exactly how likely are Democrats to pick up those two seats in the Senate? Not likely, political scientists say. What’s more likely, according to some experts is Democrats picking up the 23 seats needed to take over the House.
