Looking now like David Prosser will hold on to a narrow victory in the final count with about 50.2% of the vote.
From the Huffington Post, a map showing the county-by-county change from Scott Walker’s share of the vote to David Prosser’s. The image on the original post has a nice mouse-over where you can see the actual numbers. At first glance, the picture doesn’t bode well for Wisconsin politics — the most Democratic parts of the state got more Democratic, and the most Republican parts got more Republican. (Or so it looks — I didn’t, y’know, actually make a spreadsheet.) Combined with the inevitable bitterness that follows a close election, I think we’re looking at another couple of years of state politics carried out in Manichean deathmatch mode. People with direct knowledge tell me the State Supreme Court has been operating that way for years already.
And here’s a map showing the geographic distribution of ethnicities in Wisconsin in 1900. The Democratic/Republican line from northwest to southeast is also the Norwegian/German line.
Thanks for the maps! I’ve always wondered if there was some correlation between ethnic background and political attitudes in this state. Although this map of ethnicity is over a hundred years old and patterns may have changed somewhat since then, one can speculate that the spatial distribution of political attitudes, while originally determined by ethnicity, has remained stable over a long period of time even with ethnic shifts because attitudes are also highly influenced by the community that you move into. It would be quite amazing if we are still influenced by 100 year old patterns.
The parties have switched, but the maps are identical http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/PresidentialCounty1892.gif
Proud to Stand with Walker