Road trip to Fargo

I turned 50 and, as I had long planned, I set foot in my 50th state, North Dakota, on my 50th birthday. It’s not far from Madison to Fargo, about 7 and a half hours drive, but I was a little intimidated; it’s been a long time since I drove more than four hours in a day, and I had questions about my 2001 Forester, which went from Madison to California and back in its youth but which is now, by some measures, an old car. But I needn’t have worried! Driving long distances, when you have the company of one of your kids, is not so bad. We listened to a lot of podcasts about the new MacBook Pro.

The first day, we didn’t see much; by the time CJ got home from school and we were ready to go, it was almost 4, so we drove through the familiar landscape of western Wisconsin, stopping for Culver’s in the suburban outskirts of Eau Claire, and stopped for the night at a Hampton Inn in Brooklyn Park. (Thanks to Hotel Tonight, the perfect app for road tripping, which allows you to easily book a cheap same-night hotel room when you feel you’ve got about two hours of driving left in you.) Nobody is wearing masks in Brooklyn Park, even though it’s in greater Minneapolis, not the hotel clerk, not the people in the gas station convenience store, nobody. It’s something you notice if you’re used to Madison (and we wore ours inside, without anybody looking at us funny.) The next morning, my birthday morning, we set out into western Minnesota, as the forests started to peter out into prairie. This part of I-94 is the land of pretty lakes, like Lake Osakis (the “sak” here is the same as “Sauk”)

and of unexpected roadside attractions

perhaps most notably the world’s largest prairie chicken, in Rothsay, MN.

All these pictures are by CJ, by the way. He has taken up photography. We got him a camera, an actual camera, which it turns out they still make, on the repeated promise that he would actually use it, and he’s lived up to that. He knows what all the buttons do. More importantly, I think he has a real sense for how things should look in an image. Well, you be the judge. It takes a tough man to shoot a prairie chicken.

We roll across the Red River into Fargo around 1:00. I’m now a fifty-stater, I’ve known for a while it was within reach; two cross country trips with Prof. Dr. Mrs. Q and family trips to Hawaii and Alaska got most of the hard stuff done. Then Jennifer Johnson-Leung of the University of Idaho invited me to give a seminar in Moscow and suddenly I was at 49.

It turns out I’m not the only person to leave North Dakota for last. It’s such a common thing that there’s a club for it. I’m now a member:

Large parts of Fargo look like any other low-density Midwestern sprawlville but there’s an old turn-of-the-century downtown that gives you some sense of what the place was like when it was old and rich. (It reminded me a little bit of J. Anthony Lukas’s book Big Trouble, about what was going on in Idaho — big trouble, in case you didn’t guess — around the time Fargo was being built.) There’s a building with “Kopelman’s” engraved across the top. Really? One of us, in Fargo? Really. The building now houses North Dakota’s only abortion provider. A few years ago they found that the mikveh was still there in the basement, under a concrete slab.

We had lunch with an old Ph.D. student of mine, Rohit Nagpal, with his wife, who’s a doctor there, and their extremely enjoyable two-year-old. The lunch place, BernBaum’s, is a Scandinavian-Jewish fusion deli, and it is good. Not “I’m surprised a place in a small-to-medium city in North Dakota is this good” good — good good. Why don’t Jews put lingonberries on our blintzes? Because we never knew about them, is the only explanation.

We went across the river to Moorhead, MN to see the Hjemkomst Center. So it seems that Norwegian-Americans sometimes become obsessed and build replicas of old Norwegian things. A Moorhead guidance counselor named Robert Asp built an exact replica of a wooden Viking ship. After his death, his kids sailed it from Minnesota to Norway and back. Now it’s in a museum:

A different Norwegian-American, Guy Paulson, built an exact replica of a 12th century wooden church that stands on the southern shore of the Sognefjorden.

OK, not exact; for it to meet US code he had to use nails. “But it would stand up without them,” the guide assures us. Norwegian wooden faces are thick with feeling.

We cross the river and eat schnitzel and spaetzle at a bar where everyone is watching the North Dakota State Bison demolish Indiana State, 44-2, at the FargoDome. Then it’s time to leave Fargo, because we don’t want to have the full distance to drive the last day. The sun goes down over western Minnesota

People on the internet are saying there’s a chance of seeing the Northern Lights, so we parked on the side of a dirt road in a corn field far away from any light and with an unobstructed northern view, and we stood out there freezing for a long time until it was completely dark, but the promised borealic peak never came. CJ got some good Milky Way pictures, at any rate. And we still made it back to the Twin Cities outskirts to sleep.

Sunday morning we went into downtown Minneapolis. CJ wanted to take pictures. We went up to the top of the Foshay Tower, which I’d never heard of.

Foshay was a Minneapolis industrialist who built this huge art deco obeliskical office building in the middle of town, only to lose his shirt in the crash three months after the grand opening. He was eventually convicted of wire fraud (though not before escaping his first trial with a mistrial, the one holdout juror being, it turned out, the wife of one of Foshay’s business associates, undisclosed.) But he remained a popular figure in town and it seems like his full pardon by Truman in 1947 was celebrated rather than questioned.

CJ wanted to see the new football stadium. Really? But guess what, it’s a beaut and I’m glad we walked around it

He got a picture with no people but in fact, even at 10 in the morning, central Minneapolis was already thick with Cowboys fans in full Cowboys paint, gearing up for that night’s game. We walked across the stone arch bridge, picked up some antelope tacos, sweet potatoes, and bison bowls at Owamni, and then drove down to Minnehaha Park because CJ loves taking waterfall pictures.

From there it was a straight drive home, because CJ had Halloween plans with his friends. We listened to Taylor Swift all the way. CJ is a sophomore in high school and when I was that age I was just starting to have Opinions about Records. I didn’t know that CJ had Opinions about Records, but it turns out he does — not vaguely “notice that I am alternative” stuff like the R.E.M. albums I was opining about at 16, but about Taylor Swift. I try to hold back my tendencies to want my kids to value exactly the same things that I do, but I cannot lie, it warms me that CJ has Opinions about Records. I learned a lot about Swift’s progression as a writer and I was even able to sneak in some older songs (“Fire and Rain,” “Linger”) that I felt helped situate Swift within a tradition. Anyway, I kind of knew Taylor Swift was great but I gained new appreciation for a lot of the non-singles, like “Getaway Car.”

We made it back to Madison in time for CJ to meet his friends and for me to greet some of the masses of kids walking for candy; after a year of distanced trick-or-treating, there was a lot of pent-up demand.

There was one more sunset.

Pandemic blog 43: bluster

Blustery day in Madison; windy and wet, light snow falling, but not sticking. An unwelcome reminder that the constrictedness of our current way of life is going to be harder to handle when the ground’s frozen solid and you have to Hoth up to go outside. Still: this wave of cases has clearly crested in Dane County, which even at the severest moments has been spared the worst of what’s hit Wisconsin these past few months.

And bluster in the State Capitol, as legislators, whether they actually believe this or just feel constrained by political realities to say so, are arguing that my vote and the votes of my fellow Wisconsinites shouldn’t count, and that those legislators should be empowered to choose our Presidential electors in our stead. I prefer the sad wet snow.

Pandemic blog 15: “lock them down”

Trader Joe’s on Friday: the first time I had to wait in line to get in the store. To maintain an appropriately low density, they don’t let a new shopper in until someone comes out. This week, about 90% of shoppers were masked. The people who weren’t were mostly college-age. The food supply still seems pretty normal; a few things, like butter, were out, but it’s Trader Joe’s — there’s always something they’re for some reason out of. I asked the store manager whether they were selling more beer than usual, and he said, beer, no, hard liquor, yes.

Large majorities in Wisconsin support the governor’s safer-at-home order, but there are always dissenters:

Protester from Menomonee Falls: “This isn’t common throughout the state. It’s common in Milwaukee. It’s common in Madison. Lock them down.”

“them,” huh? https://t.co/8txsIO7BPm

— Dan Shafer-at-home (@DanRShafer) April 18, 2020

You might be surprised to hear I have some sympathy for this point of view, though he needs to be more broad with his lockdown; Waukesha County, where Menominee Falls is, has just as high a case rate as Dane does.

But it’s not crazy to imagine that COVID spread might be slower in less dense regions; maybe so much slower that the pandemic could be kept in check with less stringent suppression measures. Let’s posit that, eventually, we open schools and some businesses in rural Wisconsin before we do the same in Milwaukee. So this guy gets his wish.

My concern is this: he is not going to then say “It’s just like I said, I want to work and be productive, I’m glad I’m able to do so and I support strong relief measures for my fellow Wisconsinites in Milwaukee who have to stay home for the sake of public health.” No, I think that guy is going to say “Why should my taxes be paying somebody in Milwaukee to sit at home when I have to work?”

Pandemic blog 13: Violent Frisbee

Already discussed: the fracas over the April 7 spring election, which should have been postponed, or held by mail if it was held at all. To my great surprise, Jill Karofsky, the liberal running to unseat Scott Walker appointee Daniel Kelly from the Supreme Court, did so, with a bang, winning by about 11 points. Incumbents usually don’t lose Supreme Court races here and I thought Democrats’ political attention was taken up by the Presidential primary, by now all but over. Since Trump’s election, conservative candidates have won only one out of seven statewide elections here, and that one (Brian Hagedorn for Supreme Court) was by half a percent.

Why did Karofsky win by so much? One natural theory is that the election being the same day as the Democratic primary helped bring Democrats to the polls. Boosting this: Bernie Sanders made the apparently strange decision to campaign in Wisconsin, stay in the race until election day, and then immediately drop out before the results were reported. It all makes sense if you understand his motive to be getting his voters to the polls to vote for Karofsky as well as him.

But did it work? This chart from Charles Franklin, who knows Wisconsin politics like nobody else, says otherwise:

Turnout was way up for a court election: 1,548,504 vs 1,207,569 in 2019. This is 2nd highest court turnout since 2000.

But rising turnout was not related to vote for Karofsky or Kelly. 3/n pic.twitter.com/Ff4FnZSqfc

— Charles Franklin (@PollsAndVotes) April 14, 2020

If it was the Democratic primary driving Democratic voters to the polls, there’d be a bigger turnout boost in more Democratic counties. There wasn’t. So either the primary didn’t really boost turnout at all, or Republicans were equally motivated to go to the polls and vote for Trump against — well, the state GOP didn’t allow Trump’s Republican primary challengers on the ballot, so against nobody.

Was turnout actually higher because of the pandemic? Maybe people are more likely to vote when they’ve actually got a ballot to mail than they are to find time on Election Day.

Our first Seder without family since 2006, when I broke my arm so badly a week before Pesach that I couldn’t travel: Dr. Mrs. Q, baby CJ and I did it alone. This year we had grandparents in by Zoom both nights. But I had to cook Seder dinner, which I’ve never done. We all have things we don’t do in the kitchen for no reason except it’s not our habit. For me it’s giant pieces of meat. Just not what I cook. Don’t know how to roast a chicken or a turkey, don’t ever make leg of lamb (butterfly? spatchcock?) and I have never, before this week, made a brisket. But it’s easy, it turns out!

I was extremely successful, to my surprise, in hiding the afikoman. Both nights I thought it was in too easy a place and both nights my kids required multiple hints and were very satisfied with the search. Either I’m more cunning than I thought or my kids are not born hunters.

We did a gefilte taste test this year; traditional vs. tilapia. Tilapia is better!

With two days left to go we have eaten just about all the eggs.

We have been playing 4-person Ultimate in the backyard, AB and I vs CJ and Dr. Mrs. Q. They always win. The team of AB and me is called “Violent Frisbee” and AB has made us a flag:

Cities, Villages, Towns, and Scott Walker

Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos, still smarting from Scott Walker’s loss in his re-election bid, said “Evers win was due to Dane County and the City of Milwaukee.”  It’s typical GOP politics here to split off Madison and Milwaukee like this, as if liberalism in Wisconsin is a pair of dark blue inkstains on an otherwise conservative shirt.

Not so.  There are liberals all over your shirt, Mr. Vos.

You can find tons of interesting data about Wisconsin elections in Excel spreadsheets at the Wisconsin Elections Commission page.  This already gives you the ability to do some quick and dirty analysis of where Evers’ victory was won.  In Wisconsin, every municipality is either a City, a Village, or a Town, in roughly decreasing order of urbanization.  So it’s easy to separate out Wisconsin into three parts, the Cities, the Villages, and the Towns.  This is what you get:

CITIES:  Walker 542148 (40%), Evers 808145 (60%)

VILLAGES: Walker 257858 (55%), Evers 208596 (45%)

TOWNS:  Walker 495074 (62%), Evers 307566 (38%).

That’s a pretty clear story.  Evers won in the cities, Walker won by a bit in the villages and by a lot in the most rural segment of the state, the towns.

But wait — Madison and Milwaukee are cities!  Is that all we’re seeing in this data, a distinction between Madison and Milwaukee on the one hand and real Wisconsin, Republican Wisconsin, Robin Vos’s Wisconsin, on the other?  Nope.  Take out the cities of Milwaukee and Madison from the city total and Evers still gets 521265 votes to Walker’s 477447, drawing 52% of the vote to Walker’s 48%.  There are decent-sized cities all over the state, and Evers won almost all of them.  Evers won Green Bay, he won Sheboygan, he won Appleton, he won Wausau.  Evers won Chippewa Falls and Viroqua and Oshkosh and Neenah and Fort Atkinson and Rhinelander and Beloit.  He won all over the place, wherever Wisconsinites congregate in any fair number.

Craig Gilbert has a much deeper dive into this data in the Journal-Sentinel.  The shift away from Scott Walker wasn’t just in the biggest cities; it was pretty uniform over localities with population 10,000 or more.  Update: An even deeper dive by John Johnson at Marquette, which brings in data from presidential elections too.

There’s a general feeling that the urban-rural split is new, a manifestation of Trumpian anti-city feeling.  Let’s look back at the 2010 election between Scott Walker and Tom Barrett, an election Walker won by 7 points.  2010, when Donald Trump was just Jeff Probst in a tie.  But the urban-rural split is still there:

CITIES: Walker 505213 (46%), Barrett 603905 (54%)

VILLAGES:  Walker 207243 (59%), Barrett 143297 (41%)

TOWNS:  Walker 416485 (62%) , Barrett 257101 (38%)

Here’s the thing, though.  You can see that Walker actually didn’t do any worse in the towns in 2018 than he did in 2010.  But his support dropped off a lot in the villages and the cities.  And if you take Madison and Milwaukee out of the 2010 totals, Walker won the remainder of Wisconsin’s cities 53-47, which is actually a bit ahead of his overall 2010 statewide margin.

I don’t think Donald Trump has made Wisconsin politics very different.  I think it’s still a state that calls its own tune, and a state where either a Democrat or a Republican can win big — if they have something to say that makes sense all across the state, as Walker and Ron Johnson used to, as Evers and Tammy Baldwin do now.

Wisconsin post-election post

A few thoughts.

• Crazy that, once again, a statewide election in Wisconsin is decided when a county clerk, late into the night, reveals a stash of not-yet-counted ballots.
• Evers winning and Baldwin cruising while national media darling Randy Bryce got soundly beaten by boring former UW Regent Bryan Steil in a not-that-Republican district is further evidence for the ham sandwich theory of Wisconsin politics.  Bryce ran about a point behind Tony Evers in Racine, his own home county!
• A lot of people asking “How can there be so many Baldwin-Walker voters?  It makes no sense!”  I think it makes sense.  In a state not experiencing any visible crisis, incumbency is an advantage.  The last Marquette poll had “state on the right track / state going the wrong direction” at 55/40.  Roughly speaking, if incumbency is a 5% boost and the state’s “mood” was +5% Democratic, you’d get a Democratic incumbent winning by 10 and a Republican incumbent locked in a tie, which is pretty much what happened.  There are plenty of people whose votes aren’t strongly ideological.
• With all the focus on the governor’s race, hardly anyone was watching the state legislative elections.  They didn’t go well for Democrats, who lost Caleb Frostman’s Senate seat and may lose seats in the Assembly too, while Democrats elsewhere were making pretty big gains in state legislatures.  Some of that, probably most of it, is our ridiculously gerrymandered Assembly map.  I’ll write more about that when I know more of the final numbers in these races.  But there’s another thing going on, too — I think Wisconsin Democrats have figured out that turnout efforts in Dane and Milwaukee are the most efficient way to turn effort into votes.  Turnout for this election was high statewide but in Dane County it was crazy; Tony Evers got more votes in the county than Hillary Clinton did in a presidential year!  And it’s not cause Dane County doesn’t love Hillary Clinton.  But that focus doesn’t shift the Assembly or Senate map.
• In 2014, the total votes for Attorney General were 95% of the governor votes.  This time it was 99%.  I read that as:  more voters voting party-line, fewer voting only for governor and leaving the AG line blank because all they know is the party.  But maybe I’m reading too much into it.

 

Wisconsin pre-election post

I see no reason to doubt the polls that show a very close race between Tony Evers and Scott Walker for governor, but a healthy lead for incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin over her challenger, Leah Vukmir.

In the current hyperpartisan environment, why are these two races so different?  For one thing, Baldwin and Walker are incumbents, and people in Wisconsin seem to mostly feel things are OK here (55% said the state was “on the right track” in the latest Marquette poll.)

But there’s something else.  I think in Wisconsin we like our politicians, well, not too salty.  Scott Walker is a bland guy.  He famously eats two ham sandwiches in a paper bag for lunch every day, and the thing is, I don’t think that’s an affectation, Walker really is a guy who doesn’t mind eating the same thing for lunch every day.  Tony Evers is bland, too, and he fought off seven spicier opponents in a wild primary, winning just about every county in the state.  When Tammy Baldwin announced for Senate people thought there was no way a movement liberal and out lesbian from Madison could win a statewide race.  She won it easily.  Because she is is a movement liberal out lesbian from Madison who in every way comes off as the super-nice mom at the PTA meeting who you go ahead and let make all the decisions because it kind of seems like she’s got this.

Leah Vukmir, by contrast, is a cookie-cutter Fox News Republican who wants to bring a meaner, harder-edged style to Wisconsin politics.  I don’t think it’s gonna work.  I think Wisconsinites, both Democrats and Republicans, prefer the ham sandwich in the paper bag.

Wisconsin municipal vexillology update

Madison is changing its flag!  The old one

has a Zuni sun symbol in the middle of it, which people correctly feel is a sort of random and annoying and unrelated-to-Madison vic of somebody else’s religious symbol.  On the other hand, on pure design grounds it’s kind of a great flag!  Simple, but you see the lakes, the isthmus, the Capitol.  The new flag elegantly keeps all that while skimming off the cultural appropriation:

 

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, pressure is mounting to adopt the People’s Flag. Milwaukee’s existing flag is an ungepotchkit mess, routinely ranked among the nation’s worst city banners.  I mean:

I think my favorite part of this mess is that there are two miniflags inside this flag, and the one that’s not the U.S. flag nobody even remembers what it is!

Anyway, this is the proposed new flag, currently the subject of hot civic dissent:

I think this is great.  Daring color choices, you get your lake, you get your big flat lake, you get your optimistic sense of sunrise.  Make the right choice, Cream City!

Rebecca Dallet and the gerrymandered Assembly map

The fate of the current Wisconsin Assembly district map, precision-engineered to maintain a Republican majority in the face of anything short of a major Democratic wave election, is in the hands of the Supreme Court, which could announce a decision in Gill v. Whitford any day.

One theory of gerrymandering is that the practice isn’t much of a problem, because the power of a gerrymandered map “decays” with time — a map that suits a party in 2010 may, due to shifting demographics, be reasonably fair a few years later.

How’s the Wisconsin gerrymander doing in 2018?  We just had a statewide election in which Rebecca Dallet, the more liberal candidate, beat her conservative rival by 12 points, an unusually large margin for a Wisconsin statewide race.

The invaluable J. Miles Coleman broke the race down by Assembly district:

In the State Assembly, Dallet won 57 of 99 seats, closer to her 56% share of the state vote. She carried 21 Republican-held seats, some quite easily. The closest seat, #HD42, has a special election June 12. In the fall, the entire chamber is up. #wipolitics #scowis pic.twitter.com/zbXUxD3zzQ

— J. Miles Coleman (@JMilesColeman) April 17, 2018

Dallet won in 58% of seats while getting 56% of the vote.  That sounds fair, but in fact a candidate who wins by 12 points is typically going to win in more seats than that.  (That’s why the courts are right to say proportional representation isn’t a reasonable expectation!)

Here’s the breakdown by Assembly district, shown a little bigger:

Dallet won by 2 points or less in 8 of the Assembly districts.  So, as a rough estimate, if she’d gotten 2% of the vote less, and won 54-46 instead of 56-44, you might guess she’d have won 49 out of 99 seats.  That’s consistent with the analysis of Herschlag, Ravier, and Mattingly conducted last year, which estimates that under current maps Democrats would need an 8-12 point statewide lead in order to win half the Assembly seats. (Figure 5 in the linked paper.)

I don’t think the gerrymander is decaying very much.  I think it’s robust enough to make GOP legislative control very likely through 2020, at which point it can be updated to last another ten years, and so on and so on.  This isn’t the same kind of softcore gerrymandering the Supreme Court allowed to stand in 1986, and I hope the 2018 Supreme Court decides to do something about it.

Did Tim Burns voters come through for Rebecca Dallet?

Two liberal candidates, Rebecca Dallet and Tim Burns, combined for 54% of the vote in this February’s primary for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Dallet and the conservative candidate Michael Screnock, who got 46% in the primary, moved on to the general election in April.

There was some worry among liberal political types that voters who went for Burns, the vocally left candidate, would sit out the general rather than show up for the more conventionally liberal Dallet.  Did that happen?  Here’s something cool:  Wisconsin offers full statewide ward-level election results, which helps us figure that out!

First of all, here’s a ward-by-ward picture of the primary:

Each circle is a ward and its position in the triangle shows the proportion of votes going to Screnock (top vertex), Burns (left vertex), and Dallet (right vertex.)  The size of the circle is the total number of votes in that ward.  You can see that there’s no visible clustering, and that Dallet did much better than Burns.

So what happened in the general?

Well, first of all, Dallet won, and won big:  56-44.  But that doesn’t mean Burns voters showed up.  We can’t really know!  But the ward-by-ward data at least helps us make some guesses.

Quick and dirty:  you can do a linear regression on Dallet’s share of the general in terms of Burns’s and Dallet’s share of the primary vote.  I stripped out wards with fewer than 100 general-election votes, which still left 1827 wards.  You get

Dallet general ~ 0.724*Burns primary + 0.892* Dallet primary + 0.112

with a pretty decent fit

The Burns coefficient is a little bit lower but I don’t see strong evidence that a lot of Burns voters skipped the general election.

Here’s a test I like a little bit more.  There are 79 wards where Burns and Dallet together got between 54 and 56% of the vote in the primary.  Among these wards, Burns’s voteshare ranged from 6.5% (Milwaukee ward 211) to 35% (Town of Moscow wards 1-2, a bit on the nose, don’t you think?)  If Burns voters were skipping the general election, you might expect Dallet to do worse in April in those wards where Burns did better in February.  Here’s the scatter.  If there’s a downward trend here, it’s not very strong.

My conclusion:  liberals gonna liberal.

Update:  I got the last scatter wrong when I originally posted this; if you remember the post being a little different, you’re right!