Land of Confusion: Part I - Outagamie County

"This is the world we live in 
And these are the names we're given
Stand up and let's start showing
Just where our lives are going to"

Land of Confusion, Part I: Outagamie County

Well, this post proves just how hard blogging is. Seems that if you have to work on Sunday because your long term sub teaching job doesn't pan out for fall, you lose valuable time writing a post you're really looking forward to. Jake over at his blog took all of the storm out of my thunder with breaking down Barrett and Walker's turnout in 2010 and 2012.

Jake pretty much makes most of the points I was going to in his last two posts: here and here. But, this is what I found to be most interesting and definitly worth a little more investigation:

The other lesson to be learned from the vote swings- the Dems need to become a 72-county party. They have lost the Hwy. 29 corridor and the Northeastern part of the state. The DPW already is good at getting the boots on the ground and voters out in Milwaukee and Madison, but they need to take that same attitude to the rest of the state to get back a lot of the voters they have lost in those areas since 2008.

Amen brother! Hits the nail on the head! I would actually argue that it's not just the "Hwy 29 Corridor" but really more of a "Hwy 21 -29 Corridor". Now, Jake only looks at the 2008 Presidential Election and the 2010 and 2012 Gubernatorial Elections, but I wanted to take it a step further back and look at the 2006 Governor's Race.

Imagine those returns June 6th! That's what I term the "21-29 Corridor": all the counties that touch or are between Highway 21 stretching from Oshkosh to La Crosse, and Highway 29 from Green Bay to River Falls.

Now, the main point behind this posting was to talk about that fun county over on the right of the map, Outagamie County. This is one of those counties that Democrats have been losing badly since 2010, and need to figure out how to get it back in order to win statewide elections.

Here are the 2006 Gubernatorial Election results:

	Gubernatorial Candidate	Lt. Gubernatorial Candidate	Political Party	Popular Vote
	Jim Doyle	Barbara C. Lawton	Democratic	34,901	50.05%
	Mark Green	Jean Hundertmark	Republican	33,511	48.05%

Now, let's look at 2010:

	Gubernatorial Candidate	Lt. Gubernatorial Candidate	Political Party	Popular Vote
	Scott Walker	Rebecca Kleefisch	Republican	35,143	53.85%
	Tom Barrett	Tom Nelson	Democratic	29,223	44.78%

So, what have we noticed between 2006 and 2010? Democrats lost 5,678 votes between the two elections! That's quite the chunk for just one county and especially interesting since Scott Walker only improved Mark Green's numbers by 1,632 votes. Lesson learned between 2006 and 2010? Democratic turnout was WAY down. But, you likely already knew that. (Remember all that Tea Party rage?) It's not that Scott Walker converted en-mass Doyle voters, it's that Barrett voters stayed home in 2010.

Okay, I say this because, let's see what happened in 2012's Special Election:

From the Appleton Post-Crescent:

Numbers in Outagamie County showed the Republican governor significantly overtaking his opponent with 11,926 more votes during this election. Barrett only managed to capture 441 additional votes in the county.

 Outagamie County: 77,670 ballots cast out of 132,271 voting age residents — 59 percent turnout

WHAT!?!?!?!?!!? 

So, according to the Post-Crescent, Scott Walker got a whopping 47,069 votes to Barrett's 29,664!!!

Hey Democrats, I hope that having the convention in Appleton boosts turn-out, cause we've been served HARD in this county over the last few years. Republicans have swung UP 13,558 votes between 2006 and 2012 in Gubernatorial Elections, while Democrats have lost 5,240.

We have issues in this county! This is the Land of Confusion!