Curmudgeon's Corner

What Did Yesterday Mean?

Posted by Al Campbell on July 13, 2011

Germantown, Political, Wisconsin, People Making A Difference

What does the vote in yesterday’s primary recall election mean? 

If you’re a Sandy Pasch fan, you are very confident since she received 64% of the total votes cast.  If you are an Alberta Darling fan, nothing has changed since she will still face Sandy Pasch.  Beyond this, we now can expect the TV and radio spots to begin touting either Pasch or Darling.

I was frankly surprised at the reported vote total of 32,575 for the 8^th District primary since the Pasch opponent was a Republican “place holder” or a “fake Democrat”, however you choose to frame it.  I had expected a much lower turn-out than actually occurred and I expected a much lower vote for the place holder candidate whose name meant little to anyone and who made no efforts to campaign.  Huber was simply there to force the general election into August and she still received 11,660 votes or 34% of the total votes cast.

Those votes were apparently (duh) cast by Darling supporters, but the surprising thing for me was that this many Darling supporters even bothered to show up for a ‘no meaning’ election as some would see it. 

This suggests, to me at least, that the turn-out in August is going to be very big.  I know that folks in our community have been talking about something in the 80% range.  We are in “Darling” country if the past is any indicator.  Parts of the 8^th District are “Pasch” country, for sure but those typically haven’t generated enough opposition to derail Darling.  (This brings to mind the re-districting maps that were recently released.  Elections do have consequences no matter the party in power.)

All the old race results are thrown out the window, however, given the very heated political climate still being exhibited in our area and in our state.  Couple that with the huge amount of out-of-state money flowing into the two campaign coffers and we can expect to see a campaign like none we’ve seen for some time.

In my ‘perfect world’ the outsiders would stay out of our state’s politics; but, we are at the epicenter for the moment and we will attract a ton of outside activists and their money.  This is a good time to be a radio station, television station or newspaper.