Wisconsin voter turnout patterns favor Democrats in governor’s race

[undeterred]

By the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Republicans hoping to reclaim the governor’s office in next year’s election will have to overcome shifting patterns of voter turnout, particularly in rural areas won by Democrats in the 2008 presidential election and 2006 governor’s race.

More than two-thirds of the counties that handed victories to Republican President George Bush in 2004 shifted to support Democrat Barack Obama last year, giving Obama a double-digit victory in a state that in recent years has been one of the nation’s battlegrounds, data and interviews show.

Voter turnout in last year’s presidential election decreased between 2 and 11 percentage points in Wisconsin’s 72 counties, compared to the 2004 presidential election, according to an analysis by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. The analysis is based on vote tallies from the November election and state estimates of voting-age populations.

Some of Wisconsin’s rural areas, traditionally fertile ground for Republicans, saw the sharpest declines in turnout in 2008. Many of those same counties backed Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in his 2006 re-election.

Read more at: http://wisconsinwatch.org/