An eight-year reign of Republican dominance and political muscle in this state came to an end Tuesday when Democrat Tony Evers defeated GOP Gov. Scott Walker, the central figure in Wisconsin politics for more than a decade.
On a night when Democrats retook the U.S. House and both parties piled up striking wins and equally striking losses, voters in Wisconsin turned the page on one of the nations best-known and most polarizing governors.
They did so by a very small margin, when a late tally of absentee ballots from Milwaukee County put the race out of reach for Walker. In the other marquee race in Wisconsin, Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent Tammy Baldwin won her own re-election bid handily against Republican Leah Vukmir.
The most arresting features of Evers win and Walkers loss were massive Democratic landslides in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two big blue bastions that delivered far higher margins for Democrats than they did four years earlier.
Turnout in Wisconsin was remarkable across the state: more than 2.6 million people voted, far more than in any past midterm, more than in the 2012 recall election, and equal to roughly 59 percent of the states voting-age population. That is more than the turnout rate that many states achieved in the 2016 presidential race.
The results around the country appeared to reflect growing geographic and demographic divides, between metropolitan and rural, and voters with and without college degrees.
Walkers contest was one of the most closely watched nationally, featuring a one-time national star of the party, whose bid for the presidency shot out of the gate in 2015 before it was eclipsed by Trump.
Exit polls showed Walker lost ground with at least two key groups of voters compared with his 2014 re-election victory. One was independents. Walker had won independents in each of his three statewide victories, including the recall, by margins ranging from 9 to 14 points.
But in the 2018 exit poll, he was trailing among independents by 7 points.
A second group was college graduates. Walker won voters with college degrees by 1 point in 2014, according to the exit poll that year. He was losing them by 13 points this year.
Walker was winning men and losing women by high single digits, according to the exit poll which is a smaller gender gap than in 2014 when Walker defeated Democrat Mary Burke.
