Wisconsin Primary Elections: Live Coverage And Results

Obligatory sanity-check post: I know that the details matter, and that we’re interested to see whether Trump can take a congressional district in Wisconsin despite his poor night statewide. But it bears repeating that he’s having a really bad night and Cruz is having a really good one. Cruz currently leads Trump by 23 points with about a quarter of Wisconsin reporting. The Upshot expects that lead to eventually narrow to about 15 points. Still, that would be a larger margin of victory than predicted by any poll. And even if Trump ekes out a handful of delegates from congressional districts, he’ll be well behind the 25 delegates we expected him to win Wisconsin a few weeks ago.

The exit polls in Wisconsin are asking Republican voters who should decide the nomination if none of the candidates win the required 1,237 votes before the convention. (I gotta say, work with me here, people – how about asking that question everywhere and of all voters!?!?!) The story that the exit pollsters might have hoped to be told by the answer to this question is the difference between Trump voters (who overwhelmingly favor letting the candidate with the most votes win), and Cruz/Kasich supporters. But a majority of the latter group also favor nominating the candidate with the most votes, rather than allowing the delegates to pick the best candidate. In the absence of more systematic comparison data, we can consider these answers about process in light of Wisconsin’s political history. Our readers have been calling for some discussion of “Fightin’ Bob” LaFollette, and this might be the place to consider this iconic Progressive. In addition to LaFollette, there’s also Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive Republican who took a bullet campaigning in Milwaukee in 1912. We often think of this movement in terms of policies – expanding government protections, pushing back against the industrial capitalism. But this was a movement against party bosses as much as anything. LaFollette was concerned about corruption. Both Roosevelt and LaFollette broke away from the Republican Party to run for president on the Progressive label. Wisconsin was one of the first states to adopt primaries – we had a non-partisan one earlier this year. Direct democracy is also something we owe to the Progressive roots here – big issues find their way to the ballot, as in 2006, when the state voted to add a ban on same-sex marriage to the state Constitution. Given the state’s historical suspicion of party elites and fervor for direct democracy, it’s possible that Wisconsin voters are less amenable to letting convention delegates decide. Then again, skepticism about parties and a preference for the direct will of the people has really caught on in the past 100 years.

ABC News has just called Wisconsin for Sanders. No surprise there. The question is the margin, which we’ll be keeping an eye on.