Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Sunday, February 24, 2008
Tight race likely led to high number of Democratic voters in 3rd District
Western Wisconsin voters really turned out for the primary election Tuesday, but it’s unclear what those numbers might mean for November.
For starters, three out of four voters Tuesday in the 3rd Congressional District cast ballots for Democrats.
“It’s an extraordinary difference,” said Rodd Freitag, associate professor and chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “But is it a reflection of a hot contest or is it an indication of an enthusiasm gap (among Republicans)? It’s probably a little of both.”
Melanie Franklin, chairwoman of the district’s Democratic Party, said the high turnout is “clearly a sign of the sense that people have that we need to do something different in politics.
“It’s not that we had more voters on the Democratic side than the Republican side, but that we had more voters in general for a spring primary than we’ve had for a very long time,” said Franklin, who lives in Spencer, Wis.
Maripat Krueger, chairwoman of the district’s GOP, said not as many Republicans turned out because “we have our candidate” in Arizona Sen. John McCain. “The McCain supporters probably sat at home,” she said, which also would explain former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s strong showing in the district’s counties.
Advertising also could have played a role in Democratic turnout.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama spent more than twice as much money on TV advertising in Wisconsin than all other candidates combined and nearly five times as much as New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project.
All those ads may have helped propel Obama to a 14-point victory over Clinton.
In total, the presidential campaigns spent $250,000 on 1,338 advertising spots in the La Crosse-Eau Claire TV market, the study found.
Statewide, McCain got nearly 60 percent of the Republican votes, but in the 3rd district, Huckabee actually took 51 percent of the vote in the district’s 19 counties.
Krueger believes Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service resonated among Wisconsin’s highly taxed voters. “Citizens are trying to hold onto their houses,” said Krueger, who lives in Menomonie, Wis.
Freitag said if McCain is the nominee, “Republicans have reason to worry because voters haven’t warmed to McCain.”
But Krueger said “we’re coming home to McCain now,” and called the early resolution of the Republican nomination “a real advantage to our party.”
Freitag said he had no inside information on why the Clinton and Obama campaigns chose to send the candidates themselves to Eau Claire and their spouses to La Crosse. Both McCain and Huckabee did appear in La Crosse.
“They usually go to La Crosse,” Freitag said of the candidates. La Crosse media cover the southern part of the state, and Eau Claire’s venues for campaign events aren’t superior to La Crosse’s, he said.
Joe Heim, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, said there’s a perception the Eau Claire area covers more of northern Wisconsin, and they’d get “more bang for the buck” by going there.
La Crosse may get more attention in November because a candidate visiting here also gets coverage in Minnesota, Heim said.
Franklin said Eau Claire County Democrats have really grown in the last two to four years. “Last year they elected two new Democratic senators and one new representative to the Assembly,” said Franklin. She speculated the candidate visits may been a reward for that work. And the candidates knew they’d have strongly Democratic audiences in Eau Claire, she said.
“It was just an amazing turnout for an election that most people had written off a month ago,” Franklin said.
Reid Magney can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com.
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