Joe Handrick’s Final Look at Wisconsin’s Early Vote for Today’s Election

By Joe Handrick for the Dairyland Sentinel

April 1, 2025

This is my final look at Wisconsin’s early vote before the final day of in-person, traditional voting. Polls close at 8. Unless there is an unanticipated landslide, we won’t know the winner of the tight Wisconsin Supreme Court race until after 10 pm.

If it’s tight, the winner could be unknown until Wednesday.

Geography

Here are the tallies of votes by region.

Western Wisconsin has caught up. Southeast Wisconsin early voting remained super hot. It is not surprising that the increased percentage of in early votes for Dane and Milwaukee Counties, compared to their performances in 2023 are below the average increase from 2023 statewide. The liberal voters, who congregate in those two counties, had adopted early voting years ago.

Red, Blue, and Purple

Here we break down the final early vote comparison by county partisan lean. Again with the caveat that we don’t register by party in the state. The campaigns are privy as to whether their individual targeted voters have already cast a ballot. In my analysis, i am examining raw data in aggregate and comparing the totals to historical trends.

Conclusion

There may be 1.4 million fewer votes today than in November. Whichever side does a better job of getting its low-propensity voters out will win.

Clearly, the Republicans’ emphasis on early voting has increased turnout in the red counties, and it has increased turnout in all the counties in which Schimel needs to improve from Kelly’s disastrous 2023 run.

The questions are, will that enthusiasm carry over to today. And, will it be enough to overcome the enormous gap Kelly had?

To overcome that gap, it’s not enough just for the early turnout to be higher. The TOTAL count of voters in Schimel’s key counties at 8:01 pm must be higher–considerably higher.

As a reminder, here is what I wrote regarding the Schimel target counties last month.