This is the eight in a series of diaries depicting the Democratic victory in this year's midterm elections. Other diaries in this series can be seen here.

Already covered have been New England, NY, NJ, MD, and DE, PA, OH, IN, and Michigan.

Today's diary will focus on Wisconsin. As always first up are the seat control maps.

2004

2006

Of the  1,852,619 votes cast in the 2006 US House races in Wisconsin,  1,001,254 votes (54%) were cast for Democratic candidates, while  836,054 votes (45.1%) were cast for Republicans.  Including unopposed races that Democrats had an 8.9% vote total advantage, a 5.1% improvement over 2004.  

2006 vote totals for the the race in the WI-06 are not currently available online, so the numbers above don't include that district.

2006 Vote Margins

The deepest blue indicates a Democratic vote share over 60%, medium blue 55-60%, light blue 50-55%, pink 45-50%, medium red 40-45%, deep red 40% or less.

Democrat Steve Kagen won in the open seat in the WI-08 defeating Republican State Assembly Speaker John Gard by 6,608 votes (2.4%).  This represents a 21.4% surge over the 2004 Democratic vote share (29.8%) in this district.  Coming in at over $4 Million , Democrat Steve Kagen spent $1.7 Million of his own money outspending Republican John Gard by over $100,000.

All other races in Wisconsin were won by margins of over 10%.

2006 Vote Gains

The deepest blue indicates a Democratic vote gain of over 10%, medium blue 5-10%, light blue 0-5%, pink 0 to-5%, medium red -5 to -10%, deep red -10% or less.

2006 vote totals for the WI-06 where the Republican went unchallenged are unavailble, and the WI-07 is grayed out because there was no 2004 Republican challenger.

The most impressive vote gain was in the WI-08 as was mentioned above. In the WI-02, there was a 0.4% shift towards the Republican, while  Democrats made an 8.4% gain in the WI-02, yielding  much large Democratic margin of victory than in 2004.  In the Milwaukee suburbs, Democrats made 4.8% and 4% gains in the WI-01 and WI-05 respectively.  However, the Republican margin of victory in these districts was over 25% in 2006.

In this series I have created a race tier system that is I will explain in the next few sentences. Tier 0 races are those where the Democratic candidate won by a margin of less than 5%, the presumption being that incumbency grants an advantage of 5-10% that with the fundraising advantage that comes with holding office should be sufficient for these candidates to defend their seats without funding from the party. The assumption that incumbency gives a 5-10% advantage drives the classification of the pickup categories. Tier 1 races are those where the incumbent won by less than 5% in 2006, while tier 2 races are those where Republicans won by less than 10%. It's really quite simple.

Tier 0

Race   D%       R%        Margin        2006 D Cand.

WI-08  51.2%   48.8%      2.4%          Steve Kagen  

Tier 1

Race      D%      R%     Margin    2006 D Cand.

No races meet the criteria for this tier.

Tier 2

Race      D%      R%     Margin    2006 D Cand.

No races meet the criteria for this tier.

And finally the running totals for the series.

Tier 0 (5)

CT-02, NY-19, NH-1, IN-09, WI-08

Tier 1 (9)

CT-04, NJ-07, NY-25, NY-26, NY-29, OH-2, OH-15, PA-06, MI-07

Tier 2 (4)

OH-01, PA-15, IN-03, MI-09

States Covered

CT, IN, MA, MD,ME, MI, NH, NJ, NY, OH,PA, RI, WI, VT