This is interesting:
Keeping in mind the same thing that I said in my earlier post (the general election turnout will be much different), these are interesting. The County Executive race was a lot closer than I thought it would be. Larson is a total nut. The fact that he’s doing that well speaks to a significant faction of voters who are dissatisfied with Abele.
The Mayoral race was also closer than expected. Milwaukee has a habit of voting for incumbent mayors until they die or quit – irrespective of the mayor’s actual performance. In this case, both Davis and Donavan are running very anti-Barrett races and their combined vote is substantially higher than Barrett’s. Do we dare to be hopeful that Davis’ votes swing to Donovan for the general election? Or were a lot of Davis’ supporters black voters (Davis is black) who will swing back to the entrenched Democrat, Barrett (even though it’s a non-partisan election)? I’m not getting my hopes up, but after 12 years of a useless mayor, it would be nice to see Milwaukee folks buck history.
UPDATE: With all of the votes counted, Larson beat out Abele.
Larson had a more than 700 vote lead over Abele with 100% of the votes counted at the end of a night marked by several lead changes.
Larson, leading with a slim margin, won 45% of the vote in Tuesday’s primary, according to preliminary results.
Abele received 44% of the primary vote to place well ahead of Joseph T. Klein of the Wisconsin Pirate Party and Steve Hogan, a carpenter.
It is interesting about Abele. I know that I haven’t been paying that close of attention, but my take on him is that he’s kept his head down and hasn’t really screwed much up. He’s had his tiff with Clarke, but other than that I haven’t really heard anything. I honestly thought he would have messed a lot up in his first year. Has there been more that I’ve missed?
Not really. He’s been pretty solid on the budget despite his personal vendetta against Clarke. If I had to vote in that election, I wouldn’t mind voting for him given his record. But that’s probably exactly why the lefty wingnuts are coalescing around Larson.
I think if anyone would have told either one of us back when he was running the first time that we’d end up voting for Abele someday we wouldn’t believe it
Never thought I’d vote for him, but I did. He’s much better than I first expected, and I’m not embarrassed to say I voted for him.