The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer.
This is the free, NO PAYWALL version of The Recombobulation Area’s big post-election deep-dive column.
This column features a standalone article for each individual “takeaway,” conveniently rounded up here in one place, with shareable links for each. The full version for subscribers was published Saturday, Nov. 7.
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On the morning of Election Day, I was reaching out to a number of people in Democratic political circles, checking in to see what expectations might be on races for everything from the gubernatorial election to the hundreds of races happening downballot.
One of those people was Katie Rosenberg, a Marathon County Board member and the former mayor of Wausau, a city where a closely-contested Assembly race was taking place. In the 2024 election, the 85th was the only district in the state won by both Donald Trump and Tammy Baldwin, with a Republican incumbent who had outrun the top of the ticket by several points. This race was looking like a true toss-up.
But when I checked in with Rosenberg, she said she was “secretly very optimistic” about the race in the 85th, about Democratic challenger John Kroll’s odds to flip the district, and about Democrats’ chances in Wisconsin overall.
It took me a while to get there myself, but that’s how I was feeling going into this final week, too — “secretly very optimistic.” I had crunched the numbers, spent time on the road, analyzed the polls, examined the national environment, looked at the history, and broke down the candidates. In the end, everything was coming up Democrats. It was just hard to believe it was actually happening. As someone who believes in things like sports jinxes — did the Brewers win because of the hat and shirt combination I wore for every game? Who’s to say, really? — I was afraid to say it out loud.
Because over the last decade, this party has been burned so many times. After the shock of 2016 to the jolt of 2024, any Democratic election anxiety is not unwarranted. And in Wisconsin, we’re so used to razor-thin margins that anything beyond that seemed unlikely.
The evening before Election Day, I attended David Crowley’s final event of the campaign, at the Laborers Union / AFL-CIO hall on Milwaukee’s blue-collar northwest side.
Sometimes, these final campaign events can be telling. In 2024, Tim Walz held a rally at Wisconsin State Fair Park on Nov. 4, 2024, and the energy at the event just felt completely zapped, compared to previous events. Staffers were beyond exhausted and supporters seemed like they were just going through the motions. This did not portend well for what was to come. Then, there was the night before the August primary where David Crowley held a rally at The Cooperage in Milwaukee with Gov. Tony Evers and Congresswoman Gwen Moore. There, the vibe in the room was a sort of caution-to-the-wind optimism, where Crowley and his supporters seemed more than hopeful that a stunning comeback could actually happen, but not so optimistic that they were actually expecting to win — they just knew they had some sort of a shot.
At the union hall on Monday evening, the energy in the room before Godlewski and Crowley would speak was … calm. It almost seemed too calm. It was optimistic, yes, but quietly so. That would ramp up, of course, once the candidates took the stage.
Kent Miller of LIUNA kicked off the rally, Godlewski spoke next, then Crowley delivered a fired-up stump speech to union supporters. His voice was a bit scratchy — from the Brewers victory parade that he rode in just days before, he said — but he seemed confident and energized. I had a couple minutes to talk with Crowley and Godlewski after the speech and they were relaxed and were cracking jokes. A tightly-wound, anxiety-riddled, overcome-with-exhaustion Democratic campaign that’s been the norm post-16, this was not. They were ready to win.
As results were reported just over 24 hours later, that confident calm and secret optimism was entirely justified, as Democrats had their best night in Wisconsin in nearly two decades.
This was a blue tsunami. A generational wipeout. The biggest midterm wave since Watergate. The long-sought repudiation of Donald Trump and MAGA. It finally happened.
But for Wisconsin, there’s so much more to these results beyond the national environment. This was a fork-in-the-road election that was years and years in the making, and these realignment-level results and the stakes of what these results mean for Wisconsin requires a closer look.
So, as per tradition, we’re diving into the details, the narratives, and all of the after-the-election analysis we can provide, with this “8 Takeaways” column.
Let’s recombobulate.
Paid subscribers who support The Recombobulation Area had first access to this full column when it was published on Saturday, Nov. 7. This post-election takeaways column is now available to all, with each “takeaway” as an easily shareable standalone article.
1. At long last, Democrats flip the Wisconsin State Legislature
After 16 years of Republican control, Democrats flipped both the Senate and Assembly. They’l have an 18-15 majority in the Senate and a 53-46 majority in the Assembly.
2. The first post-Gerrymander election results in a Democratic trifecta
Wisconsin’s state legislative maps were gerrymandered for 12 years, giving Republicans outsized control in state politics. But in the first election fully under new maps, Democrats won big.
3. Between Crowley’s election and the Brewers winning the World Series, it was an all-time week for Milwaukee
The Brewers won their first World Series, and a week later, Milwaukee sent one of its own to the governor’s mansion -- with some of the biggest numbers for any candidate in recent history.
4. What does David Crowley’s winning coalition look like?
David Crowley won by the biggest margin of any gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin since 1998. How did he do it? What were the key regions of the state that helped deliver this victory?
5. Let Her Cooke: Rebecca Cooke flips Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District
She outran the top of the ticket in 2024, and finally defeated Derrick Van Orden in this western Wisconsin district, flipping several key counties and shrinking margins in others.
6. Mitchell Berman wins in a stunner
In the 1st Congressional District, Mitchell Berman upset Republican incumbent Bryan Steil in a race few saw coming.
7. Wisconsin’s Hispanic voters shift to Democrats in a big way
Some of the biggest shifts of any demographic group came among Hispanic voters. JoCasta Zamarripa, who won the race for Secretary of State, was a big part of Latino outreach statewide.
8. Crowley makes history
“I didn’t run to be the first black governor. I didn’t run to make history.”
Dan Shafer is an independent journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He worked with Civic Media from 2024 to 2026. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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