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 Recombobulation Area’s big post-election deep-dive column. See previous versions from the August 2026 primary, the 2025 Spring Election, 2024 presidential election, 2024 partisan primary, 2024 Spring Election, and 2022 midterm elections.
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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.
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Takeaways include:
At long last, Democrats flip the Wisconsin State Legislature
The first post-Gerrymander election results in a Democratic trifecta
What a week for Milwaukee
What does Crowley’s winning coalition look like?
Let her Cooke
Mitchell Berman wins in a stunner
Wisconsin’s Hispanic voters shift to Democrats in a big way
Crowley makes history
We’ve been busy covering the election, from columns to new maps to a 3.5-hour Election Night livestream and much more, so in case you’ve missed anything from this week, here it is:
