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.
In the 2026 midterm election, voters delivered a full-throated repudiation of Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda. The biggest blue wave in generations swept the country, with surprise victories in states like South Carolina and Mississippi and surprise margins of victory in places like Texas and Georgia.
The blue wave crested in Wisconsin, too, as Democrats flipped the Wisconsin State Legislature for the first time in 16 years, Rebecca Cooke ousted Derrick Van Orden, and once-longshot candidate Mitchell Berman defeated Bryan Steil.
And in Wisconsin’s statewide election for governor, David Crowley won by the largest margin of any Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate since Tommy Thompson was re-elected to a fourth term in 1998. Crowley’s more than eight-point blowout of Congressman Tom Tiffany exceeded even the eye-popping +7 number from the final Marquette poll of the 2026 cycle. It’s the largest margin of any statewide victory in a fall election since Tammy Baldwin’s re-election in the last blue wave year of 2018.
In the end, Crowley found himself on the winning side of some of the warring outside factors in the race: overwhelming levels of billionaire funding backing Tiffany and an increasingly anti-Trump national environment benefiting the Democrat.
But Crowley’s success in this race goes beyond the narratives that dominated headlines in this campaign. He proved to be the right candidate at the right time, the candidate at the top of the ticket who helped deliver this gargantuan statewide victory and the first Democratic trifecta since the 2008 election.