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Lazy Trump Voters
Six hundred thousand Wisconsin voters who pulled the lever for Trump in November 2024 abandoned the cause and stayed home on Tuesday. They didn’t vote in the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and that apathy handed the court to Progressives. Trump won WI in 2024 with over 1.6 Million votes. But only about 1 million voted for the Trump-supported candidate, Brad Schimel. The liberal Dem won with 1.2 million votes. Why is that important? Because plans to redistrict WI will end up before that court, and with a liberal majority 2 House seats now held by Republicans will likely be gerrymandered out of existence. Given the slim majority, yesterday’s vote could end the Trump agenda in 2026.
Something similar happened in Georgia a few years back. The 2 current Democrat Georgia senators were also elected because 2020 Trump voters didn’t come out to vote in the special elections for the Senate.
I suspect this is just plain laziness. I suppose it could be a facet of what I call the “Only Trump” voter bloc. Either way, it’s costly and needs to be fixed.
Published in General
Republican voters in general are lazy when it comes to special or off-year elections. It’s sad . . .
I heard that some people were pushing back against Musk’s pressure. Poor guy can’t get a break.
I think this is part of it. TONS of money from outside the state spent on political advertising for both candidates, but Musk put a face on it.
Biden and Harris weren’t on the ballot. They had a great ability to turn out the republicans base.
Both Republican and Democratic “brands” are problematic. The US would be a California style one-party state by now if not for Trump. Trump has ushered in a shift away from the career politician track to a perceived business competence resume for political power. But the transition is both one that will not be made smoothly and is no guarantor of continued liberty. Wisconsin was a disappointment, but with Voter ID winning there it is clear that Trump is still operating in the sweet spot of popular opinion. But the struggle continues even as the public wears faded patches of political identities.
It didn’t used to be this way. The GOP has to work harder. Having a national political party depending on Scott Pressler to knock on doors is not good enough. Having a national party wake up once every 4 years is not good enough.
There is a LOT of money and power working to working to eliminate the power of the people. Not just in the USA and Brazil, but in Romania and France dark powers are deciding elections.
Voter ID is no guarantor of legal voting. The State of WI hands out ID’s to all kinds of people … including non-citizens.
It isn’t just Wi and it isn’t just disappointing. It’s a crucial, nationwide problem that needs to be fixed ASAP.
Most people vote for celebrity. Judicial candidates are rarely celebrities.
They didn’t vote for celebrity Dr. Oz in PA … nor celebrity Herschel Walker in Georgia.
I think we are making excuses instead of sounding alarm bells.
Aside from issues of turnout etc, it’s easily possible that a number of Democrats voted for Trump in 2024 but would continue to vote Left in other situations. Trump only won WI by 0.8%.
I can picture that. Imagine if this election happened just a handful of years ago, when Elon Musk was still an Obama-supporting Democrat. This flashy, non-Wisconsinite billionaire shows up throwing tons of money around and telling people who they must vote for. Would there not be quite a few people who had been on the fence who are motivated to vote against the arrogant billionaire? Of course, we don’t see Elon Musk as an arrogant know-it-all, because he’s on our side of the political fence these days. If he were pushing for Democrats, though, that’s exactly how most people here would see him.
Germany and the UK have also been lurching toward that goal.
I don’t see this at all. Prior to Trump’s arrival, there were substantial, real differences between the parties and how they governed. The flight from poorly-governed blue states to red states predated Trump. Gains made for 2nd Amendment rights predate Trump. The idea that everything was one big “uniparty” blob before Trump is no doubt appealing to MAGA egos, but doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.
Here are the numbers:
2024 Trump 1,697,000 Harris 1,667,000
2025 SC Rep 1,063,000 Dem 1,301,000 TOTAL = 2,364,000
Voter ID YES 1,435,000 NO 852,000 TOTAL = 2,287,000
600,000 People who voted for Trump 6 months ago stayed home. 300,000 people who voted for Harris 6 months ago stayed home. And yes … about 400,000 Dems voted for voter ID. But it’s ABSOLUTELY true that over 35% of the Trump vote just failed to show up.
Notice from your own numbers that about 80,000 more people voted in the SC race than the Voter ID one.
But in total, about a million fewer people in total voted, than for President last year. And you really don’t know who they all were, or how they would have voted for SC or ID.
I can see it. I can see Republicans and Democrats attached to the Deep State, voting for more and more spending, both expanding the size of government and the administrative state, both fighting for their pork barrel projects. There was a time when they could actually be cordial with each other, too.
So you think that Reagan was the same as Carter? You think Gore would have had the same policies as Bush? Yeah, right…
I’m talking about the legislators.
When was that? I thought the government party always worked harder, because for so many of them life has no meaning outside of government and politics. Also, their employment (or of many in their social circles) is at stake.
Russia is already there.
Alright here’s my quick take, from someone who lives in Wisconsin and voted yesterday.
The attack ads against Schimel seem to have worked, especially the ones that called out Musk. The people I’ve talked to or heard talking about this election at work were very unhappy about him getting involved in this election. I think in general, people are annoyed about how much money was spent in this Supreme Court election. Wisconsinites have barely recovered from the incessant amount of ads we were showered in daily for the Nov election. So having one this soon did not help. I am not surprised that a lot of people didn’t show up to vote, they just wanted it to be quiet for a bit.
Sounds like they’ll get what they voted for – or couldn’t be bothered to vote against – good and hard.
The 2 current Democrat Georgia Senators were also elected because 2020 Trump voters didn’t come out to vote in the special elections for Senate.
Maybe Trump telling Georgia voters that the election was rigged, and thus their vote didn’t matter, encouraged them to stay home.
Or, since that didn’t happen for Wisconsin, maybe that wasn’t the issue back then either.
So – if your claim about the “uniparty” is true, this should be easily proven or disproven by the voting records of Republicans and/or their ratings by the American Conservative Union. Would you agree that those would be an accurate measure of a legislator’s conservatism? If so, then please provide evidence of the dominance of the uniparty from those records.
I’m looking at ACU ratings of senators from 2006, to just pick a random sample of a pre-Trump year. Rick Santorum was running for president, and had a lifetime ACU rating of 88.1. But he wasn’t even the most conservative of the Republican senators that year – 26 Republican senators at that time had higher ACU ratings, while 4 had equivalent scores. If what you say about the “uniparty” was true, you wouldn’t expect high ACU ratings (which reflects actual voting records) at all, but a majority of Republicans and Democrats would have similar scores.
I don’t think your claim holds up.
Apparently it bothered Trump voters much more than Progressives.
Sure we do. Trump appealed to those who voted for him to vote yesterday. Musk made the same appeal. 600000 Trump voters tuned that appeal out. That is a problem that needs a solution not excuses.
Just those numbers don’t really explain or prove that much. You might (want to) think they do, but they really don’t. That would be a kind of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”
I think there are plenty of reluctant Trump voters or undecided-turned-Trump voters in a state this evenly split politically. For a presidential election, you can be turned off by it but still show up to vote because you deem it too important. A special election for Supreme Court that you wish would just go away, yeah plenty of people would skip it.
Again, this is just a personal anecdote but most people at my workplace left work early on Nov 5 to go vote. Yesterday, it was like just a normal Tuesday. I was one of the few people in my area that bothered leaving early to vote. I work at an investment firm so the people there are politically aware and the vibe I get is that most of them ended up voting R in Nov. But maybe they didn’t care for this election, whether from political burnout or out of spite for Musk or apathy.