Krueger: Early Voting Surge Signals Either 'Civic Engagement' Or 'Election Fatigue'

WAUKESHA — Wisconsin's in-person absentee voting totals are running about 8 percent ahead of the same point in the 2022 cycle, and I have now spent four evenings trying to figure out what that means before concluding it might not mean anything at all.

That is not a satisfying sentence to write in an analysis column, but I did not get a 31-year career in the city Department of Public Works by telling people the pavement was in better shape than it was. You report the crack, you don't speculate about the frost heave underneath it until you've dug.

Two Competing Theories, Neither Disprovable

Theory one holds that the 8 percent increase reflects heightened civic engagement among a motivated subset of the electorate, possibly tied to interest in specific down-ballot races. Theory two holds that people are simply trying to get the whole business over with before Election Day traffic, parking, and the general atmosphere of a packed gymnasium make voting feel like a chore on top of a chore.

I emailed the Waukesha County Clerk's office to ask which theory their internal numbers supported. A spokesperson named Darlene Hofstetter replied that the office does not track voter motivation, only voter turnout, and that I was welcome to file a records request if I wanted raw timestamp data on when ballots were cast relative to lunch breaks. I have filed that request. I expect it back sometime in December, which will be useless for this column but potentially useful for whatever column I write in four years when this exact question comes up again.

"It could indicate heightened civic participation among a specific subset, or it could mean people are simply trying to get it over with before Election Day chaos."

— Bob Krueger, opinion contributor

The Weather Variable Nobody Wants To Talk About

No analysis of early voting is complete without acknowledging that this week's unusually mild stretch of 61-degree afternoons may have simply made walking to a polling place more pleasant than it was in 2022, when a cold front moved through on the equivalent Tuesday and kept turnout artificially low through no fault of civic sentiment whatsoever. I raised this with Hofstetter. She said the clerk's office does not model for barometric pressure. I told her someone should.

I also want to flag, in the interest of full methodological transparency, that the 8 percent figure itself is an aggregate across the entire state, and Waukesha County's own early voting line at the courthouse has at various points this week stretched past the second-floor landing, which several voters described to me as either an encouraging sign of democratic participation or a sign that there are simply not enough people stamping and date-checking ballots at the folding table. Both things can be true. That is, in fact, the entire thesis of this column.

What Happens When Nobody Can Agree On The Takeaway

History suggests the county will spend three to six months after Election Day trying to retroactively assign meaning to this turnout bump, the way the 2022 numbers were alternately described as a referendum on redistricting, a referendum on gas prices, and, in one letter to the editor I still think about, a referendum on the condition of Sunset Drive. By next spring, whichever outcome occurred will be cited as proof that the early voting surge predicted it all along, regardless of whether the surge had anything to do with anything.

I don't say this cynically. I say it as someone who spent three decades patching the same stretch of Northview Road every spring and watching residents alternately credit and blame that work for completely unrelated changes in their commute times. People like a tidy story. The data rarely offers one before Election Day, and by the time it might, everyone has moved on to arguing about the result instead of the turnout that produced it.

For what it's worth, I voted early myself, on a Tuesday afternoon, mostly because I did not want to deal with it later. Draw whatever conclusion from that you'd like. I've stopped trying.