PolitiFact: Has Wisconsin really had 12 elections since 2000 decided by 30,000 votes or less?

Vanessa Swales, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
·3 min read

Wisconsin is used to tight elections. Razor-thin presidential races. Statewide cliffhangers.

But when Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming claimed in a media call during Vice President Kamala Harris’ March 6, 2024 visit that “We’ve had 12 elections in 24 years in Wisconsin that have been decided by less than 30,000 votes,” it struck us as a lot.

Brian Schimming, the newly elected chairman of the Republican. Party of Wisconsin.
Brian Schimming, the newly elected chairman of the Republican. Party of Wisconsin.

So we decided to dig into the numbers.

Close calls for a handful of statewide races

When PolitiFact Wisconsin reached out to state GOP spokesman Matt Fisher to find out which races Schimming was referring to, he supplied a list of 12. PolitiFact confirmed the results from those races with the Wisconsin Elections Commission election results archive and added the vote margin.

This is how the races played out in the last 24 years:

  • 2000 Presidential – Republican candidate George W. Bush narrowly defeated Vice President Al Gore by 5,708 votes.

  • 2004 Presidential – Bush won again, beating out Democratic ticket of then-U.S. Senator John Kerry by 11,384 votes.

  • 2006 Attorney General – Republican J.B. Van Hollen defeated then-Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk by 8,859 votes.

  • 2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court – Conservative Michael J. Gableman secured victory against incumbent Justice Louis Butler with a 22,303 vote margin.

  • 2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court – The incumbent justice, conservative David Prosser, Jr., won a second ten-year term after defeating assistant Wisconsin Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes.

  • 2016 Presidential – Republican Donald Trump beat out former secretary of state and First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton by 22,784 votes.

  • 2018 Gubernatorial – Incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker lost his run for a third term after being defeated by Democratic challenger and then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. Evers won with a 29,227 vote margin.

  • 2018 Attorney General Race – Current AG Josh Kaul, a Democrat, defeated Republican incumbent Brad Schimel by 17,190 votes.

  • 2019 Wisconsin Supreme Court – Former Appeals Judge Brian Hagedorn defeated then-Appeals Chief Judge Lisa Neubauer with a 5,981 vote gap.

  • 2020 Presidential – The race saw current president and then-former vice president Joe Biden beat the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump, by 20,608 votes.

  • 2022 United States Senate – Incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson won his re-election to a third term after defeating Democratic lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes by 26,718 votes.

  • 2022 Secretary of State – Incumbent Democrat Doug La Follette narrowly beat out Republican state legislator Amy Loudenbeck. He won a 12th term in office with a 7,442 vote margin.

It’s worth noting that only two presidential contests in the last 24 years did not have close calls: 2008 and 2012. In those two election years, former President Barack Obama won by 414,818 and 213,019 votes, respectively.

Our ruling

On a GOP press call on March 6, 2024, WisGOP Chairman Brian Schimming claimed: “We’ve had 12 elections in 24 years in Wisconsin that have been decided by less than 30,000 votes.”

And he was not wrong, with Wisconsin Elections Commissions data confirming, indeed, how tight those races were.

We rate this claim as True.

Sources

Brian Schimming, GOP press call, March 6, 2024.

Emails with WisGOP spokesman, Matt Fisher, March 25, 2024.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Tight elections feel normal in Wisconsin. Here is what makes this one so unusual,” Nov. 7, 2022.

Wisconsin Elections Commission, Election results archive.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Has Wisconsin had 12 elections since 2000 decided by 30K votes or less?