On election night, Wisconsin was too close to call, but President Trump was ahead by comfortable margins, defying the predictions of corporate media pollsters who prepared America for a Biden blowout in the Badger State. Pollsters’ predictions ranged from 17 to five-point margins for Joe Biden. By early Wednesday morning, Biden had been pushed over the edge by a “ballot dump” of mail-in votes. While some have alleged that this ballot dump points to fraud, even Republican Party officials say they were prepared for 160,000 mail-in votes to be counted after the polls closed.
Others have called into question disparities in Wisconsin’s high voter turnout when compared to other election cycles. This too can be explained by same-day voter registration in an election that saw record turnout nationwide.
However, voter anomalies in Milwaukee County, the largest county in the state, do raise some questions. Specifically, how did Biden outperform former President Barack Obama’s 2008 performance in the county, in an election that saw the highest voter turnout in 40 years?
In 2008, Barack Obama received 316,916 votes in Milwaukee County. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won only 288,822 votes there. But in 2020 Biden outperformed them both, receiving 317,251 votes countywide and besting Obama’s share of the vote by nearly two points.
What makes this suspicious is that the county is shrinking. The Census Bureau population estimates show that in the last 10 years, thousands of metro Milwaukee residents have left the area for other parts of the state and country. As the Milwaukee Sentinel put it, “We’re lagging in a key metric that often reflects the vitality and desirability of a metro area: population growth.” The City of Milwaukee, which makes up about 60 percent of the county’s population, saw the number of registered voter decline by more than 26,700 from 2008 to 2020.
While it’s true that Obama in 2008 won about 18,000 more votes than Biden in the City of Milwaukee itself, one would also expect the countywide vote total for Biden to be less than Obama. Obama was a historic figure that motivated record numbers of blacks to vote in 2008. In addition, he had one of the most robust and successful campaigns in American history. His ground game and get-out-the-vote efforts were unprecedented, utilizing door knocking, canvassing, and phone banking. Not surprisingly, in no small part because of the black vote in Milwaukee County, he won the state of Wisconsin handily by a 6.9-percent margin.
By contrast, Biden’s campaign has never come close to the enthusiasm of Obama’s, and he faced an equally obvious enthusiasm gap compared to his 2020 challenger, President Trump, whose devoted supporters swarmed to his events despite a pandemic, and staged numerous non-campaign-directed boat, car, and ATV rallies throughout the state.
What makes Biden’s vote increase over Obama’s in Milwaukee County even more suspicious is that because of Biden’s decision to rarely leave his basement for fear of COVID-19, the Biden campaign had no ground game in Wisconsin and other key battleground states. No door-knocking, no volunteer phone-banking, virtually no activity at his anemic campaign offices. Biden staffers were running an almost exclusively digital campaign, sometimes based out of other states. Moreover, the much-anticipated Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee was upended by COVID-19, and Biden came to Wisconsin a total of only two times as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.
What’s more, Biden has a history of making wildly racist comments. He wrote the 1994 crime bill, which is widely considered to have been discriminatory against black Americans, and during the campaign he made several insensitive and significant blunders, including telling black radio icon, Charlamagne tha God, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.” Given all of this, it’s odd that Biden got more votes in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s most populous black county, than Obama, the first black major-party presidential candidate in American history.
The numbers in Milwaukee County suggest something fishy is happening in Wisconsin, and the Trump campaign is right to call for a recount.
