Politics & Government

Walker Wins Wauwatosa Handily in High-Turnout Contest

Voters go to the polls in droves usually seen only in presidential years, with 82 percent exercising their rights.

Gov. Scott Walker easily won his hometown in Tuesday's recall election .

In unofficial results, Walker outpolled his recall challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by 2,028 votes in Wauwatosa.

Walker received 14,049 votes, 53.6 percent of all 26,195 cast in the governor's race. Barrett got 12,021, or 45.9 percent. Hari Trivedi received 107 votes and there were 18 write-ins.

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The governor improved on his performance in Wauwatosa in 2010, when he won 51.8 pecent of the hometown vote.

Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch got 13,720 votes, 53.25 percent, to challenger Mahlon Mitchell's 12,005, or 46.6 percent. There were 44 write-ins in that race.

Find out what's happening in Wauwatosawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

One thing Walker did not win was his own ward, No. 11. Barrett got 595 votes to Walker's 541 in Tosa's most southeasterly ward, east of North 68th Street and south of State Street.

Walker did, however, win the whole of District 4, 1,757 to 1,603, taking Ward 12 by more than a 200-vote margin.

The voter turnout in Wauwatosa for the Tuesday recall election was close to but not quite as high as the last presidential race, one of the biggest in the city's history.

At 81.92 percent, Tuesday's turnout for Tosa was higher than in the 2010 election that put Walker into the governor's seat. That poll, which also featured the high-profile Supreme Court race between David Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg and the U.S. Senate race between Ron Johnson and Russ Feingold, as well as the first matchup between Walker and Barrett, drew 74.20 percent of voters in Wauwatosa.

As high as it was, Tuesday's swarm of voters did not reach quite the epic proportions of the 2008 presidential election that brought Barack Obama into office. That election brought out 86.57 percent of voters in Tosa.

Wauwatosa's voter interest has "always been very high," said Deputy City Clerk Susan Van Hoven. "But something like this is unusual, such as we're used to seeing only in presidential years.

"A lot of people who don't normally vote, or only vote in presidential races, seem to have come out for this one."

That shows in the number of new voters registered at the polls as well — although that's a figure the clerk's office hasn't arrived at quite yet.

"We haven't gotten them counted yet," Van Hoven said, "but there seems to be hundreds and hundreds of them. There are big stacks of them.

"Toward the end of the night, they were running out of registration forms."


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