(CN) — A staunch supporter of President Donald Trump won a special election to fill a vacant northern Wisconsin congressional seat Tuesday, besting a local school board president to maintain Republican leadership over a large swath of the critical battleground state.
The race was called for two-term Wisconsin state Senator Tom Tiffany just after 9 p.m. Central time Tuesday, at which point Tiffany had 57% of the vote and held a comfortable lead over Tricia Zunker, an associate justice on the Ho-Chunk Nation Supreme Court and president of the Wausau School Board, who had 42% with 78% of votes counted.
The Badger State's 7th Congressional District, comprising all or some of 26 counties throughout the state’s rural north, came up for grabs when Republican U.S. Representative Sean Duffy resigned in September ahead of the birth of his child who was expected to have health problems.
Tiffany ran very much in line with hard-right Trump initiatives, particularly on hot button issues like gun rights, immigration and protecting the unborn. Those points seemed to resonate with Northwoods voters, indicating Trump has a good shot to continue his success in a region he won by 20 points in the 2016 general election.
However, the conservative’s margin of victory was smaller than Duffy’s most recent 2016 and 2018 reelection wins in the 7th District, in which he won by more than 20 points both times over his liberal challenger.
This may be an indication that Democrats have a window for success in a district where Hillary Clinton failed to gain traction in the 2016 presidential election but the odds are still long. The historically purple 7th District was represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Dave Obey from 1969 until he resigned in 2010, at which point Duffy took over, aided in part by controversial redistricting after the 2010 census that rendered the district friendlier turf for Republicans.
Zunker attempted to straddle the Democratic party’s ideological divide by taking up progressive positions on issues like campaign finance reform and far-reaching criminal justice reforms, while keeping a moderate “Medicare for all who want it” stance on health care. And while she did manage comfortable wins in the more liberal Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland counties, the gap was too much to bridge in the end.
“We showed what can be done, and we laid the groundwork for this seat to turn blue in November," she said in a concession video Tuesday night.
Tuesday was the second time in a little over a month that Wisconsinites headed to the polls during the Covid-19 pandemic. The state’s April 7 primary was shrouded in chaos and confusion as municipalities scrambled to carry out a safe election at the last minute with critical shortages of supplies and personnel, while also handling a record 1.3 million absentee ballots.
Things seemed to go smoother in northern Wisconsin on Tuesday, though, as there were no such reported shortages or similar problems managing the ballot box for the 420,000-plus voters in the district, 69,000 of which had already had absentee ballots counted as returned as of Monday.
Lines were rare and short at polling places in the border towns of Hudson and Somerset on Tuesday despite some consolidation of polling locations to save personal protective equipment. With two polling places each, local officials in Hudson noted that the in-person turnout was much lower than it had been during the state’s presidential primary and Supreme Court election on April 7.
The mood at Hudson’s firehouse, which hosted voting for two-thirds of the city’s voters, was easygoing early in the morning, with Police Chief Geoff Willems and Finance Director Alison Egger making casual conversation with voters in the parking lot.