The long-awaited 2026 general election is here, and the question is what will voter turnout bring? Charles Franklin dissected the last Marquette poll before Nov. 3. With the Milwaukee Brewers World Series win diverting the fervor of the final days of campaigning, retired sports reporter Tom Haudricourt relived the past and present of the scrappy championship-winning team.

Charles Franklin
Director, Marquette Law School Poll

• With the clock to the 2026 midterms counting down, Franklin’s final statewide poll results show a snapshot in time from the third full week in October. With 4% remaining undecided, the match-up between Wisconsin’s candidates for governor show that among likely voters, 44% prefer Republican candidate Tom TIffany and 51% prefer Democratic candidate David Crowley.
• Franklin: “He’s pulled up a little bit. Compared to last month. Crowley’s picked up 2 points and Tiffany has fallen by 2 points. So the net is a shift of 4 points, but each candidate has only changed by a moderate amount. Now, again, this is with likely voters, those people that are certain they’re going to vote. If you look at registered voters, the whole set of registered voters, that slips to just a 3-point Crowley advantage. The interesting thing is that when you go to the people who are not certain, but those who will probably vote but not sure they’re going to vote, Tiffany actually leads by 12 with that group. And so, you can see that if the electorate expanded, if Tiffany was able to bring some of those somewhat reluctant voters to the polls, then that would give us a result that’s narrower, closer to that 3% end of that range. Whereas If people do what they’ve told us they’re going to do in this poll, then we get up to the 7-point Crowley advantage.”

Tom Haudricourt
Retired sports reporter

• Haudricourt covered the Milwaukee Brewers for 36 years as a sports reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He said the depth of the team’s fan base was evidenced in 1982 when the Brewers made it to the World Series – and lost – and supporters turned out when the city still hosted a parade. Another parade and celebration for the team’s first championship in 2026 had Haudricourt asking whether there was any beer left in Milwaukee.
• Haudricourt: “Milwaukee is just a very good baseball town. Let’s not forget — it’s not a lot of people left who were Braves fans in the ’50s, but that team was extraordinarily successful and drew very well for the market. So, and considering how long they had to wait to get to the World Series, you know, a lot of fan bases might’ve just thrown up their hands and said enough, but this one never did. All they’ve ever wanted is for the team to be competitive. In the last decade, they’ve really been competitive. And then once you get competitive, you dream of that next highest step, getting to the World Series. And then let me just be frank about getting to the World Series — as huge an accomplishment as that was to get there after 44 years, if they wouldn’t have won it, people were going to be devastated. You know, when you don’t get there very often, when you get there you got to win.”

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