City Carries Shelton to Victory

Circuit Judge-elect Danielle Shelton‘s big totals in the city on Tuesday boosted her to a decisive victory over incumbent Andrew Jones in the race for the Branch 40 bench, Milwaukee County election records show.

Shelton, an assistant state public defender, won the race countywide by 18,243 votes, 71,647 to 53,404, but ran slightly behind in the county’s suburbs. In Milwaukee, however, she crushed Jones by 18,263 votes, 38,414 to 20,141, resulting in her entire margin of victory.

Shelton won in 10 of the county’s 18 suburbs. Her average suburban victory, however, was 442 votes, while her average suburban loss was 556 votes. Overall, she lost the suburbs by 20 votes.

Shelton’s largest suburban win was in Shorewood, where she won by 1,608 votes and took 70 percent of the vote, the largest vote share either candidate won in the county.  Shelton won 66 percent of the vote in Milwaukee, her second biggest vote share.

Her largest loss was in Franklin, where Jones captured 61 percent of the ballots and won by 1,495 votes.

The Branch 40 race did not attract the voter participation that the Supreme Court race between Lisa Neubauer and Brian Hagedorn did. There were 25,053 — or 17 percent — fewer total votes cast for Shelton and Jones than there were for Hagedorn and Neubauer in Tuesday’s election.

There were 125,051 votes for the two Branch 40 candidates and 150,104 for the Supreme Court contenders.

Gretchen Schuldt writes a blog for Wisconsin Justice Initiative, whose mission is “To improve the quality of justice in Wisconsin by educating the public about legal issues and encouraging civic engagement in and debate about the judicial system and its operation.