So what did we learn yesterday?

We learned that if you are going to run in a statewide election, you have to go on TV with a good-sized buy and run ads in the entire state in order to win. If you don't do that, you might as well not even bother spending much money at all. Nick Voegeli, one of the Republicans running for Lt. Governor, spent almost no money on his campaign and got a larger percentage of the vote than Republican Attorney General Candidate Paul Bucher received in his race.

We learned that the Democrats look much more motivated for the election season, even if it means taking out one of their own. The Democratic Primary for the Attorney General race attracted over 350,000 votes while the Republican Primary only attracted about 238,000 votes (so far-the final totals are not in yet). I'm sure there were some crossover votes, but not enough to account for the large discrepancy in vote totals.

We learned that people don't like party switchers even when they come their way. Nancy Nusbaum was unable to convince very many people that she is a strong Democrat after she once ran as a Republican. She came in third in her primary for the 8th Congressional District behind two people that started out with a lot less name recognition than she had. One spent a lot of his own money, but one did not.

We learned once again that voting really matters and campaigns can't take anything for granted. There are a couple of primaries that are too close to call yet because there will be recounts. One of them only has about eight votes between the winner and the loser. One of the close primaries has a former state senator (Gary Drzewiecki) running for an assembly seat.

We learned that it's very tough to beat an incumbent, but not impossible. Most incumbents survived the night, but one did not so don't be scared to run just because it will be hard.

And we learned that despite being more removed from campaigns now, I'm still a nervous nelly that still worries about get-out-the-vote plans. I suspected I was being targeted by the Sanders campaign and in the end I played along because I thought it was an interesting race. Madison Republicans were trying to flex a little muscle in an overwhelmingly Democratic district and city. In the end what really mattered was that Travis' office has clearly been doing the constituent work and Travis votes the right way so it was hard for Sanders to make the case to vote him out.