Did marijuana really help Tony Evers win election?

Did marijuana help Tony Evers defeat Scott Walker? According to a new study, the answer is yes. But it seems such a surmise may be misleading. A political website called Patch.com analyzed voting patterns from throughout the state in the last election, and determined that Tony Evers won in part because sixteen Wisconsin counties including La Crosse put questions on the ballot asking if marijuana should be legalized. The popular theory is that asking voters to weigh in on the legalization issue would draw more democrats to the polls. Some even accused the La Crosse County Board of playing politics by putting it on the ballot alongside the governor’s race. When the ballots were tabulated Evers eeked out a narrow victory, barely 30,000 more votes out of the nearly 2.7 million cast. What is interesting is that in counties like La Crosse where marijuana legalization questions were on the ballot, Walker earned about the same number of votes as he did in 2014, but Evers earned almost 150,000 more votes than the democratic candidate that year. The theory is that more people turned out to vote in hopes of legalizing marijuana. Maybe Tony Evers was simply a better candidate than Mary Burke was four years ago. Maybe more voters had become unhappy with Governor Walker. And can we really assume that all those people who turned out to weigh in on the pot issue were democrats? That no republicans are in favor of legalizing the drug? That seems as much of a stretch as suggesting that pot was responsible for Tony Evers becoming Wisconsin’s next governor.