Vince_Condella's Blog

This has been an historic election day, but not in the way you may think. Will there be record turnout across the country? Perhaps.  Will we elect the first African American president or the first female vice-president?  One way or the other, yes.  But the record I am writing about relates to weather.

Today's official high at Mitchell International Airport was 73 degrees, one degree higher than the old record high for November 4.  And we came up one degree short of tying the record warmest presidential election day in Milwaukee.  That occured on November 3, 1964 when we reached a high of 74.

How rare was today's warmth?  Going back 112 years of Milwaukee weather records, a presidential election day was warmer than 65 degrees only once, not counting today!  By the way, the coldest presidential election day was November 6, 1984 when we had a morning low of 26 degrees.

In the 29 presidential election days since 1896, Milwaukee has had 9 dry days (including today) and 20 days with precipitation.  The wettest was November 8, 1932 with 0.69" of rain.  Four election days had snow, with the greatest being 0.3" of snow that fell on November 3, 1992.

Hopefully you voted in this election.  It will be historic in several ways.

(Thanks to the folks at the National Weather Service office at Milwaukee-Sullivan for compiling these statistics.)