Read: I respected Scott Walker. Then I worked for him.

To be sure, exit polls aren’t entirely reliable. The election data and preelection surveys that we do have complicate the story a bit. Wisconsin’s counties report different levels of data, and only Milwaukee provides a statistically useful data set broken down by discrete geographic areas, the city’s wards. The results of course don’t contain demographic information on individual voters, but one side effect of the city’s staggering level of racial segregation is that the wards themselves are reasonable proxies for racial groups. And according to John Johnson, a research fellow at the Marquette University Law School, both plurality-black and plurality-Hispanic wards did see turnout markedly increase. Of Milwaukee’s 327 wards, black people are the largest group in 148. Turnout in those wards increased from 64.5 percent in 2014 to 68 percent in 2018. But that actually didn’t keep pace with plurality-white wards, where turnout increased from 66.7 percent to 78.7 percent, meaning plurality-black wards might have actually made up a slightly lower percentage of the Democratic vote share than in 2014.

One particularly interesting aspect of the voter data is the strong increase in turnout and vote share among wards with large Hispanic populations. Turnout in those wards rose 14 percentage points from 2014 to 2018, going from 50 percent to 64 percent and making those wards almost identical to plurality-black wards in terms of turnout. Latino voters in Milwaukee are a much smaller population than black voters, but Johnson’s preliminary analysis found that the vote share of plurality-Hispanic wards in the overall results tripled from 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent, a substantial amount in a state where election margins are often narrow. And that’s as the candidate preference among voters in those plurality-Hispanic wards shifted strongly away from Walker and toward Evers.

Read: Even Scott Walker says he’s “at risk” in Wisconsin.

These data aren’t complete either. Milwaukee’s wards are only a rough proxy for race across the state, and their usefulness could be limited by demographic shifts over the years, such as any displacement of black residents to the suburbs or internal population movements within the city. One major confounder is the fact that there are 25,000 fewer registered voters in the state than there were in 2014, a result of a widespread voter-purge program that opponents claim disproportionately disenfranchised black and Latino voters. In June, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to similar purges across the country, but the upshot for minority voters in Wisconsin is that they might have showed up to the polls in spite of increased barriers against doing so.

Further analysis from the Marquette Law School captures some of that enthusiasm. Using an aggregate of each election year’s polls, Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, calculated that 67 percent of all black respondents said they were certain they’d vote in 2018, with 29 percent indicating they were not likely to vote. That’s compared with 60 percent of black respondents who said they were certain to vote in 2014, and 39 percent who said they weren’t likely, Franklin explained in an email to me. Indeed, these results appear to be positive signs after troubling returns on black likelihood of voting from the 2012 and 2016 elections, in which the proportion of respondents who said they were certain to vote dropped five percentage points. It appears that at the very least, 2018 was a reversal of a mini-trend of disengagement among communities of color, and that result alone will have significant meaning in elections in the state.