2  A battleground in flux

by Craig Gilbert

Wisconsin is the most politically competitive of states. Its big statewide elections are routinely close. Its role in picking presidents is persistently pivotal. It is a showcase for the defining trends in our politics, from partisan polarization to the decline of ticket-splitting to the growth of the urban-rural divide.

It is in this sense a microcosm.

But it is also a special case.

Wisconsin’s very status as a 50/50 state makes it an outlier, since only a handful of states today are divided so evenly that presidential candidates bother to contest them.
Its population is atypical. Wisconsin is the whitest of the presidential battlegrounds. In fact, white blue-collar voters – a demographic segment that has gotten huge attention in the Trump Era – make up a larger share of the vote in Wisconsin than in any other swing state.

Its culture of political engagement is also unusual, fueled by decades of high-stakes partisan combat. Wisconsin has historically had the highest turnout of any true battleground, equaled or surpassed only by a handful of states (such as Maine and Minnesota) that aren’t in play in close national elections.

It has been the nation’s most enduring battleground, along with Pennsylvania, making it even more of an oddity. Four of the past six presidential races in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a point.

In no other state has this happened more than twice. Most states, in fact, have either changed their partisan stripes in recent decades or never been competitive at all.

They’ve gotten redder, like Missouri. Or bluer, like Maryland. They’ve stayed very red, like Mississippi. Or stayed very blue, like New York. They’ve gone from red to blue, like Colorado and Virginia, or from blue to red, like West Virginia.

Most of the states that were battlegrounds three decades ago have shifted politically as their populations changed, or as the kinds of voters that dominate their electorates trended away from one party and toward another as the nation’s politics changed.

The story in Wisconsin is different. Its population has undergone changes, but smaller changes than those experienced by many other states that have seen bigger inflows or outflows of people.

It has seen huge partisan shifts within its borders, as rural voters in the north and west of the state have become more Republican and suburban voters in the south have become more Democratic. The state’s political map looks very different now than it did in the 1990s or even 2000s, and those differences say a lot about our changing politics. At the statewide level, though, these changes have somehow cancelled each out.

Wisconsin remains as much a presidential battleground as it was in the 1990s, when Democrat Bill Clinton’s winning margins tracked closely with his winning margins nationally, and in the 2000s, when Republican George W. Bush lost the state twice by less than a half a percentage point.

Wisconsin is arguably even more pivotal today. There are considerably fewer swing states now than there used to be. And Wisconsin was the mathematical “tipping-point state” in the 2016 and 2020 elections, the state that pushed the winning candidate (first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden) past 269 electoral votes.

None of this means that Wisconsin will always be a 50/50 state. Politics doesn’t stand still. We can’t predict the electoral future. But we can study the past and analyze the present. We can measure how the state has changed over recent decades, based on years of quality polling, on years of statewide election results, and on years of detailed election data down to the neighborhood.

Under the surface of Wisconsin’s recurring jump-ball elections, there is a great deal of change to talk about.

Let’s start at the top, with the big statewide battles, and examine the geographic and demographic trends and patterns that define Wisconsin elections today.

The two parties in Wisconsin have been engaged in a long struggle for dominance in which neither side could claim durable victory.

Democrats won every presidential contest from 1988 to 2012, but four of the past six have been toss-ups.

Democrats dominated US Senate elections from the 1960s through the 2000s, but since 2010 Wisconsin has taken turns electing conservative Republican Ron Johnson and liberal Democrat Tammy Baldwin. Wisconsin is one of just five states with senators from different parties. And Johnson and Baldwin are farther apart in their voting records than any other pair of same-state senators, making them the Senate’s pre-eminent political odd couple.

In elections for governor, Wisconsin voted Republican from 1986 to 1998, Democratic in 2002 and 2006, Republican in 2010 and 2014, and Democratic in 2018 and 2022. But while the parties have taken turns throwing victory parties, the nature of these big statewide elections has fundamentally changed.

One change is the decline of split-ticket voting (voters backing different parties for different offices) and crossover voting (where voters who identify with one party vote for the other party’s candidate). This is a national trend, but in Wisconsin the change has been especially dramatic, given its history of dominant politicians on both sides enjoying cross-partisan appeal.

It was only a few decades ago that voters delivered landslide victories to Republican Tommy Thompson for governor in the 1990s and to Democrat Herb Kohl for US Senate in the 1990s and 2000s (and Democratic Sen. Bill Proxmire before that). These politicians routinely won the support of a quarter or third of the other party’s voters, and enjoyed rosy approval ratings. In the 1980s and 1990s, more than a fifth of the electorate was splitting its ticket for governor and senator.

But the era of blow-out victories in big elections by both parties is a thing of the past.

Since 2008 (when Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points), the only double-digit victory in a major statewide partisan election is Baldwin’s 11-point win in 2018.

In 2022, races for governor and Senate were decided by 3 points and 1 point.

The previous race for governor and the past two races for president were all decided by 1 point, give or take a fraction.

The decline of ticket-splitting and cross-over voting are inseparable from another national (and global) trend that has left its stamp on Wisconsin elections: partisan polarization.

As partisan lines have hardened, most politicians are widely disliked by the other party’s voters, capping their popularity at much lower levels than in the past.

Republican candidates today rarely win more than 10% of the other party’s voters, and vice versa. Often, it is much less than that.

The state has polarized geographically, too, as communities have become more like-minded in their politics: red places have gotten redder, blue places have gotten bluer.

The share of Wisconsin’s voters who live in one-sided communities has been methodically rising for decades.

But this trend has taken different forms at different times.

A decade ago, the most striking example of this kind of polarization was metropolitan Milwaukee. In fact, the greater Milwaukee area was arguably the most polarized place in swing-state America.

With almost every election since the 1980s, the gap between how people voted in the red part of metro Milwaukee (the suburban “WOW” counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) and how they voted in the blue part (Milwaukee County) grew bigger and bigger.

You could literally locate the dividing line (more like an abyss) on the Milwaukee County border.

But these red and blue camps suddenly stopped spinning apart after 2014, the year that Republican Gov. Scott Walker won a second term.

Since then, the urban-suburban voting gap in metro Milwaukee has narrowed. It has narrowed not because Milwaukee County has gotten less blue but because the WOW Counties have gotten less red. The three WOW counties that were once invariably the most Republican counties in Wisconsin – and some of the highest-performing red counties in America – are now no longer. In the 2022 election for governor, Waukesha ranked 29th of 72 counties in the size of its GOP tilt. Ozaukee ranked 44th. Sizeable suburbs that voted for Bush and Walker by 40 points or more in the 2000s and 2010s voted for Trump by 10 to 20 points.

This “Trump Era” Republican erosion in the suburbs has not been confined to big fall elections; it also has occurred in big spring elections for the state’s highest court. And it has not been confined to the WOW counties that were once the bedrock of the Wisconsin GOP.

Over time, the Madison suburbs have gone from being Democratic-leaning or “purple” to in some cases rivaling the city of Madison in their one-sidedness.

The inner suburbs within Milwaukee County have gotten bluer. The North Shore suburbs in the northern half of the county have rapidly gone from purple to lopsidedly blue.

Meanwhile, the more blue-collar and conservative suburbs in the southern half of the county have gone from red to purple or light blue.

The result is that metro Milwaukee is no longer the “face” of polarization in Wisconsin.

Today, geographic polarization in the state has far more to do with the gap between metropolitan voters and rural voters than it does between city voters and suburban voters. Rural Wisconsin, which once boasted some very purple areas, shifted in a decisively red direction with Walker’s victories for governor in 2010 and 2014 and Trump’s first two races for president in 2016 and 2020.

Consider the Wausau media market, an area of 11 counties in north central Wisconsin that is home to about 8 percent of the state’s voters. In the 80s, 90s and 2000s, it was typically a few points more Republican than the rest of the state. But in the 2012 presidential race, the GOP margin in the Wausau region was 9 points better than the statewide, and in 2020 it was 18 points better.

You can get a far more complete measure of the rural vote in Wisconsin by adding up all the towns in the state. There are more than 1,200 of them. These communities are overwhelmingly rural, and they are home to about 30% of the state’s voters.

Democrats won the “town vote” for governor in 2006 but have lost it by 23 to 25 points in the four gubernatorial races since.

The last Democrat to win the “town vote” for president was Bill Clinton in 1996. Republicans George W. Bush and Mitt Romney won it by 12 to 14 points in 2000, 2004 and 2012. But Trump has won the Wisconsin town vote by 25 points in his two races.

Again, these are national and global trends. Rural voters are flocking to the more conservative party. The gap between city and countryside (and between college grads and non-college voters, and between secular voters and the most religious voters) grows ever larger.

But the trend has been especially vivid in Wisconsin because these fault lines were once a lot less stark.

The voting gap between cities and towns has been growing with almost every Wisconsin election for more than 30 years, as has the gap between metropolitan counties and rural counties.

It used to be a hallmark of the Wisconsin political map that much of it defied political stereotyping.

The sparsely populated northern half of the state sent Democrat Dave Obey to Congress from 1969 to 2011. Now it is landslide red turf.

In the hilly, unglaciated southwest corner of the state, known as the Driftless Area, a bloc of very rural, very white counties along the Upper Mississippi River voted consistently Democratic for president for decades, setting them apart from the vast majority of rural white counties between the coasts.

But most of these Wisconsin counties flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016.

By the same token, the outer suburbs of Milwaukee were once national outliers as well. While suburban voters in other major northern metros were trending in a Democratic direction the “WOW counties” were very red and getting redder.

But the Trump Era has altered this pattern as well, as the GOP has seen its once massive edge dissipate in these communities, especially the more densely populated, higher-education suburbs closer to Milwaukee County.

These are two examples – one rural, one suburban – of how Wisconsin has fallen more in line with powerful national currents and lost some of its political idiosyncrasy. These changes have been shaping the struggle for partisan supremacy in the state.

You can see this most clearly by comparing the state’s two jump-ball elections for president in 2000 and 2004 with its two jump-ball elections for president in 2016 and 2000. Between the “Bush elections” and the “Trump elections,” Republicans made virtually all their gains in the state’s predominantly rural north, west and center. From 2004 to 2020, the party saw a net gain of almost 150,000 votes in the state’s five media markets outside Milwaukee and Madison (Green Bay, Wausau, La Crosse, and the Wisconsin portions of two Minnesota markets, Duluth and the Twin Cities).

Meanwhile, Democrats made almost all their gains in the much more populous south and southeast. This includes the city and suburbs of Milwaukee, which have gotten bluer. It also includes the city of Madison and its suburbs, which have not only gotten bluer but gotten bigger. Dane County is not only the state’s second biggest county but easily its fastest-growing one, and its combination of high growth, high turnout, and increasing lopsidedness has boosted the Democrats’ fortunes in statewide elections.

From 2004 to 2020, Democrats saw a net gain of a little over 150,000 votes in these two metros.

In other words, Democratic gains in the more densely populated Milwaukee to Madison corridor and Republican gains outside the Milwaukee and Madison metros have largely offset each other.

Largely, but not exactly.

These changes have advantaged Republicans on one way and Democrats in another.

They have advantaged Republicans in congressional and legislative races because Democratic voters are now more geographically concentrated in cities and inner suburbs. And the party’s collapse in small towns has left the GOP dominating large swaths of the state. Democrats controlled a majority of the state’s congressional districts when they were competitive in northern and western Wisconsin. Now Republicans hold six of Wisconsin’s eight US House seats.

And combined with very pronounced gerrymanders in 2011 and 2021, Republicans have controlled huge majorities in the state Legislature, even while they were losing big statewide elections.

That edge is now gone. Very GOP-friendly legislative maps were overturned by the state’s highest court, which shifted from a conservative majority to a liberal one thanks to a series of liberal elections victories in Wisconsin’s increasingly partisan spring judicial races.

The other sobering development for Republicans has been its Trump Era record in statewide elections. The political trade-off of rural gains and suburban losses produced a very narrow victory for Trump in 2016 and for Sen. Johnson in 2022. But the party’s decline in metro Milwaukee and Madison has left the GOP with a lower ceiling in statewide races, a narrower path to victory, and losing a little more often than winning.

Just compare the party’s record in major races (president, governor, Senate and state Supreme Court) during the Obama presidency with its record in the Trump Era since 2016. From 2009 to 2016, Republicans went 9-4 in these major races.

But from 2017 to the present, Republicans are 2-7. Even more telling, no GOP-backed candidate in one of these big elections has reached 51% of the vote, something that Republican-backed candidates did regularly in the previous era.

That’s the historical context for the momentous 2024 election in Wisconsin, with Democratic incumbent president Joe Biden and Democratic Senate incumbent Tammy Baldwin both on the ballot, and a new legislative map making the fight for legislative control far more competitive than it has been in more than a decade.