2  Wisconsin’s Frozen Electorate

This essay by John Johnson originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Middle West Review.

The United States has held forty-three presidential elections since the 1854 founding of the Republican party in Ripon, Wisconsin. Since then, no state has ever remained as closely divided between the major parties throughout three consecutive elections as Wisconsin in 2016, 2020, and 2024. In those years, Donald Trump first won the state by 0.8 percentage points, lost by 0.6, and finally won again by 0.9 points. Each time, between twenty and thirty thousand votes separated Trump from the Democratic candidate. Unless stated otherwise, all references to “points” or “margin” herein refer to the Democratic candidate’s percent of the total vote minus the Republican’s percent.

Wisconsin is a relatively small state, demographically older, whiter, and more rural than the rest of the country. Still, it holds broader lessons, even apart from its temporarily pivotal role in the electoral college. For one, Wisconsin has been the subject of intense campaigning for decades now. This is what an electorate looks like where both parties have gone to the mat in their efforts to both persuade swing voters and turn out unenthusiastic supporters.

Being a swing state is nothing new for Wisconsin. Although Barack Obama won both his races handily, the 2000 and 2004 contests were settled in Wisconsin by the slimmest margins in state history. George W. Bush lost the 2000 race by a mere 5,708 votes. Donald Trump did not create Wisconsin’s divided electorate, but his two reelection campaigns do coincide with yet another superlative. In 2024, the median voter’s county changed its vote the least from the previous presidential election of any year in state history. The year with the third least amount of change was 2020.

County-level vote patterns can conceal significant internal variation, but the same pattern appears in spatially integrated ward data. The median voter’s ward changed its vote by just 2.6 points between 2020 and 2024—the least amount of change since these data began in 1990.

In short, the 2024 presidential election in Wisconsin showed the least evidence of political realignment of any such race in state history. Rather, both Trump’s loss in 2020 and win in 2024 represented the consolidation of a realignment in the Wisconsin electorate that began in earnest with the Tea Party wave in 2010. Trump has been the beneficiary of this trend, not its precipitant.

Nationwide, every state and about 90 percent of counties gave a greater share of their vote to Donald Trump in 2024 than 2020. In Wisconsin a similar share of counties, sixty-eight of seventy-two, or 94 percent, shifted toward Trump. But in two important ways, Wisconsin diverged from national patterns. The shift toward Trump was much smaller—about a quarter of the national swing. Also, voter turnout grew more in Wisconsin than in any other state.

Nationally, Trump’s share of the vote grew by about 3.1 percentage points since 2020. In Wisconsin, it only grew by 0.77 percentage points, the third lowest increase in the country and the lowest among all swing states. The share of eligible voters who cast a ballot grew from 75 percent in 2020 to 76.9 percent in 2024, while national turnout fell by about 2 percentage points, according to preliminary estimates from Michael McDonald at the University of Florida’s Election Lab. These two facts are related. Some of the biggest turnout drops came in populous, safe blue states like New York, New Jersey, and California. Those same states also saw Donald Trump grow his vote share by more than the rest of the country. In the seven swing states, conversely, the share of eligible voters participating grew by half a percentage point since 2020, while Trump’s increase in the vote share was merely 1.6 percentage points—half the growth in the safe states.

Why, then, did Trump win Wisconsin? The simplest explanation for why Trump won in 2024 is that he gained more in the least-educated places than he lost in the most-educated ones.

Imagine Wisconsin divided into five buckets, each representing one fifth of voters in the 2024 election. In the quintile of census tracts with the lowest level of educational attainment, about 14 percent of adults ages twenty-five and up have a bachelor’s degree. Geographically, this covers much of Wisconsin’s rural-but-not-touristy areas, as well as sections of the state’s less prosperous cities, including Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Beloit, Manitowoc, and Superior. This fifth of the state collectively voted for Trump by 3 points in 2016, 7 points in 2020, and 11 points in 2024.

Compare that with the most educated fifth of the state, where about 60 percent of adults ages twenty-five and up have a bachelor’s degree. This includes much of Dane County in and around Madison, many suburbs in other urban areas, and the northern tip of Door County (a popular destination for wealthy retirees). These places shifted toward the Democrats by 6 points between 2016 and 2020, accounting for a considerable part of Joe Biden’s victory. Harris, however, won them by just a single point more than Biden, a meager improvement which failed to offset her party’s continued slippage in less-educated areas.

Some of these highly educated areas did move more substantially toward the Democrats. Door County along with the Milwaukee suburban counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington are the only four counties which gave Harris a greater share of the vote than Biden in 2020. This progress for Democrats was countered by a Republican tilt which occurred in another set of highly educated places—those near college campuses.

Voters’ ages are another significant factor in Trump’s victory. National exit poll data showed pronounced gains for Trump among voters under age thirty, and this is consistent with the patterns in Wisconsin’s ward data. Trump gained 3 points in the youngest fifth of the state, 2 points in the next-youngest fifth, and just 1 point in each of the three older quintiles. The pattern extended even to areas surrounding college campuses. These remain bastions of Democratic support, but across the fifty-seven wards closest to one of the state’s dozen large undergraduate campuses, Trump’s share of the vote grew from 31.3 percent in 2020 to 34.5 percent in 2024. Trump’s vote share grew by 3.3 percentage points in the wards near the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus. In the wards surrounding Marquette University, Trump’s support grew from 19 percent to 28 percent; near UW–La Crosse it grew by 9.5 points; near UW–Platteville by 6.7.

Patterns of support by income also reveal tensions in the Democratic party’s coalition. When the state’s census tracts are divided into five quintiles based on per capita income, Democrats do best in the poorest and wealthiest fifths, while Republican strength comes from the middle three.

The poorest fifth of the state is a heterogenous mix of Milwaukee’s urban core—rust belt cities like Racine, Kenosha, Beloit, Janesville, and Manitowoc—and a smattering of rural areas in the western and northern portions of the state, including the Menomonee, Lac Courte Oreilles, Bad River, and Lac du Flambeau Indian reservations. Taken altogether, these are the parts of the state where Democrats do best, but their margins are slipping. They voted for Hillary Clinton by 18 points, Joe Biden by 15, and Kamala Harris by 11.

Voters in the wealthiest fifth of the state were tied in 2016. They gave Biden a 6-point victory in 2020 and Harris a 7-point edge in 2024. As with education, a closely correlated attribute, Democratic improvement in the highest quintile failed to offset losses in the lowest.

It will take years and the painstaking reconciliation of ecological correlations (like those described above) with survey data and validated voter records before political scientists reach a consensus about precisely how and why the electorate changed in 2024. The correlations presented here should be understood as just that, correlations. In many cases, they overlap with one another.

Race is one of those areas of overlap. The parts of Wisconsin which are majority black or Hispanic tend to be poorer, younger, and with lower levels of college attainment than majority white areas. Perhaps it should not be a surprise, then, that these areas (almost entirely within the City of Milwaukee) all swung toward Trump. They remain strongly Democratic, but Trump lost them by less in each reelection campaign.

In the state’s 153 majority black wards, mainly covering Milwaukee’s near west and inner north sides, Trump’s 2024 margin improved by 2 percentage points since 2020 and a total of 5 points since 2016. In the fifty-three majority Hispanic or Latino wards (mostly on Milwaukee’s near south side), Trump’s margin improved 10 points since 2020 and 19 points since 2016. Trump’s margin in majority non-Hispanic white wards fell two points between 2016 and 2020, before gaining back 1 point from 2020 to 2024.

National data also show that Trump’s support grew most among nonwhite voters. Part of the reason for Wisconsin’s unusually small shift toward Trump from 2020 to 2024 may well be because these voters make up a smaller fraction of Wisconsin’s population than in other swing states or the nation overall.

Most of the shifts described above are quite small. In a state as closely divided as Wisconsin in the Trump era, even small changes are consequential, but one should not lose sight of the overall stasis of the state’s electorate. This stability through the past three presidential cycles stands in stark contrast to the period of rapid change immediately preceding it. The median municipality in the state (weighted by votes cast) voted 3.4 points differently in 2004 than 2000. The shift grew to 12.8 points in 2008, 7.2 in 2012, 8.9 in 2016, 4.1 in 2020, and 1.9 in 2024. Most people live in a place whose political preferences have changed little in the past four years. Even the large rightward shift from Obama’s 2012 reelection to Trump’s 2016 victory was presaged by the Tea Party wave.

Every inch of Wisconsin is part of a city, town, or village. Trump’s biggest gains over Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, came in Wisconsin’s unincorporated “towns” (an administrative category analogous to “townships” elsewhere). These typically rural areas hold 28 percent of the state’s population. Beginning in 2010, the towns shifted sharply to the right. They gave Romney a 12-point victory in 2012, before voting for Trump by 25 points in 2016. Yet this sharp growth in Republican support predates Trump’s first campaign.

After supporting Republican gubernatorial candidates by single-digit margins in the 2000s, the towns swung hard in support of Scott Walker, giving him the victory by 23 points in 2010, 27 points in the 2012 recall election, and 25 points in his 2014 reelection. Trump’s 2016 landslide success in rural Wisconsin exactly matched the average of Scott Walker’s three preceding victories in those same areas.

That growth in rural Republican support matched the national trend, as working-class voters without college degrees switched their allegiances in droves. In Wisconsin, the change was enough to elect Walker and Trump in 2014 and 2016. But increases in Democratic support among urban and suburban college educated voters tipped the state in 2018 and 2020. These competing trends have almost perfectly offset each other in Wisconsin, leading to the split elections of a U.S. senator from one party and a governor or president from the other in both 2022 and 2024.

Indeed, Wisconsin’s turnout was apparently higher in 2024 than in any other state. Democrats cannot plausibly blame Harris’s defeat on Wisconsin supporters staying home. But Republicans cannot take too much comfort from that. Trump’s victory was wide but shallow, and reliant on younger, poorer, and less educated supporters who participate less reliably in midterm elections. For the third consecutive election, he failed to a win an outright majority of Wisconsin’s electorate, and his narrow victory had insufficient coattails to bring Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde along with him.

Wisconsin in the Trump era is the country’s ultimate swing state. This is true arithmetically, in that no other state has ever been as closely divided across three presidential elections. But this paper-thin division does not reflect an abundance of swing voters. Within the state, individual wards changed their vote between Trump’s campaigns at historically low rates. The 2024 election resulted in a Democratic senator and a Republican president; nonetheless, the county vote correlation between those two offices was the closest in state history. The split outcome reflected not an abundance of ticket-splitters, but the decisive influence even a tiny number of voters can have in such an evenly divided state. In this way, Wisconsin repeats in miniature the calcified partisan divisions of the country as a whole.