Wisconsin, the sleeper tipping point state
Wisconsin, the sleeper tipping point state
How political geography makes the Badger State a pure tossup
A surprising swing right made Wisconsin red in 2016 and it was the tipping point state in the 2020 election. But the polls have often missed here. In 2016 and 2020, it was forecast to be safely Democratic, to the left of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and it’s still polling to the left of them today.
But the political geography of Wisconsin makes tells a different story, that of a pure tossup, just as much if not more so than Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin is the most rural of the three major Rust Belt battlegrounds. 39 percent of its population is in its major metro areas compared to 46 percent of Pennsylvania and 40 percent of Michigan. And it is significantly whiter and more rural. On demographics alone, it resembles red Iowa more than purple Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But, more than most states, Wisconsin has idiosyncracies that keep it competitive. It has voting blocs—liberal Madisonites and Scandinavian rural voters—that are way more Democratic than generic urban or rural voters in other states would be. Education polarization in 2016 washed away some of these historic oddities but it did not wipe them out completely.
Nevertheless, the upside of realignment was all Trump’s in 2016. While large metros (Milwaukee and Madison) and rural areas are evenly matched at 39 percent of the vote, with 22 percent of the vote being cast in smaller cities, only the very college-educated and very white working class extremes were subject to demographic pressures pushing voters strongly to and from Trump. Areas with 28 percent of the state’s voting population swung 15 points or more towards Republicans between 2012 and 2020, while just 14 percent of the state swung 15 points or more towards Democrats. Overall, the state swung 7.7 points right in 2016, more than erasing Barack Obama’s 7 point margin, and it swung left just enough for Joe Biden to eke out a win in 2020.
The result is a state that flipped from more Democratic in the country from 2004 to 2012 to one that in 2020 leaned 4 points to its right. Except for when Obama was running, all of the presidential races here have been decided by a point or less.
My approach to carving up states into custom political geographies—with the help of Colin Miller’s Redistricter—has unique advantages in Wisconsin. The state is defined politically by extreme polarization between the two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, and the rest of the state. But the Milwaukee metro, especially, is no monolith. It has minority communities, white working class areas, prosperous suburbs and middle class suburbs that each have trended their own way in recent elections. Overall, Wisconsin has 20 distinct political regions that add up to make it one of the competitive states in the nation.
Milwaukee and Madison vs. the rest of the state is a familiar narrative that hides tectonic shifts under the surface. In 2000, more than half of the GOP’s margins came from the “WOW” suburbs of Milwaukee; today, the overwhelming majority come from rural areas. Meanwhile, Democrats have steadily expanded their margins in their Milwaukee and Madison strongholds, but collapsing turnout in minority areas and the departure of the white working class have left them more reliant on the white liberal part of their coalition.
Thanks to Redistricter, we have a wealth of Wisconsin election data going back to 1992, and paid subscribers will see a cycle-over-cycle view of partisan shifts over time in each of our regions, divided up by four key groups: the Milwaukee metro, the Madison metro, smaller cities, and rural areas.
On the Democratic side, the party’s existing base has consolidated over the last 30 years, with Democratic margins in the core parts of Madison and Dane County growing from 30 to 70 points. Over this long time horizon, the impact of demographic change in Milwaukee is also visible, with growing of minority populations replacing ethnic whites, a process we have seen reach its logical conclusion. On the Republican side, the rural areas became a hydrogen bomb of Trump votes. And sitting in between these are the state’s smaller cities, the state’s bellwethers, voting roughly the way they were 30 years ago.
Metro Milwaukee — 27% of the vote
The Milwaukee region is divided between 10 percent of the statewide vote cast in urban Milwaukee and 17 percent cast in the suburbs, typically shortened to “WOW,” for the Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington collar counties.
We can split the vote in Milwaukee proper four ways:
White Working Class Milwaukee, 4.2% of the vote, Biden +19, D+5 since 2012
Downtown Milwaukee, 2.0% of the vote, Biden +62, D+19 since 2012
Black Milwaukee, 3.2% of vote, Biden +79, R+5 since 2012
Latino Milwaukee, 0.6% of the vote, Biden +55, R+14 since 2012
All of the main parts of the electorate are represented within the city with a clear expression of their national trends in each group.
In 2016, as Trump was swiping the state, the Republican performance within the majority-white parts of Milwaukee proper were mediocre, with significant bloodletting in the white liberal downtown areas and only marginal gains in the white working class.
But Trump still managed to net votes out of Milwaukee due to collapsing turnout in majority-minority neighborhoods: over just two election cycles, votes cast were down 25 percent in Black-majority precincts and 12 percent in Latino precincts. Meanwhile, white-majority areas mostly bounced back from their 2016 turnout drops.
This is partly a reflection of shifting population patterns. Specifically, the metro’s small Latino population is increasingly migrating into White Working Class Milwaukee from the ex-Polish strongholds it has mainly occupied, diluting the white working class GOP-trending vote. But the same moves are happening in Philadelphia, and Trump made gains in white working class areas there compared to the losses we see in Milwaukee.
The Black vote in Milwaukee proper is highly segregated, stopping right at the county line that demarcates the city from the suburbs. But as in other former industrial cities, these areas are slowly getting more diverse, with gentrification at the edges of liberal downtown Milwaukee, Black voters moving out to other parts of the city, and Latinos moving in.
Democrats have put in strong performances among white liberals in downtown Milwaukee, improving their margins by 19 points. But these has been offset by weak Democratic turnout in the working class parts of Milwaukee County.
The Milwaukee metro has had some of the sharpest social and partisan divides between a city and its suburbs anywhere in the country, something we see in other big Midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit. In Milwaukee, the suburbs were anomalously Republican until very recently, and they still retain much of their conservatism.
But there’s a misconception that the entirety of the WOW region is swinging strongly to the left, when that trend is mostly happening in the wealthier towns. Nevertheless, the overall trends are enough to make the WOW counties bluer by double digits.
Slightly less than a third of the Milwaukee suburbs are well to-do and college educated, and racing to the left. More than two thirds are solidly middle class, with Trump margins that rival the surrounding rural areas—but still down from 2012.
WOW Prosperity, 5.4% of the vote, Biden +6, D+26 since 2012
WOW Normies, 11.3% of the vote, Trump +23, D+7 since 2012
Geographically, the higher income Milwaukee suburbs known as WOW Prosperity extends northward from downtown Milwaukee along the lake and west in a line Brookfield and beyond.1 WOW Normies include the balance of the WOW Counties, including towns like Waukesha, West Bend, and Menominee Falls.
There’s a clear dividing line on education and income between these two communities that aligns with their political shift. In WOW Prosperity, 62 percent have a BA compared to 40 percent of WOW Normies. 18 percent in WOW Prosperity have incomes over $200,000 versus 10 percent of WOW Normies. The education polarization of the Trump era was still in full swing in 2020, with a 9 point swing left in WOW Prosperity and 4 points in the WOW Normie region.
Madison — 12% of the vote
In virtually no state does the main university town have such outsized influence on state politics. Madison’s impact is such that not only is the entire city a liberal political monoculture, so too are many of the surrounding rural areas. Rural white working precincts that vote Democratic have no reason to exist anymore, and they don’t — except for outskirts of Madison.
The political region I affectionately call the Madison Democratic People’s Republic is the largest single bloc of urban white liberals anywhere in the swing states—larger in absolute size than liberal areas in much larger cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta.
The 12% of the state’s vote that comes from the Madison sphere of influence can be broken down as follows:
Madison D.P.R., 6.5% of the vote, Biden +59, D+15 since 2012
More Diverse Madison, 1.5% of the vote, Biden +69, D+4 since 2012
Madison Allies, 4.2% of the vote, Biden +22, R+4 since 2012
The core liberal areas around the university and state capitol really do set the tone for the entire region, but the edges of the Madison area have not entirely been immune to a countervailing shift right. The Madison Allies—rural areas and small towns outside the city that vote Democratic—did swing 7 points to Trump in 2016, on par with many of the state’s urban working class areas that year, though well below what other rural areas did. Republicans however gave 3 points of those gains back in 2020, along with a further leftward shift of 7 points in the D.P.R. and 5 points in the relatively diverse areas of Madison. It is unusual to see areas so left-leaning to begin with add significantly to their Democratic margins the last few elections.
Demographically, the region is overwhelmingly white — 80 percent in the D.P.R. and 92 percent among the Allies with a relatively more diverse part of Madison proper coming in at 64 percent. Not surprisingly, the D.P.R. is the state’s most college-educated region with 62 percent having college diplomas.
The Smaller Cities — 22% of the vote
Wisconsin’s smaller cities are the state’s political fulcrum. Holding the balance of power between the 39 percent of the vote cast in the state’s largest cities and 39 percent cast in rural areas is the 22 percent of the vote in these cities.
Perhaps no area in any of the battleground states I've examined so far fits the model of a bellwether more than Wisconsin’s northeastern cities — Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Loc, and Manitowoc. Together, these places made up 11 percent of the state and voted for Trump by 2 points. The cities collectively are a good reflection of the state demographics: 84 percent are white compared to the state’s 83 percent, and 30 percent have Bachelor’s degrees compared with the state’s 31 percent. In 2016, the Northeast Cities swung right by more than the state — 9.5 points vs. 7.7 points, but then swung back in 2020 — by 3.7 points vs. 1.4 points statewide. On Election Night, early results from counties like Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), Winnebago (Oshkosh), and Fond du Lac will be strong indicators.
While Wisconsin’s other small cities lean further left, they’ve moved in the tandem with the state as a whole over the last three decades. The four areas that make up this crucial voting bloc are:
Kenosha and Racine, 2.2% of the vote, Biden +22, R+12 since 2012
Beloit and Janesville, 1.6% of the vote, Biden +17, R+11 since 2012
Northeast Cities, 11.4% of the vote, Trump +2, R+6 since 2012
West Central Cities, 6.7% of the vote, Biden +9, R+3 since 2012
Kenosha and Racine represent just 2 percent of the state’s vote but were a flashpoint in the 2020 BLM protests over the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha. After the election, analysts used the Kenosha area’s 2-point shift right (as compared to a swing left almost everywhere else in southeast Wisconsin) as proof that the protests hurt Democrats.
Maybe so. But what’s different about these two cities in the state’s southeast corner is that they are much more diverse (40 percent nonwhite) and very working class (just 22 percent with degrees compared to 30 percent in the Northeast Cities). The slight shift right here may have been due in part to the minority shift right, particularly among Latinos, who are 19 percent of the voting-age population.
Beloit and Janesville, the latter of which is home to Paul Ryan, swung left by a point in 2020 after posting a 12.5 point gain in 2020. Like Kenosha, it’s extremely working class (22% BA+) but whiter, so exactly in Trump 2016’s demographic wheelhouse—but it was still an underperformance relative to his monster 18-19 point swings in rural areas with the same demographics. This area is a small piece of the statewide puzzle, but illustrative of how race, education, and population density combine to produce electoral shifts.
Finally, we have the West Central Cities, casting 7 percent of the statewide vote and favoring Biden by 9 points in 2020. Embedded in the North Central Wisconsin rural region are Wausau, Stevens Point, and Wisconsin Dells, and in the west are La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Hudson. Central and western Wisconsin have been friendlier territory for Democrats than the northeastern part of the state, and we see this borne out in these numbers. They swung left by 4 points in 2020, a figure identical to the Northeast Cities, but swung less decisively towards Trump in 2016, by 7 points. They are slightly more college-educated (34 percent) and whiter (89 percent), a friendlier demographic mix for Biden and now, Kamala Harris.
The Rurals — 39% of the vote
Historically, rural Wisconsin has been far from a Republican stronghold. In fact, in 1996, there were many more blue rural precincts than red. (An animated map for paid subscribers shows the changes from 1996 to 2016.) The mini-realignment of 2000 turned much of northern Wisconsin red for the first time, only to see many of these areas revert back to blue in 2008. It wasn’t until 2016 that we saw a typical rural vs. urban map in Wisconsin.
If there was a divide in the state’s rural areas in the pre-realignment days, it was between it’s very Republican southeast and its Democratic west, with the northeast serving as the battleground.
The largest of the rural regions, the Southeast Countryside, serves as a virtual extension of the deep red WOW suburbs, and this Republican strength extended northward up to Green Bay.
Today, the seven rural regions of Wisconsin break down like this:
Southeast Countryside, 10.2% of the vote, Trump +23, R+9 since 2012
Northeast Wisconsin, 7.5% of the vote, Trump +33, R+21 since 2012
North Central Wisconsin, 7.2% of the vote, Trump +28, R+20 since 2012
Northwest Wisconsin, 7.5% of the vote, Trump +17, R+21 since 2012
Southwest Wisconsin, 6.3% of the vote, Trump +13, R+24 since 2012
Lakeside Getaways, 0.5% of the vote, Biden +14, D+3 since 2012
Menominee Tribe, 0.1% of the vote, Biden +53, R+10 since 2012
Wisconsin’s rural vote is large relative to the other battlegrounds, at 39 percent of the vote, with 28 percent of the total statewide vote swinging 20 points or more towards Trump in 2016 and 2020.
And because so much of rural Wisconsin was initially “out of place” in the new partisan and cultural alignment wrought by Trumpism, his catch-up growth in 2016 was strong here, as it was in similar locales throughout the Midwest. Republican strength in rural areas has surpassed the deepest red parts of the WOW suburbs.
Like its Pennsylvania cousin, the South Central Countryside, the Southeast Countryside is Republican-friendly and vote-rich, with greater population density thanks to its proximity to the large metro areas. But its exurban pieces tamp down the Republican percentage and Trump-era swing.
Outside the Southeast, Northeast Wisconsin — the rural area surrounding Green Bay — was historically the most open to voting Republican. In 2020, it was the most Republican area in the state, at Trump +33. The second-most Republican was neighboring North Central Wisconsin at Trump +28. And the Southeast Countryside came in at Trump +23—an identical margin to its suburban WOW Normie cousins.
What these three regions share in common is an above-average share of the population that is German—57, 54, and 41 percent respectively—compared to 31 percent statewide.
The state’s rural Northwest favored Trump, but by a lower margin—Trump +17. And its ancestrally Democratic Southwest, also known as the Driftless, was Trump +13. One thing these two areas share in common is a higher population of Scandinavian ancestry, 19 and 11 percent respectively.
Scandinavian ancestry has held down rural Republican margins—but it did not affect the magnitude of pro-Trump shift in 2016 and 2020. I’ll write those numbers out for each of the four main rural areas outside the southeast, but with one exception, it’s not worth delineating which is which: 21, 20, 21, and 24 points. And here are the respective percentages with a Bachelor’s degree: 22, 21, 24, and 21 percent. The similarities underscore the extent to which Trump-era shifts have been demographically-controlled, and not the result of any region-by-region targeting strategy.
Only in the southwest was the pro-Trump shift higher, at 24 points, but this is also the place where Republican support was the lowest due to idiosyncratic pre-2016 regional loyalties. One of the last rural Democrats in Congress, Ron Kind, eventually retired, eventually giving way to Republican Derrick van Orden.
And in 2020, these areas still had small upside for Trump, with eerily similar pro-Trump swings of 1.8, 1.5, 1.0, and 2.0 points across the four. This was the best rural improvement that Trump 2020 had across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Included in rural Wisconsin are two small blue enclaves—the Lakeside Getaways, popular vacation spots along Lake Superior, the Door Peninsula, and Lake Geneva, casting 0.6 percent with a Biden margin of 14 points and trending bluer, and Menominee Tribe at 0.1 percent with a Biden margin of 53 points and trending redder over the long haul. They are worth breaking out because they represent their own political ecosystems, trending differently than the areas that surround them.
A large swath of Wisconsin’s rural vote remains counter-positioned against national trends. Trump could win rural western Wisconsin by 20 points, a fantastic result for him, and this would well short of his 35-point margins in rural Pennsylvania or northeast Wisconsin. But if we allow for Republican growth to match national trends in the rural areas, we must also allow for more Democratic strength to match national trends in the suburban WOW counties. In the end, the magnitude of these two potential shifts likely cancel each other out.
But, on a good night for either candidate, we might see only one of these incipient realignments materialize. A big question across the map is whether we will see the realignment trends of the last two elections continue to progress, or if we will instead see mean reversion. Wisconsin will be an interesting test case of this, given that it’s the state where both sides have left the most on the table.
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