Swing state guides: Wisconsin

The most evenly-divided state in the nation?

Between now and election day, I’m going to be publishing swing state guides roughly once a week. The posts are designed to be digestible guides to understanding the political geography and demographics of each swing state, and I guarantee that they’ll make you the most informed person at your watch party on election night.

Most swing state guides are and will only be available to paid subscribers. But between now and election day, there’s a 15% discount to all annual subscriptions - so sign up now to lock in a low price and be able to access all of the guides between now and the election. You can also check out the guide to Arizona, guide to North Carolina (free to read), guide to Nebraska’s 2nd district (free to read), guide to Georgia, guide to Michigan, and guide to Nevada. The guide to all-important Pennsylvania is coming up next Tuesday.

Wisconsin is a state in the Midwest of the United States, a region which has emerged in recent decades as the most pivotal part of the country in presidential elections. But within the Midwest, we’re really talking about three states as being particularly important - Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Of those three, Wisconsin was arguably the most pivotal in both 2016 and 2020, because it was the “tipping point state” - the one where the winning candidate’s margin of victory finally put them over the top.¹

Particularly in media outside the United States (but also plenty of times within it), “the Midwest” often gets discussed in vague and general terms. Even worse, it’s often conflated with “the Rust Belt”, the network of deindustrialized towns and cities which are important to the region’s identity but certainly don’t make up all of it. The Midwest also contains thriving cities, struggling rural areas, and sprawling suburbs. It contains reliably blue Minnesota (Biden won by over 7%) and reliably red Ohio (Trump won by 8%). But then you have the swing states, whose demographics and political identity make them very evenly divided between the two parties - they’re not red or blue, but purple. And as we’ll discover, each is this way for its own reason.

The Midwest, which contains three of the most important swing states this year - Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Credit.

Like Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin had been considered safely Democratic for a long time before Donald Trump came along. When Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, it was the first time for a Republican since Ronald Reagan carried it in 1984. Barack Obama won the state by nearly 14% as recently as 2008, and by about half of that in 2012. Even though Trump only eked out a small victory - he won by just 24,000 votes, less than 1% of those cast - the swing from 2012 to 2016 was still very large and unusual. The swing back to Biden in 2020 was comparatively more modest - Biden also won the state by less than 1% - and seems to solidify Wisconsin’s position as a closely-divided swing state.

Understanding Wisconsin

So what makes a state favor Democrats by large margins for decades and then shift to being competitive in the Trump era? To understand why, you need to know some things about the history and demographics of Wisconsin.

To put it simply, Wisconsin is a weird state. One of the things that makes it weird is its complexity - as a state that was settled relatively early, it’s had the time to build up some history. That history has included producing Robert La Follette, a key early figure in American progressivism, and Joseph McCarthy, the infamous leader of the Red Scare. But it’s a simplification to say then that Wisconsin has just “two sides”. It actually has many, many sides, and shifts in any of them can make the difference when elections are being decided by just 1%.

That being said, the broader shift that Wisconsin has undergone from deep blue to swing state in the Trump era is fairly explicable. There are three things that are heavily correlated with being a Trump supporter - being white, living in a rural area, and having a lower level of education. Wisconsin contains huge numbers of these voters and, as in other parts of the Midwest, many have been affected by changes in Wisconsin’s economy.

Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and agricultural consolidation - which is probably the most important Midwest political topic to be bafflingly absent from national discourse - has increased rural unemployment or turned formerly independent farmers into tiny cogs in a corporate machine. At the same time, Trump’s aggressive racial and cultural politics has found a fertile ground in Wisconsin, as it has among rural white voters elsewhere.

Looked at this way, it’s actually surprising Wisconsin hasn’t become a red state, like Iowa has. But it’s here that the state’s complexity steps in to keep the story interesting.