TLP's 2024 Swing-State Project: Wisconsin (Part One)
Examining Wisconsin's political history and geography
Wisconsin is a quintessential swing state. Both Democrats and Republicans have had success here over the past few decades. Democrats have carried the state at the presidential level in nearly every election since 1984, and they held both U.S. Senate seats from 1993 to 2011. On the other side, Republicans held the governorship from 1987 to 2003 and had a state government trifecta—control of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature—from 2011 to 2019.
However, each party’s success has often come in incredibly close elections. Outside of Barack Obama’s victories, both of which were by at least seven points, every presidential contest since 2000 has been decided by less than a point. This reality has also been evident down the ballot. Since 2000, Democrats have won four elections for governor while Republicans have won three (including a recall), and successful candidates averaged a win margin of just 4.8 points. Additionally, from at least 1992 to 2008, Wisconsinites voted for divided state government fully 88 percent of the time—a reflection of the state’s divided electorate.
The story of modern-day Wisconsin, though, really begins with the 2010 midterms, when the Tea Party movement helped usher in a Republican wave across the country. Wisconsin was not spared, as the GOP earned a governing trifecta for the first time in more than two decades. This coincided with decennial redistricting, giving them a chance to gerrymander themselves into a permanent majority for the next decade—even as statewide elections continued producing narrow results.
Led by combative Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin Republicans shifted the state in a decidedly right-wing direction. Most famously, they targeted unions, diluting the power of a core Democratic constituency. Meanwhile, as ancestrally Democratic rural areas began trending more Republican, the state became more competitive at the presidential level. This culminated in Donald Trump’s win in 2016, when he became the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to win the state’s electoral votes.
Democrats put an end to Republicans’ reign over state government in 2018, when Democrat Tony Evers defeated Walker and the party also regained control of the attorney general and treasurer offices. Still, the Democrats struggled to make inroads against Republicans in the state legislature or U.S. House delegation. Moreover, show the state remains as competitive as ever. Although Wisconsin voted Democratic at the presidential level again in 2020, Joe Biden’s win margin was even narrower than Trump’s was in 2016. In the 2022 midterms, Wisconsin delivered one of the few split-ticket results in the country, re-electing both GOP Senator Ron Johnson and Democratic Governor Tony Evers by 1.0 point and 3.4 points, respectively.
Most recently, Wisconsin hosted a high-profile race for state Supreme Court in April 2023. Although candidates do not formally run on a party ticket for this body, they are usually loosely aligned with one of the two major parties and not shy about revealing their personal views. Conservatives held a slim four-to-three majority, with an open seat being vacated by a conservative justice. This left the balance of the court up for grabs and opened the door to the body revisiting hot-button issues like gerrymandering and abortion. After unprecedented levels of spending on both sides and a deluge of ads on the abortion issue, specifically, liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz ultimately won a decisive 11-point victory and flipped the balance of the court.
Republicans, who fear the new liberal court majority will bust their gerrymandered state legislative and congressional maps and endanger their stranglehold on state power (among other things), threatened to impeach the new justice before she even has the opportunity to hear cases—continuing an alarming anti-democratic streak from the state GOP. For their part, Democrats may be overstating the lessons from Protasiewicz’s win, believing abortion to be a universally winning strategy moving forward despite ample evidence that it only worked for Protasiewicz given the unique circumstances of her race.
As a more practical matter, the court’s new liberal majority may toss the GOP’s legislative gerrymanders. Even under new, fairer maps, however, there’s no guarantee that Wisconsin’s evenly divided partisanship will be reflected in the congressional delegation or even the state legislature, as Democratic voters remain largely clustered around Madison and Milwaukee and are thus less efficiently distributed across the state than are Republican voters.
Heading into 2024, Wisconsin is once again expected to be among the most hotly contested states at the presidential level—and possibly for control of the U.S. Senate.
2024 Senate Race
Two-term Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin is running for re-election in 2024. According to DW-NOMINATE scores, which gauge lawmakers’ relative ideological position, Baldwin is the sixth most progressive member of the Senate. Although Wisconsin is fairly evenly divided politically, Baldwin’s more liberal leanings have not prevented her from finding sustained electoral success. In each of her previous two Senate campaigns, she defeated her GOP opponent by at least five points. Before serving in the Senate, she represented Wisconsin’s Second District—situated around deep blue Dane County—from 1999 to 2013 and often won re-election with at least 60 percent of the vote.
However, ahead of her 2024 re-election bid, Baldwin’s approval rating has been middling. According to a November 2023 Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of Wisconsin voters approved of her job performance while 42 percent disapproved—putting her in the bottom quartile among all incumbent senators on the ballot in 2024. Similarly, several Marquette Law School polls have shown her net favorability just barely above water.
Still, Baldwin has already experienced some good fortune in her re-election bid, as several would-be, high-profile GOP challengers have declined to throw their hats into the ring, including Congressmen Bryan Steil (WI-01), Tom Tiffany (WI-07), and Mike Gallagher (WI-08) as well as former Governor Walker. As of December 2023, only three relatively unknown candidates had launched campaigns against Baldwin: Trempealeau County Supervisor Stacey Klein, retired U.S. Army veteran Patrick Schaefer-Wicke, and 40-year-old college student Rejani Raveendran.
As of the end of the third fundraising quarter in 2023, Baldwin had already raised $18.0 million and had $6.9 million in the bank. Given her stout war chest, her relatively good favorability, and the weakness of the GOP field, Baldwin appears to have a slight edge in her bid for another term.
Wisconsin’s Political Geography
Wisconsin’s growing political divide has correlated with increased geographic polarization over at least the past decade. Although Obama and Biden both won the state, Obama carried 35 counties in 2012 compared to Biden’s 14. One part of this equation was the rightward drift of the state’s rural counties. After Obama won them by 2.1 points, Biden lost them by 17.1.
Nowhere has Democrats’ rural erosion become more evident than in southwest Wisconsin, an ancestrally Democratic region. Between 2012 and 2020, the area experienced a sea change: in 2012, Obama won 16 of the area’s 17 counties, but eight years later, Trump won 12 of them (11 of which had supported Obama). Overall, the region swung rightward by 22.3 points during that period.
As rural areas have swung away from Democrats, the party has become increasingly reliant on college-educated voters, many of whom reside in and around the state’s population centers of Madison and Milwaukee. In 2020, Biden outperformed Obama in just five counties, all of which are near these metro areas: Milwaukee County, home to the city of Milwaukee and its immediate suburbs; Milwaukee’s collar counties of Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha (or the WOW counties); and Dane, home to state capital Madison and the University of Wisconsin.1 Collectively, these counties made up 37.1 percent of the 2020 vote share, and they made up just under half (45.1 percent) of Biden’s votes.
Dane and Milwaukee, specifically, are the two largest counties in the state by population and also two of the most Democratic-leaning, backing Biden by 59.2 points and 39.8 points, respectively. In addition to Biden’s strong performance in these two counties, the leftward shift of the WOW counties no doubt boosted his chances statewide as well. According to one analysis, the biggest movement came from areas situated closer to Milwaukee, which tend to be better educated. In fact, some of these areas voted Republican at the lowest levels in any presidential election since 1936. Still, despite their recent shifts, the WOW counties remain extremely conservative overall—especially compared to most other suburban areas around the country.
Historical Turnout
Wisconsin has traditionally had among the highest voter turnout rate of any state for both presidential and midterm elections, likely a product of its regularly competitive elections. In presidential elections since 2000, Wisconsin’s average turnout among its voting-eligible population (72.1 percent) has trailed only Minnesota (75.9 percent).2 The same story holds true in midterm cycles, where the state has only trailed Minnesota and Maine in average turnout.
Part of the reason Democrats continue to be competitive in a state whose demographics are increasingly less likely to reflect those of the party’s national coalition is because their votes come from populous parts of the state where voters are highly engaged and trending leftward. Across eight statewide elections from 2012 to 2023—including three presidential races, two gubernatorial races, and three state Supreme Court races—the counties with the highest average turnout as a share of registered voters included Dane and all three WOW counties.3
Of note, Milwaukee County, the most populous in the state, has had the second-lowest turnout rate across those elections, behind only Menominee County (home to the Menominee Indian tribe). However, there is a significant gap between the city of Milwaukee and the suburban portion of the county. Registered voters in the county’s suburbs turned out at a rate of 70.1 percent across these eight contests, close to the statewide average of 74.1 percent. However, the city’s turnout was just 58.4 percent.
Indeed, registered voter turnout in Milwaukee City has fallen at an alarming rate over the past decade. After it hit an astonishing 87.2 percent in the 2012 presidential election, it dropped to 75.5 percent in 2016 and only marginally bounced back to 78.5 percent in 2020. Turnout in the city has remained lower than most of the rest of the state in midterm cycles, too. In 2014, as the country experienced record-low voter turnout, 65.7 percent of registered Milwaukee voters cast a ballot. However, while turnout nationwide was up significantly from 2014 in the 2022 midterms, it fell even further in Milwaukee to 61.8 percent. Even in 2018, when turnout hit historic highs across the country, it was 73.6 percent in the city, which was lower than all but two other Wisconsin counties.
Democrats have made up for the turnout decline in the city of Milwaukee by performing better in its surrounding suburbs in recent elections. Still, such serious drop-off in this vote-rich city is something that could haunt the party in a close election. In fact, it already has: U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes lost his high-profile 2022 race to incumbent GOP Senator Ron Johnson by 26,718 votes (or just one point). If turnout in Milwaukee had hit 2018 levels, Johnson’s margin would have shrunk to under 5,000 votes. And if Barnes had additionally matched Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin’s 2018 margin—64 points versus his 61.4 points—he would have won the race by 899 votes.
[Part two of this report tomorrow will examine population and demographic characteristics and voting trends in Wisconsin.]
Notably, all five boast higher rates of college degrees than the statewide average.
Of note, the year it saw the fifth-highest turnout rate was 2016, when Clinton narrowly lost the state by just 22,748 votes, or 0.7 points.
Rounding out the top five was Door—a small Obama-Trump county that is a popular tourist destination.