State resists Trump-mania
Unlike nationally, polls find negative view of candidate
While Donald Trump is dominating the GOP field in national polls, you wouldn’t know it from his tepid support in Wisconsin, which may be as resistant as any place in America to the lure of Trumpmania.
About one in five Wisconsin Republicans supported Trump in the past two statewide surveys by the Marquette University Law School.
That compares to the high 20s, 30s and even low 40s that Trump has drawn this fall in other states and nationally.
More striking, Trump’s image in his own party is “underwater” in Wisconsin: More Republican voters viewed him unfavorably (50%) than favorably (36%) in Marquette’s November poll. The same was
true in late September and August.
That’s utterly at odds with other states — including Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida — where credible polling is available.
And it’s completely out of step with Trump’s standing in the party nationally.
In a recent nationwide poll by Monmouth University, 61% of Republicans viewed Trump favorably, 29% unfavorably. In another by Suffolk/USA Today, 54% of Republicans viewed Trump favorably and only 32% viewed him unfavorably.
Yet in Wisconsin, Trump’s image is poor among not only Democrats and independents, but Republicans, too.
Why is Trump polling so much worse here than he is elsewhere?
Here are some theories that emerged in interviews with GOP pollsters, politicians and political strategists:
Personality conflict. Is there a mismatch between Trump’s brazen and bullying style and a more staid political culture in the upper Midwest?
“His language sets people off,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, an outspoken Trump critic who views the candidate’s rhetoric as insulting and self-aggrandizing.
“I do think there’s a niceness about Wisconsin” that leaves voters here cool to Trump’s in-your-face flamboyance, Ribble said.
Republican consultant Mark Graul of Green Bay said Trump is a caricature of “East Coast attitudes and bad behavior” that grates on “Midwestern sensibilities.”
“If you’re talking about modern Republicans who do well here, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan are obviously the top two on that list,” Graul In polling this fall, Donald Trump has a negative image in Wisconsin among not just Democrats and independents, but among Republicans, too. More Republicans in Wisconsin view him negatively than positively, which is strikingly different from national polls in which Trump has a positive image among Republicans.
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said. “Both of them are congenial, decent people who’d much rather let their actions speak louder than their words, and Donald Trump is the exact opposite of that.”
GOP pollster Gene Ulm, who is based in northern Virginia but has surveyed Wisconsin for many years, said, “The Midwestern electorate is much more tempered.”
But the notion that Trump is “too rude for Wisconsin” has its skeptics.
Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster and top adviser to Walker’s presidential bid, said if Trump’s personality were such a liability for Midwesterners, Trump would be doing much worse in Iowa than he is. In the most recent Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll, Trump drew negative ratings from a significant minority of GOP voters. But his numbers still were a lot better than in Wisconsin: 55% of Iowa Republicans viewed him favorably and 42% viewed him unfavorably.
The Walker factor. While he is no longer a candidate for president, the Wisconsin governor was a serious contender when Trump began to surge nationally.
“In the early summer months, when everyone was shopping (for a candidate), they didn’t move to (Trump) in the same way because you had Scott Walker absorbing some of that attention,” Goeas said of Wisconsin.
He thinks Walker’s presence was a barrier to Trump’s rise here, and that effect has carried over beyond the governor’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign three months ago.
Trump attacked Walker’s performance as governor during the campaign. And when Walker left the race in September, the governor urged Republicans to coalesce around an alternative to Trump. Might that have swayed some GOP voters against Trump in this state?
Walker’s candidacy also prevented Trump from dominating the political news in Wisconsin the way he did in many other places, since Walker’s presidential bid was the central campaign story in this state for the first nine months of 2015.
Talk radio. While the Trump campaign got a boost from some conservative talk radio hosts nationally, he has drawn heavy fire from leading talk show hosts in Wis-