The Wisconsin Voter Obama leaves with two-sided political legacy in state

President Barack Obama leaves office Friday with a mixed electoral record of personal success and popularity combined with decline and disaster for his party.

Few states exemplify this two-sided legacy more than Wisconsin.

Obama’s 14-point victory here in 2008 and his 7-point victory in 2012 make him the most effective presidential candidate this state has seen in roughly half a century.

Yet Democrats have suffered historic losses up and down the Wisconsin ballot during his time in office, including the party’s first presidential defeat in 32 years.

“At the moment, he looks like a very individualized figure in history,” said political scientist Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hillary Clinton “couldn’t mobilize the Obama coalition because it’s an Obama coalition.” Obama is hardly unique

among two-term presidents in presiding over down-ballot defeats for his party. So did George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. When a party holds the White House for eight years, it almost always comes out a net loser nationally in contests for Congress, governor and state legislature.

But the gap between Obama’s own election performance and that of his party is a big one compared to past presidents.

And it has been especially big in Wisconsin, where Obama has been more popular than he is nationwide, but where his party’s losses have been unusually heavy.

Let’s break down both sides of the Obama electoral legacy in a battleground state that has been at the forefront of the struggle between the parties:

Two big wins at the top of the ticket. Obama is the only presidential candidate to win 50% or more of the Wisconsin vote since the 1980s. Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry and Republican Donald Trump all fell short of 50% in their victories here. But Obama won a majority of the vote twice and did it easily both times, with 56.2% in 2008 and 52.8% in 2012.

His 2008 victory is the biggest in Wisconsin since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. While you can attribute much of that margin to incumbent George W. Bush’s unpopularity and the ’08 financial crisis, Obama’s re-election four years later stands on its own. His 2012 margin in Wisconsin — coming on the heels of his party’s massive midterm losses in 2010 — was bigger than that of any nominee in recent decades other than Obama himself in ’08, Clinton in ’96 and Reagan in ’84.

This state was a tossup in the two elections before Obama’s big wins (2000 and 2004) and in the only one since (2016). Obama amassed his victories by both mobilizing base Democrats, including African-Americans and young people, and holding his own with blue-collar and rural white voters. His hoped-for successor, Hillary Clinton, fell short last fall on both counts.

A consistently positive image. In 37 Wisconsin polls by the Marquette University Law School since 2012, Obama has enjoyed an average favorable rating of 52% (the share of registered voters who view him favorably) and an average unfavorable rating of 44%.

Those polls cover his final five years in office, but not the slide in his popularity during the 2010 midterms.

Only three times in those 37 polls did Obama’s negative rating exceeded his positive rating. His very worst rating in the past five years — 46.4% favorable, 48.6% unfavorable in October 2014 — is far better than Trump’s best rating in Marquette’s polling (33% favorable, 62% unfavorable in October).

Obama’s approval ratings have been a little lower than his favorability ratings, meaning views of him personally are more positive than views of his record.

But his job ratings have also been mostly positive over the last five years in Wisconsin, averaging 49% approval and 46% disapproval. Obama is leaving office on a high, with approval ratings of 54%, 52% and 52% in the final three polls of 2016.

Obama’s “ups and downs (in Wisconsin) have mirrored the country as a whole,” but his numbers have generally been a little better here, said Marquette pollster Charles Franklin.

“He has been a very successful president in terms of public opinion in Wisconsin,” Franklin said. “But I think it’s striking that with his successes in ’08 and ’12, he has failed to leave a legacy with other Democrats.”

Democratic decline. The flip side of the Obama years politically has been his party’s historic slide at other levels of government in Wisconsin. Democrats lost a U.S. Senate seat (Russ Feingold’s) and U.S. House seat (Dave Obey’s) in 2010. They also lost the governor’s office and both chambers of the Legislature that year. They failed twice to oust Gov. Scott Walker (in 2012 in a recall and 2014 reelection) and came out of the 2016 election with their fewest state Senate seats since the 1970s and their fewest state Assembly seats since the 1950s.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Wisconsin since Walter Mondale in 1984.

The only major statewide race in Wisconsin that Democrats have won under Obama was Tammy Baldwin’s victory for U.S. Senate in 2012. They have lost three contests for governor, two for U.S. Senate and last fall’s presidential race.

Is Obama responsible for his party’s decline in a state like Wisconsin? That can be debated. Political backlash against Obamacare and the stimulus led to the GOP’s huge gains and takeover in 2010. But lots of other factors have fueled Republicans’ election success in Wisconsin since then, including the GOP’s hugely advantageous redistricting plan and emasculation of public employee unions, the strengths and weaknesses of candidates in both parties, and the traditional advantage (in this case for Republicans) that comes with running against the party in the White House.

You could say Wisconsin is a testament to Obama’s political strengths, since he withstood a Republican ascendancy here by winning re-election and leaving office with a positive image and healthy approval ratings.

Or you could say his political achievement was a narrow one because he failed to build and grow his party.

Either way, he is in the odd position of being succeeded in office by a politician in the other party who is far less popular than he is.