GOP Senate primary turning on north-south division
Vukmir leads southeast; Nicholson leads the rest
The fight to pick a Republican nominee against U.S. Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin is playing out along a familiar GOP fault line in Wisconsin. North versus South.
In GOP primary polls this year, state Sen. Leah Vukmir is leading by double-digits in populous southeast Wisconsin, her home turf. Marine Corps veteran and first-time candidate Kevin Nicholson is well ahead in the rest of Wisconsin, especially the rural north and west.
If this schism sounds familiar by now, there’s a reason. It was a defining feature of the state’s past three Republican presidential primaries and the GOP primary for governor that launched Scott Walker in 2010.
In each case, one Republican contender won lots and lots of small counties distant from Milwaukee. The other won fewer but bigger counties, dominating the state’s largest media market (Milwaukee) and piling up votes in the high-turnout, ultra-red “WOW counties” of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington.
In each case, the more prosperous, suburban, college-educated, “establishment” southeast out-voted the more rural, blue-collar, economically
challenged, “populist” north and west.
It happened when John McCain defeated Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primary.
It happened when Walker defeated Mark Neumann in the 2010 gubernatorial primary.
It happened when Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum in the 2012 presidential primary.
It happened when Ted Cruz defeated Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential primary.
There is no single factor that perfectly explains why McCain, Walker, Romney, Cruz and Vukmir would do so much better with Republicans in southeastern Wisconsin — and why Huckabee, Neumann, Santorum, Trump and Nicholson would do better in the north and west.
The pattern has been influenced by where candidates put their resources, their regional ties, their endorsements and the role of conservative talk radio in Milwaukee, which crusaded for Walker in 2010 and against Trump in 2016. At a more basic level, this divided map seems to reflect a greater comfort among Republican voters in suburban southeast Wisconsin with the party and its leadership — and a greater appetite among Republican voters in the rural north and west for insurgents and outsiders.
“You can call it rural versus urban, you can call it cultural, you can call it demographic or economically stressed, but all of that seems to have favored insurgent candidates in recent years within the GOP,” political scientist Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette Law School poll, said of northern half of this dynamic.
Not every big GOP primary has generated a northsouth divide. The pattern was far murkier in Wisconsin’s 2012 Republican U.S. Senate fight, a fragmented four-way contest in which metropolitan Milwaukee divided its vote and ex-Gov. Tommy Thompson won narrowly statewide.
But if the polling is any guide, this recurring geographic fault line could end up defining the party’s 2018 Senate primary, which will be held Aug. 14.
Combining March and June polls by the Marquette Law School, Vukmir led Nicholson 42% to 29% among GOP primary voters in the 10-county Milwaukee media market. And Nicholson led Vukmir by 36% to 12% in the combined media markets most distant from Milwaukee: Green Bay; Wausau/Rhinelander; La Crosse/ Eau Claire; and the Wisconsin counties outside both Duluth and the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
There are still tons of undecided voters out there, especially in northern and western Wisconsin, where opinions are much less settled than they are in the southeast. And there are thousands of campaign spots to be aired, so these numbers will shift.
But the geographic split has been surprisingly sharp for a race in which there are few glaring issue differences between the candidates, neither started out with much of a statewide political profile and the two are both highly supportive of Trump.
The most obvious explanation is Vukmir’s career as a state legislator from the Milwaukee suburbs, her profile on Milwaukee talk radio and her formal and informal backing by much of the party leadership, which is concentrated in southeast Wisconsin.
It’s possible that this same profile and these same ties are a negative for at least some voters outside the Milwaukee region, where polls have measured low name recognition and limited support for her so far.
In Marquette’s combined March and June surveys, Vukmir’s name identification (the share of voters who knew enough about her to express an opinion) was
49% among GOP primary voters in the Milwaukee TV market but no higher than 22% anywhere else in the state.
Nicholson’s name ID was lower than Vukmir’s in the Milwaukee region but higher elsewhere.
He is from Milwaukee County but has no political base there since he is a first-time candidate. His campaign is premised on the notion that a military background and the image of a political fresh face will resonate strongly enough in the rest of the state to offset Vukmir’s strength in southeast Wisconsin.
Mathematically, it can certainly be done. And Nicholson led Vukmir by 5 points statewide in Marquette’s June poll (with the caveat of a small sample and lots of undecideds).
But history suggests it is a major challenge to win this way. The candidate who carries southeast Wisconsin has an immense advantage in a Republican primary.
The Milwaukee media market produced almost half the GOP vote in the 2010 primary for governor won by Walker. It produced 46% of the GOP vote in the 2012 Senate primary won by Thompson.
There are so many Republican voters in southeast Wisconsin that if they break decisively for one candidate it tends to dictate the outcome statewide.
“If they can run up the score there, they can afford to lose modestly or moderately in the less populated areas of the state,” Franklin said of Republicans in the southeast.
Walker’s victory over Neumann in the 2010 primary for governor is an extreme example: Neumann won 42 counties by a combined margin of roughly 26,000 votes. Walker won the four counties of metro Milwaukee by roughly 113,000 votes.
Nicholson’s challenge will be to limit his losses in the southeast while dominating in the north and west.
If he were to somehow win a major statewide primary while decisively losing the GOP suburbs around Milwaukee, he’d be the first Republican to do so in decades.