Pandemic, fallout haven’t dented Trump in Wisconsin

We got two reminders this week of what a dogfight Wisconsin is likely to be in November.

The first came in a statewide poll by Marquette University Law School showing President Donald Trump’s approval rating in the state (47%) hardly budging amid an economic and public health catastrophe.

The second came in Tuesday’s election to fill northern Wisconsin’s vacant 7th congressional seat.

It produced a double-digit GOP victory and a sigh of relief from Republicans fretting over a big April election defeat and Trump’s national standing in the pandemic.

But that victory came in a solidly red district that Trump carried by 20 points in 2016, making it hard to read the result as a powerful signal in either direction about how Wisconsin will vote in November.

In fact, there were sobering signs for both sides in the competing crosscurrents within the district.

For Democrats, it was a reminder that some parts of northern Wisconsin are just beyond reach for the party. Some counties delivered the same margins for Republican congressional winner Tom Tiffany as they did four years earlier for Trump, which is saying a lot, given Trump’s huge inroads across the region in 2016. That includes deep red counties such as Clark and Taylor but also the district’s biggest county, Marathon, which Trump carried by 18 in 2016 and Tiffany carried by 17 on Tuesday.

Marathon anchors the 11-county Wausau media market, which has seen the biggest and most durable shifts toward the GOP of any part of Wisconsin over the past decade. The seat Tiffany won contains almost all of the Wausau TV market and is the only congressional district in the state where GOP Gov. Scott Walker didn’t lose ground between the 2014 and 2018 elections.

In short, this may be the part of Wisconsin most resistant to Democratic inroads.

At the same time, the results are a reminder that even in northern and western Wisconsin, there are some communities where Trump is going to have an especially hard time matching his 2016 numbers.

One example: the traditionally Democratic counties of Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland in the state’s northwest corner, which performed terribly for Democrat Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016. Clinton only won them by an average of 9 points after Barack Obama won them by an average of almost 30 in 2012.

But these counties have now gone back to being more reliably blue (or liberal) in contests for governor, U.S. Senate and state Supreme Court. They voted Democratic for Congress on Tuesday by an average of more than 20 points. It is hard to imagine Joe Biden doing as badly in these three counties this November as Clinton did four years ago.

Another example: the second biggest county in the 7th District, St. Croix, which includes suburbs and exurbs on the outskirts of Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Unlike the rural red-trending parts of the 7th, suburban St. Croix is becoming less Republican, not more. Walker carried it by 20 points in 2014. Trump carried it by 18 in 2016. Walker carried it by 14 in 2018. Tiffany carried it by 9 on Tuesday. Given that trend and Trump’s struggles with suburban voters, the president is very likely to do worse in St. Croix in 2020 than he did in 2016.

Tuesday’s election was a reminder that Trump will have to do better than he did in 2016 in some parts of Wisconsin in order to offset his slippage in others.

But it is a massive stretch to see this election as a signal of who’ll win Wisconsin in November.

Yes, the GOP margin in the 7th District (14 points) was smaller than Trump’s 2016 margin in the district (20 points), a point Democrats seized on. And yes, it would be very bad for Trump if he only carried the 7th District by 14 points in November.

But you can’t just plug Tuesday’s results into the 2020 presidential race and extrapolate. Special elections aren’t predictive that way. One reason is that local contests are individual campaigns and not pure referenda on the president or the national parties.

Another is that turnout in the 7th District will be about twice as large in November as it was Tuesday, so a very different pool of people will be voting.

Consider another special election that took place in western Wisconsin in January of 2018.

It was a race to fill the 10th state Senate seat, a district Trump had carried by 17 points in 2016. Democrats won that contest by 10 points. It was a political shocker. Walker called it a “wake-up call” for his party. And it turned out to be a genuine signal of how the GOP would struggle in the 2018 midterms, losing races that November for governor and U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.

But that special election represented a far more dramatic political shift than Tuesday’s election did. There was a 27point swing in that GOP-leaning district (from Trump’s 17-point margin in 2016 to the party’s 10-point defeat in the 2018 special election). Compare that with the 6-point shift we saw in the 7th Congressional District Tuesday (from Trump’s 20-point margin in 2016 to Tiffany’s 14point margin in 2020).

And while that 2018 race turned out to be a warning sign for Republicans, it didn’t actually predict how that same district would vote the following November. Nine months after his party lost the seat, Walker ended up carrying the 10th state Senate district by 11 points that fall.

In the end, a well-positioned GOP candidate with a spending edge, the benefit of having gone through a primary campaign, the advantage of a bigger political base and organizational help from an incumbent president handily won a safe seat for his party Tuesday. The outcome was not a powerful sign of strength for the president nor an obvious danger sign for him either.

Instead, it was kind of what you’d expect in an election climate that doesn’t clearly advantage either party in this state.

Marquette poll

So was the poll released Tuesday by the Marquette Law School, which showed Trump narrowly trailing Joe Biden, 43% to 46%. Of those polled, 47% approved of Trump and 49% disapproved. That is almost identical to the president’s average job ratings (47% approve, 50% disapprove) in the nine polls Marquette has conducted over the past year.

While Trump’s numbers are a little more negative than positive, they are slightly better than his national polling numbers. And while his ratings for handling the pandemic declined, his overall approval remains remarkably steady despite the volatility of events and scale of the current crisis.

Nothing in this poll or in Tuesday’s special election tells us who is going to win Wisconsin in November. Nothing suggests one side has unambiguously gained the upper hand here.

Things can still change, but so far, the contest for Wisconsin doesn’t appear to have been fundamentally altered by the pandemic.

Craig Gilbert has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and chronicled Wisconsin’s role as a swing state at the center of the nation’s political divide. He has written widely about polarization and voting trends and won distinction for his data-driven analysis. Gilbert has served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Lubar Fellow at Marquette Law School and a KnightWallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied public opinion, survey research, voting behavior and statistics. Email him at craig.gilbert@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @WisVoter.