Visits underscore need for Wisconsin boost
Trump, Pence travel to shore up GOP base
Tandem visits this week by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence not only illustrate the importance of Wisconsin to the GOP ticket in 2020.
They highlight one of Trump’s major election challenges this year — shoring up the GOP base.
Pence traveled to Waukesha County Tuesday, part of the deeply Republican suburban belt outside Milwaukee.
Trump visits Marinette and Green Bay in northeastern Wisconsin Thursday.
These two regions are the biggest building blocks of the GOP vote in this state.
And they are places where Trump isn’t as strong as he needs to be to carry Wisconsin in 2020, polling suggests.
In fact, the president is lagging behind his 2016 performance in both regions.
Take the “WOW counties” in southeastern Wisconsin (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington). For decades this was the “reddest” part of the state. These high-turnout suburban counties voted Republican by 35 points for president in 2012 and by 46 points for governor in 2014.
But Trump “under-performed” there in 2016 — winning them by the smaller margin of 28 points.
Today, Trump’s support in these counties appears to be even softer. In the combined 2020 polling by Marquette Law School, Trump is leading Biden by just 21 points in the WOW counties. (This number is based on a sub-sample of 332 WOW-county voters polled by Marquette in January, February, March and May of this year).
If 21 points turns out to be Trump’s winning margin in the WOW counties
this fall, it could be fatal to his Wisconsin prospects. Republicans bank on much bigger margins in these “base” counties to win statewide elections. But GOP margins in the WOW counties have declined not just in polls but in recent elections, too.
What about the other key GOP-leaning region on the Trump-Pence schedule this week — the 16-county Green Bay media market?
This region stretches from Lake Winnebago to the Michigan border. It includes small Republican counties such as Marinette and Oconto that Trump carried by 33 and 37 points in 2016, and larger battleground counties such as Brown and Outagamie that Trump carried by 11 and 13 points.
Unlike the WOW counties, Trump did not under-perform here in 2016. Collectively, he won the Green Bay media market by 18 points.
Yet he appears to be falling short of his 2016 vote in this part of the state as well.
Trump leads Biden by just 13 points in this region in the 2020 polling by Marquette (based on a four-poll sample of 634 registered voters from the Green Bay media market).
Polls are imperfect snapshots. The election is more than four months away. And these numbers aren’t etched in stone.
But the polling this year suggests Trump’s support has softened more in these two areas than it has in the rest of the state.
And if anything, these surveys may understate the problem for Trump, because they’re based on Marquette’s combined polling from January through early May of this year. That is a period in which the Trump-Biden race was relatively close and stable in Wisconsin.
Since then, Biden’s lead has grown in national polls and in more recent surveys by other pollsters in Wisconsin.
In other words, Trump’s current standing may be weaker than these numbers suggest.
The Green Bay region and the outer Milwaukee suburbs generate almost half the GOP vote in some Wisconsin elections.
Trump carried each of these areas by roughly 100,000 votes in 2016 — when his statewide margin was less than 23,000. He can’t afford to lose much ground in either place.