New to Trump: Blue-collar challenge
State’s small cities have swung back to Dems
More than 300 miles northwest of Milwaukee is a much smaller Democratic enclave that played a much smaller role in Hillary Clinton’s Wisconsin defeat four years ago.
The deeply “blue” port city of Superior voted for Clinton by 18 points.
But that was half the margin a Democrat normally wins by.
“We’ve been so solidly Democratic for years,” former state legislator Bob Jauch said of the area he used to represent. “The only conclusion I could reach was they just didn’t like Hillary at all.”
Small Democratic cities such as Superior were an underrated ingredient in Donald Trump’s victory in Wisconsin — cities like Janesville, Platteville, Portage, Prairie du Chien, Ashland, Kenosha, Washburn, Beloit, Black River
Falls and Baraboo.
Trump lost every one of them – but by a lot less than Republicans did in 2012.
That made them indispensable to his stunning 2016 upset.
Now, however, these same communities that were such a disappointment to
Democrats could pose a major challenge to Trump’s reelection.
Why?
Because these cities have been swinging back toward the Democratic Party since 2016. Many have reverted to their “pre-Trump” voting patterns, performing solidly for Democrats in the 2018 midterms and in more recent elections as well.
Take Superior (pop. 26,000), a blue-collar border city in the shadow of Duluth, Minnesota.
Before 2016, Superior was a bastion of blue. Democrats won the four preceding presidential races by 38, 38, 39 and 39 points. They won the preceding elections for governor by 37 and 31 points.
Then the bottom fell out. The party’s presidential margins were more than halved in 2016.
“The guys in the grain elevators were not voting for Hillary,” said Diane Arnold, current chair of the Douglas County Democratic Party.
“It’s the same thing that happened everywhere else,” said Superior Mayor Jim Paine, a Democrat. “There was lower Democratic turnout that allowed a lot of energy on the Donald Trump side to kind of carry the day.”
But with Trump in office, Superior is looking more like its old blue self again. In the 2018 midterm, Democrats won the city by 30 points for governor and 35 points for U.S. Senate. The liberal state Supreme Court candidate won Superior by an average of 31 points in the three April elections of 2018, 2019 and 2020. Democrats carried Superior by 33 points in a special U.S. House election in May.
“Hillary Clinton did not energize the Democratic base. Donald Trump has energized the hell out of the Democratic base ever since,” Paine said.
Paine said that after the 2016 election, “I spoke to a number of national reporters who all wanted to document the story of a Democratic stronghold going red or purple. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. … Any statistical question should account for outliers, and that’s what 2016 was.”
Superior is an unusual place in the national political landscape – a mostly white, blue-collar, Midwestern community that still votes Democratic by very lopsided margins.
But other blue Wisconsin cities have gone through similar swings in recent years.
The Democrats’ winning margin in Janesville dropped from 25 points in 2012 to 15 in 2016, then snapped back to 25 in the 2018 governor’s race.
In the small northern city of Ashland, the party’s margin dropped from 37 points in 2012 down to 24 in 2016, then back to 36 in the 2018 governor’s race and 41 in May’s special election for Congress.
In Oshkosh, the Democratic margin went from 16 points in 2012 down to 4 in 2016, then back to 12 in the 2018 contest for governor and 20 in the 2018 Senate race.
These blue cities are only one piece of the election puzzle in Wisconsin. Their role in the 2016 election has gotten less attention than other important things that happened, such as the drop in Democratic turnout in Milwaukee, the huge rural shift toward the GOP, the related swing in “Obama-Trump communities,” and the erosion of Republican support in historically red suburbs outside Milwaukee.
But the part they played in Trump’s victory shouldn’t be overlooked.
There are 53 cities in Wisconsin that have voted Democratic in each of the past five presidential elections. Set aside the two heavyweights, Milwaukee and Madison (which are stories unto themselves), and that leaves 51 smaller blue cities ranging in size from Green Bay (pop. 105,000) to Bayfield (population under 500). A few of these cities are actually suburban in character (Glendale near Milwaukee, Sun Prairie near Madison), but most are urban hubs outside metro Milwaukee and Madison.
Together, they’re home to about one in six Wisconsin voters.
In 2012, Democrat Barack Obama won these 51 cities by a combined 27 points and roughly 138,000 votes.
In 2016, Clinton won them by a combined 18 points and a little over 90,000 votes.
That’s a net shift toward the GOP of nearly 48,000 votes, which was more than twice the size of Trump’s statewide victory margin.
These communities experienced a bigger Democratic decline than the state as a whole in 2016.
But they also experienced a bigger Democratic comeback in 2018. Democrat Tony Evers won these cities by a combined 25 points for governor in 2018. Democrat Tammy Baldwin won them by a combined 33 points for U.S. Senate (better than Obama’s margin in 2012).
The challenge for Trump this year is replicating his 2016 performance on this unfavorable partisan turf, amid a historic economic and public health crisis – and doing it against Joe Biden rather than Clinton.
“It’s trickier in 2020 for Trump because of his opponent,” said GOP strategist Bill McCoshen, who grew up in Superior and now owns a hockey team in Janesville, another blue-collar Democratic city.
“Those are both union towns. Even though a lot of the union jobs are gone in both, that’s still part of their DNA and Biden’s got a strong relationship with unions. It’s not the same comparison as Clinton vs. Trump,” McCoshen said.
McCoshen said the Trump campaign will compete hard in many of these blue cities because of the gains Trump has made with working-class white voters (and in the case of Superior, the gains he has made in northern Wisconsin).
And some of these smaller Wisconsin cities (Sheboygan and Wausau are examples) are arguably trending away from Democrats.
But former Democratic state senator Jauch said he thinks it will be much harder for Trump to match his 2016 performance in blue-collar cities than in small blue-collar towns and rural areas, where the president’s appeal is strongest and the partisan trend toward the GOP has been much more pronounced.
“I think people are going to show up” to vote this time, said Arnold, the Democratic chair in Superior’s home county of Douglas. “But I’m going to work my ass off to make sure (2016) doesn’t happen again.”
If Trump can make even deeper inroads this year in rural Wisconsin (and avoid further erosion in the suburbs), that could offset any slippage he suffers in these small Democratic cities.
But in the current climate, marked by sagging presidential approval and a unified Democratic base, bluecollar cities such as Janesville and Superior are looking much brighter for Biden than they did for Clinton four years ago.
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 Knight-Wallace 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.