State’s fierce political divide won’t last
History shows polarized mood is not status quo
With three of its last five races decided by less than a percentage point, Wisconsin is the drama king of presidential politics.
It has been so close and polarized and fiercely fought for the past two decades that this bitter parity feels almost like a permanent feature of the political landscape.
But a brief survey of Wisconsin’s past is a reminder of how historically unusual today’s “tipping-point” era is.
Wisconsin is the only state in America that has experienced three presidential contests in recent decades as close as 2000 (decided by 0.22 points), 2004 (0.38 points) and 2016 (0.76 points).
That helps explain why Democrats picked Milwaukee for next week’s 2020 national convention, a gathering that is now almost entirely “virtual” due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those three elections over the past 20 years are unusual not just among the 50 states. They are oddities with respect to Wisconsin’s own history. They are the three closest presidential contests in Wisconsin’s 172 years of statehood.
They are the only ones that have been decided by less than a point. Only five of the state's previous 38 presidential contests were decided by less than 3 points.
“Historically speaking, the back and forth of recent years is kind of unprecedented,” said Booth Fowler, a retired political scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Wisconsin Votes: An Electoral History.”
“Most of the time it has been a oneparty state,” said Fowler, referring to the dominance of the GOP during the state's first hundred years.
Fowler thinks Wisconsin will continue to be politically competitive in the short term. But the longer term is anyone's guess.
“There is an obvious lesson here,” Fowler said of the state's political past. “There is no reason to assume it's going to go exactly the way it has” before.
One big question among political scholars going into the 2020 election is whether “we're at an inflection point between party eras,” said Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari. “We're in a really competitive era. That tends not to be the normal status quo. Normally, one party sort of dominates,” Azari said.
She was referring to national politics, but the point also applies to Wisconsin.
Wisconsin's modernday status as the epitome of two-party competition is utterly at odds with the most striking features of its partisan past.
One is what Fowler calls a “lively, fun, interesting third-party tradition.” The Progressives and Socialists won important 20th-century elections and eclipsed at least one of the two major parties at different times and in key regions of the state.
Another is a “one-party” tradition marked by decades and decades of Republican sway, from the aftermath of the Civil War through much of the 20th century. Republicans won the governor's office 44 times from 1855 to 1956. Democrats won it four times. Progressives won it three times.
In the 80 years from 1894 to 1973, Democrats never won a majority in the state Senate. (For most of the 1920s, they didn't have a single member). No Democrat got 50% of the presidential vote between Franklin Pierce in 1852 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. After Roosevelt, the GOP resumed its dominance in state and federal elections until the late 1950s.
For a time, the Republican Party was so entrenched at the state level that the defining ideological struggles occurred inside the GOP, not between Republicans and Democrats.
“It's been a Republican state historically, but within the party, it's been an all-out fight between the conservatives and progressives. It's not as though it's been a one-minded state. It has always been very divided,” said Fowler.
At a low point in state elections between the two world wars, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin elected fewer state legislators than the Socialists did in the 1920s and the Progressives did in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
These two “third parties” are hallmarks of Wisconsin's political history. The first Socialist congressman in the country was Victor Berger of Milwaukee, who served off and on from 1911 to 1929. Socialists held the mayor's office in Milwaukee for most of the half-century between 1910 and 1960. Wisconsin generated the highest Socialist vote share in the nation in the 1920 and 1932 presidential races.
Progressives, led by Republican governor and senator Robert La Follette Sr., battled “stalwarts” for control of the GOP, then formed their own party, winning three elections for governor and two for U.S. Senate in the 1930s and 1940s. At one point they dominated Wisconsin's congressional delegation.
Four different parties won major Wisconsin elections in the 1930s. Staggering twists and turns occurred. The Republican presidential vote went from 63% in 1904 to 33% in 1912 to 71% in 1920 to 37% in 1924. Three different parties carried Wisconsin in the space of four presidential races, including La Follette's 17-point victory in 1924 on the Progressive ticket.
The demise of the Progressives in the 1940s paved the way for a competitive Democratic Party to emerge a decade later and belatedly bring real and sustained two-party competition to the state.
Almost perfectly divided
The modern two-party era has had two different chapters in Wisconsin.
The first lasted through the 1990s. It featured more ideologically diverse parties than we have today and an electorate that was less polarized along party lines. It was common for voters to split their tickets. It was not unusual for voters to cross over and vote for candidates in the other party. That made big election swings possible, as well as landslide victories by politicians who could attract support across partisan lines. Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson and Democratic senators Bill Proxmire and Herb Kohl are the most obvious cases.
The second chapter of the state's two-party era, dating from about 2000, is the almost tribal red-blue divide of today – what Azari calls “weak parties/ strong partisanship.” The parties continue to trade wins and losses, but the shifts are much smaller because there are fewer swing voters.
Landslides are almost unheard of now because ticket-splitting has largely died, and politicians are unwilling or unable to seek crossover support. This is the era of negative partisanship, when what unites each's party's base the most is its dislike of the other side. It's also an era of nationalized politics, making it hard to imagine the emergence of idiosyncratic state-level movements such as Wisconsin's Progressive Party and Milwaukee's “Sewer Socialists.”
This era is characterized by fierce competition at the statewide level, thanks to the somewhat accidental fact that the Wisconsin electorate is almost perfectly divided among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents on one side and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents on the other.
There have been only two doubledigit presidential wins in Wisconsin since the 1960s (Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2008) and none for governor since Tommy Thompson dominated the 1990s. Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin's 11-point re-election in 2018 is the only double-digit victory in any major statewide race over the past decade.
But while competition has never been keener in statewide contests, it has rarely been weaker in district elections for the U.S. House and state Legislature. Thanks to gerrymandering of districts and the political sorting of the state into redder and bluer communities, Wisconsin boasts shockingly little competition in legislative and congressional contests.
Will this current era of partisan polarization and statewide parity last?
That will depend in part on national political trends – whether the Trump Era or the post-Trump era leads to further shifts in the party coalitions, such as the GOP's decline in metropolitan America and dominance in rural America, or to a partisan realignment.
Azari said she suspects the GOP post-Trump is “likely to go through long periods where it has a lot of trouble winning national majorities but remains very strong where it's strong" (the Deep South, the interior West, parts of the Midwest).
It also will depend on the impact of changes within the state, such as the shift of non-college white voters (a huge share of the Wisconsin electorate) toward the GOP, Democratic inroads in more prosperous and populous suburbs , and the population growth of deeply blue Dane County.
The current battleground era in Wisconsin is a striking phenomenon. Only a handful of states have been this competitive at the presidential level for this long. Never in its own history has Wisconsin been so reliably up for grabs.
Whether this perennial, unpredictable and bitter struggle between the parties excites you or depresses you, it's not guaranteed to last.
As Fowler wrote in his book about the history of Wisconsin elections, “Only a fool would make confident predictions about it, given (the state's) remarkable history.”