For Trump and GOP, Wisconsin suburbs prove key 2020 test
The bad news for Donald Trump in 2016 in Wisconsin was that he had a very real “suburbs problem.”
The good news for Trump was that he won the state anyway.
Once more the suburbs loom as a battleground in the 2020 election — bluer on average than country, redder than city.
Republicans fired a furious volley in that battle at their national convention Monday when one speaker accused Democrats, with little basis or explanation,
of wanting to “abolish the suburbs.”
Democrats see a chance in this election to make deeper inroads among suburban voters after the gains they made in 2016 and 2018.
Republicans see a chance to recover lost ground in one of the two geographic pillars — suburban and rural — of their traditional Wisconsin coalition. (We’ll take a look at the rural vote in a separate story).
Let’s examine the state of play for the suburban vote in Wisconsin, defined two different ways.
One is the battle over the “WOW counties” (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington), the Republican belt around Milwaukee County and building block for so many GOP victories in the state.
The other is the contest for suburban voters much more broadly defined. In Wisconsin politics, the “WOW counties” often become shorthand for “the suburbs,” and vice versa. But there are lots of other suburban communities that don’t vote like the WOW counties.
The suburbs around Madison are deeply blue and getting bluer.
The inner suburbs on Milwaukee’s North Shore have gone from red to purple to blue in recent decades.
The suburbs in southern Milwaukee County and those outside Green Bay, Appleton, La Crosse and Eau Claire all vary in their politics.
Whither the WOW counties
Trump is beating Joe Biden by 26 points in the WOW counties in Marquette’s 2020 polling (based on a combined sample of 473 registered voters in these three counties from January to August).
That is very close to Trump’s actual 28-point margin over Hillary Clinton in these counties in 2016.
While that’s a big Republican edge, it’s an underwhelming one given past history. Mitt Romney won the WOW counties by 35 points in 2012. George W. Bush won the WOW counties by 35 and 36 points in 2000 and 2004.
Former Gov. Scott Walker won the WOW counties by an average of 45 points in his three statewide victories.
But Walker’s margin slipped to 35 points in 2018, and Trump is running behind that.
“Things look and feel a little different than they did 10 years ago,” Brian Nemoir, who has run GOP campaigns in the state, said of the region.
One potential glimmer for Trump: the polling in both 2016 and 2018 understated the GOP’s eventual edge in the WOW counties, so it’s possible Trump is doing better (or will do better) than surveys suggest.
Trump “is going to max out in the rural areas, that’s a given. If Democrats max out in Milwaukee and Dane, Trump has to do better in the suburbs if he wants to win here,” GOP consultant Bill McCoshen said.
How might Trump do better in the WOW counties than last time? One reason is that he’s more popular with GOP voters than he was in 2016 and these counties remain quite Republican and quite organized. Conservative talk radio, a mobilizing force, is much more pro-Trump today than it was back then.
“You don’t have guys like Charlie Sykes hammering (Trump) five times a week on the biggest talk radio station in the state,” said McCoshen, referring to the former conservative radio host and Trump critic who is no longer on the air in Wisconsin.
At the same time, Democrats have seen their performance steadily improve, particularly in more upscale and white-collar communities in Ozaukee and Waukesha counties. That trend is not just a Trump phenomenon — it has taken place over several years and across contests for federal, state and judicial offices.
The WOW counties certainly pack clout. They made up 12% of the Wisconsin
vote in 2016. Trump’s WOW county winning margin four years ago was 28,000 votes smaller than Mitt Romney’s in 2012, and 42,000 votes smaller than Walker’s in 2014. These are pivotal differences in a state sometimes decided by fractions.
The broader suburban vote
The story shifts when you broaden the focus to all suburban voters in Wisconsin, a much more politically diverse population.
For many years, the Marquette poll has tracked these voters based on how they subjectively describe their own communities (urban, suburban, rural).
But the poll also uses voters’ ZIP codes now to divide the electorate into objective categories of “principal city,” “core suburbs,” “exurbs and large towns,” “small towns” and “isolated rural.”
“Core suburbs” describes metro-area communities around the state that are close and connected to cities. These places are home to around 30% of Wisconsin’s registered voters.
Collectively, these voters tilt modestly toward the GOP (49% lean Republican while 42% lean Democratic in Marquette’s polling).
But despite that, Trump is only tied with Biden in the “core suburbs” this year, 46% to 46%, according to Marquette.
As the election approaches, the two parties are offering very different messages to these voters.
Republicans say that while Trump has had his suburban struggles, these voters are uneasy about the civil unrest and violent protests that have erupted this year over police shootings and this will drive them away from Democrats and toward Trump.
“I think the issue matrix, starting with law and order, is driving up (Trump’s) numbers in the suburbs,” said McCoshen, pointing to rising support for police in Wisconsin and declining approval of protests in polling here.
“There is a case to be made that suburban voters are keenly focused on these law and order issues and what’s going on in Kenosha is only going to accelerate that,” he said, referring to the fires and looting amid the uproar over the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by Kenosha police Sunday.
Democrats call Trump’s rhetoric about mayhem and anarchy a scare tactic and express skepticism that it’s moving voters. They argue that voters in suburbs (and elsewhere) are more focused on bread-and-butter issues such as health care and more concerned about a pandemic they say the president has mishandled.
“Suburban women are a particularly important section of the electorate,” Democrat Tanya Bjork, an adviser to the Biden campaign in Wisconsin, said at a forum last week organized by Wispolitics.com.
Marquette’s polling shows a bigger gender gap in this election among suburban voters than among rural or urban voters.
“My pitch to them would be around COVID and health care,” Bjork said. “Those are the issues they tend to care about most. A lot of these women are now the primary caregivers and schedulers and virtual educators now … and I cannot think of anything that has touched all of our lives more than COVID.”
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 WisconsinMadison, 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.