Trump must get another rural rout
Small towns are key if he hopes to win state again
It was no fluke a farmer from Wisconsin was featured at the Republican National Convention.
Donald Trump won Wisconsin four years ago in small towns and rural counties.
And that is where his path to victory in Wisconsin begins in 2020.
It is a narrow path, judging from both history and recent polling.
No GOP nominee has won 50% of the presidential vote in Wisconsin in more than 30 years (and only one has reached 49%).
Trump won by the thinnest of margins four years ago and has consistently trailed in the Wisconsin polling against Democrat Joe Biden.
But there is certainly a plausible path for the president in an evenly divided state that is navigating volatile crises. Many strategists on both sides expect the race to narrow.
Last week we looked at how Biden might win Wisconsin.
This is a look at how Trump might win Wisconsin.
Trump’s 2016 formula
Let’s start with how he won it last time.
If you divide Wisconsin into “metropolitan” counties and “non-metropolitan” counties, the state’s 46 non-metro counties contain around a quarter of the state’s voters.
But they accounted for 60% of the raw vote shift toward the GOP from 2012 to 2016. In other words, they fueled Trump’s victory. Big swings in small places put him over the top.
Trump won these non-metro
counties collectively by almost 19 points. No GOP nominee since the 1980s had won them by more than 5.
If you drill down to the local level, the smallest shifts toward the GOP from 2012 to 2016 occurred in larger communities. And the biggest shifts (Trump’s biggest gains) occurred in the smallest communities.
The pattern is dramatic. Compared to 2012, Trump’s margins were about 2 points better, collectively, than Republican Mitt Romney’s in communities of over 10,000. But they were 20 points better in communities of under 1,000 people.
“Historically we have seen the most ‘swinginess’ … in those north and central small towns in Wisconsin,” said GOP strategist Betsy Ankney, who ran Sen. Ron Johnson’s winning reelection campaign in 2016. “That’s a contingent Donald Trump absolutely has to hang on to, and a contingent Joe Biden will make a play for.”
Right now, Trump is not polling as well as he needs to in northern and western Wisconsin.
But many of these communities have been getting steadily redder over time, so it’s possible he could do even better in some rural areas than he did in 2016.
Western Wisconsin could prove key
Others are more purple, have a history of swinging against the party in power (as they did when they voted for Trump four years ago), and swung back toward the Democrats in the 2018 midterms. That is particularly true of western Wisconsin, where it may be harder for Trump to replicate his 2016 vote.
“I think I would zero in especially on the 3rd Congressional District,” said state GOP Chair Andrew Hitt, referring to the western district represented by Democrat Ron Kind. “I think Trump is going to do very well in the 7th (northern Wisconsin), and in those rural areas in the 8th (northeast) and the 6th (east central) he is going to crush it. The big question is in that 3rd Congressional District.”
Kind’s district voted Democratic for president by 11 points in 2012, Republican for president by 4 points in 2016, and Democratic for governor by 2 points and Democratic for U.S. Senate by 13 points in 2018.
Kind said he is skeptical Trump can do as well there as he did four years ago.
“In 2016, it was status quo versus change and Trump embodied more of the change element. Now four years later, they’ve had a chance to look at his track record,” he said. “In ’16 it was such a binary choice, a relative unknown versus a 30-year known commodity and so many for whatever reason could not pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden does not carry that baggage.”
Farmers have taken a lot of economic hits in Wisconsin in recent years.
But Republicans have more than a 20-point edge over Democrats in how farm families describe their partisan leaning in Wisconsin, according to polling by the Marquette Law School.
And Trump has a similar margin over Biden among farm families in Marquette’s polling dating back to last fall.
If Trump suffers any slippage in parts of rural Wisconsin, could he make it up elsewhere?
The most obvious opening on paper is a place where Trump underperformed in 2016 — in the red suburban counties outside Milwaukee. He won the “WOW counties” (Waukesha-Ozaukee-Washington) by 28 points in 2016, a much smaller margin than Gov. Scott Walker in 2018 (35 points), Romney in 2012 (35 points), George W. Bush in 2004 (36 points) or Walker in 2014 (46 points).
The 2018 midterms and the state’s big judicial races in recent years all suggest these suburbs remain a question mark for Trump, especially among college graduates and especially among women.
But GOP strategists now argue the protests and turmoil in Kenosha and other American cities will drive suburban voters toward Trump’s “law and order” message. Trump is also more popular among GOP voters today than he was four years ago, which should help in the WOW counties, which are still quite Republican.
Getting a more “normal” GOP vote in these counties won’t be easy. But doing so could add 20,000 or 30,000 votes to Trump’s statewide margin.
Trump would benefit from a variety of other possible election scenarios: soft Democratic turnout among young people, Blacks and Hispanics (a concern among some Democrats); marginal inroads among Black and Hispanic men; and above all, success in turning out blue-collar white voters who didn’t turn out in 2016.
Democratic pollster Paul Maslin argues that Trump will have real trouble matching his spectacular 2016 numbers in some parts of Wisconsin outside the Milwaukee and Madison media markets, meaning he would have to make up any slippage elsewhere.
“There is enough evidence that (Trump) can’t put the same rural vote together” that he did in 2012, Maslin said. “And there’s the decline that has already shown up in the Milwaukee suburbs and maybe to some extent in places like the Fox Valley. … All those places are not going to add up the same way they did in 2016, which means we should be able to win if we get our vote out.”
In the end, Republicans believe the key for Trump will be maximizing the GOP’s modern-day, two-legged coalition of rural and suburban voters in Wisconsin, two groups that have responded to Trump with different levels of enthusiasm.
The idea is to “hold their own in suburbs while running up the score in the rural areas,” Ankney said.
“Some people will tell you the old coalition (of suburban and rural) is kind of broken and Republicans are going to have to figure out whole new group of voters” in Wisconsin, said GOP consultant Brian Reisinger.
Reisinger said he disagrees with that view and believes “that statewide coalition of rural working-class Republicans and suburban Republicans remains intact.”
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.