Red wall of WOW counties is cracking
If they were once a bloc, they didn’t vote as one
Call it a crack in Wisconsin’s “red wall.”
When Joe Biden carried the small city of Cedarburg by 19 votes, it was the first time since the 1990s that a Democratic presidential candidate had won a single community in the vaunted “WOW” counties — the deeply red suburban belt around Milwaukee.
The plates are shifting in one of the most polarized metropolitan areas in America.
The 2020 vote underscored three striking trends in the WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) — so famous for their Republican turnout that one of them (the GOP bastion of Waukesha) inspired a New Yorker cartoon.
Trend number one: For the third November election in a row, Republicans have lost ground in their old geographic base. Suburbs that once generated 30- and 40-point landslides — Mequon, Elm Grove, Brookfield — voted for Donald Trump by just single digits.
Trend number two: If the WOW counties were once a voting bloc, they are no longer. These counties are sep
arating politically. Trump won Washington by 38 points, Waukesha by 21 and Ozaukee by just 12.
The 71 communities within the WOW counties are also separating.
More populous suburbs closer to Milwaukee and places with lots of college graduates are shifting from red to purple. Meanwhile, blue-collar towns and exurbs farther from Milwaukee are as red as ever, voting for Trump by margins of 50 to 60 points.
In Brookfield and Elm Grove, it was the worst Republican performance in a presidential election since those communities were incorporated in the 1950s. In Cedarburg, Mequon and Thiensville, it was the worst since 1936, when Republican Alf Landon lost in a landslide to Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
By contrast, some towns on the periphery of the Milwaukee metro area are making history in the opposite direction, producing bigger Republican landslides for Trump than they did for George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.
Trend number three: The political gulf between blue Milwaukee and the red WOW counties has now begun to shrink, after widening for decades. The voting gap between the two grew with almost every presidential election for 50 years, making this arguably the most politically polarized metropolitan area in the country.
But that trend peaked in 2012. The voting gap has narrowed in each of the past two presidential races. As the WOW-counties suburbs closest to Milwaukee grow more purple, the Milwaukee County line is not the yawning political chasm it used to be.
Behind the trends
Two big questions:
Is the Republican slippage in the WOW counties driven more by voters’ personal qualms about Trump or by a broader turn away from the GOP?
And do these trends have more to do with changes in voter sentiment or changes in the population mix of these increasingly competitive suburbs?
“It’s both,” said Tom Schreibel, a Wisconsin member of the Republican National Committee who served for many years as chief of staff to the area’s longtime congressman, Jim Sensenbrenner.
Schreibel points to younger families from Milwaukee County moving into Waukesha and Ozaukee. And he also points to the Trump factor.
“Everybody knows the president didn’t do that great with suburban women,” he said.
In an interview, Sensenbrenner recalled that when he was new to Congress 40 years ago, he spent a lot of time reaching out to new constituents who had left the city of Milwaukee for the outer suburbs. Many of them became reliable Republican voters.
“This is one of the things that made the WOW counties the WOW counties,” he said. “Now it’s going in the other direction,
The race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden showcased the trend of the ‘WOW’ counties’ suburbs diverging politically, as some get redder and others grow increasingly purple.
I am not here to say it is irreversible.”
Sensenbrenner said it was clear that Biden was a more acceptable Democrat to some suburban voters than Hillary Clinton was four years ago.
He said it was too soon to tell how closely the GOP’s declining margins in the WOW counties were tied to Trump.
“We’ll know in 2022 if it’s a Trump effect. Some of it is. How much of it is I don’t know,” said Sensenbrenner, who will retire in January.
“I think the Milwaukee suburbs are following the same trend we’re seeing across the country,” said Sara Rodriguez, the Democrat who just captured a Republican-held Assembly seat that includes suburban communities in both Milwaukee and Waukesha counties.
“They really are moving (politically). That move is really led by women, college-educated women in the suburbs moving much more to Democrats, and (also) some demographic shifts, with younger families moving in,” said Rodriguez, who grew up in a Brookfield that was much more Republican than it is today.
The Republican suburbs that have shifted the most in the two Trump elections share one or more of the following attributes, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of election trends and census data provided by John Johnson, a research fellow at the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center: They have higher rates of college education, have higher incomes, are more densely populated, or are closer to Milwaukee County than other suburbs and exurbs.
“The type of voter who has moved away from the president fits the demographic of places like Ozaukee and eastern Waukesha County,” said Stephan Thompson, a Republican strategist who grew up in Waukesha County.
Take Elm Grove. It borders Milwaukee County, has one of the highest median household incomes in the WOW counties ($116,000) and has the highest percentage of college graduates (67%). It voted for Republican nominee Mitt Romney by 36 points in 2012, for Trump by 14 points in 2016 and for Trump by just 3 points in 2020.
Take Brookfield.
It
borders Elm
Grove, has lots of college grads (62% of those 25 and older) and is the third most populous community in the WOW counties. It voted for Romney by 36 points in 2012, for Trump by 20 in 2016 and for Trump by just 9 in 2020.
Take Menomonee Falls. It borders Milwaukee County, is one of the larger WOW counties communities and one of the few that is less than 90% white. It voted for Romney by 29 points, for Trump by 20 in 2016 and for Trump by 11 in 2020.
Take Cedarburg, a small, walkable Ozaukee County community whose downtown is a historic district. It voted for Romney by 25 points in 2012 and for Trump by 8 in 2016.
In 2020, to the surprise of some longtime residents, it voted for Biden by two-tenths of a percentage point.
Back in 2008, Cedarburg was the first campaign stop that the GOP ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin made after the Republican National Convention. The Journal Sentinel’s story about their rally before a boisterous crowd described Ozaukee County as “one of the most reliably Republican areas of the state.” Ozaukee was the third most Republican County in Wisconsin that year, out of 72.
This year, it was 49th. And Cedarburg became the first municipality in Ozaukee in 44 years to vote Democratic for president. It was the first WOW counties community to do it since 1996, when the Village of Lannon in Waukesha voted for Bill Clinton by 3 votes.
“I was assuming we’d take some wards, but I didn’t think we’d take the whole city,” said Deb Dassow, who lives in Cedarburg and chairs the Ozaukee County Democratic Party.
She attributed the outcome there to stepped up Democratic organizing, demographic changes, voters’ qualms about Trump, comfort with Biden and concerns about how the president handled the pandemic.
A retired teacher, Dassow said the traditional dominance of the GOP in places like Ozaukee County remains a challenge for Democrats.
“I get all kinds of Trump literature. People just assume by your age or your geography that you’re a Republican here. It’s a lot easier to be a Republican in Ozaukee County than it is to be a Democrat,” she said.
‘Rentals’ or long-term changes?
“The question over the long term is, are these ‘rentals’ (voters that have temporarily shifted toward the Democrats because of Trump), or are these changes in demographics and changing voter trends?” said Thompson, the GOP strategist. “The people moving into these areas aren’t your grandfather’s suburban voter.”
State GOP Chair Andrew Hitt suggested his party’s declining margins in the WOW counties are more about the personal disconnect between Trump and suburban voters than about a rejection of his policies or the party.
“We know that in these parts of the state especially, folks tended to focus a little bit more on the personality of the president instead of the amazing accomplishments,” said Hitt.
But these shifts in red and purple suburbs are about more than the president’s personality, argued Lisa Guide, co-founder of a national group, the Women Effect Action Fund, involved in voter contact efforts with women in the WOW counties and elsewhere.
“It wasn’t just, ‘I hate Trump’s tweets.’ It was also extremely high percentages of people thinking about health care, child care or elder care or paid leave” or the pandemic, said Guide.
2020 changes mirror recent shifts
The voting shifts in the WOW counties mirror shifts in other battleground states in 2020. Across the country, suburban areas generated Biden’s biggest gains over Clinton’s performance in 2016.
The shifts are also a continuation of a pattern locally. Republicans have now seen shrinking landslides in the WOW counties in 2016, 2018 and 2020, across multiple years and multiple offices, from governor to state Supreme Court to Congress and Legislature.
GOP Congressman Glenn Grothman won Ozaukee County by 37 points in 2014, 33 in 2016, 21 in 2018 and 19.6 in 2020.
Walker’s biggest declines from 2014 to 2018 were in Ozaukee and Waukesha.
And the GOP’s only two losses this year in Assembly races were in districts that crossed from the Milwaukee County suburbs into the WOW counties.
This Republican erosion is the flip side of the Democratic Party’s decline in rural Wisconsin — two trends that have roughly offset each other at the statewide level.
“Both parties are experiencing the same predicament,” said Schreibel. “The Democrats lost in the rural areas. We picked that up big time. Now we’re hurting in suburban areas.”
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. Email him at craig.gilbert@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @WisVoter.