The States That Flipped From Trump in 2020 — And How They Could Shape Up in 2024 #5: Wisconsin
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Part 6: Finale
Six states that Donald Trump won the electoral votes for in the 2016 presidential election flipped (or in the case of Nebraska, partially shifted) to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes went to Biden. The five states that went from red to blue for president are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In this series of posts, I will look at recent political history of these states and current partisan trends. With a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 looking increasingly likely, this series of posts will largely assume that that will be the case and make some sense of whether these states will stick with Biden or flip back to Trump. (Now that Nikki Haley is out of the race, a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 is all but assured pending lawsuits over Trump’s candidacy.)
Today’s post is the fifth post of the series and focuses on Wisconsin, The Badger State.
Wisconsin and Recent Presidential Elections
Like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin in recent decades has been regularly won by Democratic presidential candidates. The Badger State actually had a longer Democratic streak than the other two states prior to Trump winning them in 2016: Michigan and Pennsylvania went blue for six straight presidential elections (1992 to 2012) while Wisconsin did it for seven straight (1988 to 2012).
But several close calls in 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020 have given the state a purplish hue instead of definitively blue. Those states had a respective 0.22, 0.38, 0.76, and 0.63 point vote margin between the Democratic and Republican candidates. With the exception of Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories, the state has been highly competitive for president in the 21st century.
The three most well-known election ratings organizations all predicted correctly that Wisconsin would vote for Joe Biden in 2020. The level of confidence was warranted, too, as Biden beat Trump by only about 20,682 votes (0.63 percentage points).
- Inside Elections: Lean Democratic (two tiers from a toss-up by its rating system)
- Cook Political Report: Lean Democratic (one tier from a toss-up by its rating system)
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Leans D (one tier from a toss-up by its rating system)
Wisconsin in the 2024 election isn’t quite as valuable as the other four states we’ve looked at in this series in terms of Electoral College votes. But it does have 10 of them, which is tied for 18th-most with Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, and Missouri. It’s quite possible that Wisconsin makes the difference in the 2024 presidential election.
Where exactly in Wisconsin, home state of Culver’s (yes, I shoehorned the restaurant in because their butterburgers, cheese curds, and custard are delicious), might we see this election difference being made? As with the previous four states of the series, we turn to the county level. The 72 counties of Wisconsin are too numerous to directly include in this post. So, here is a link to the full table showing the percentage of participating voters who picked either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016 and either Joe Biden or Trump in 2020.
The information on that table and where it came from is as follows:
- The number of registered voters is for March 1, 2024, and is the latest released set of data. It comes from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Of course, this will be somewhat different from the number of voters in 2016 and 2020, but it won’t be enough to matter for this exercise. The order of the counties by most total voters also will have barely changed, if at all.
- The vote share for Clinton/Trump in 2016 and Biden/Trump in 2020 come from Dave Leip’s Election Atlas.¹ The margins of victory were calculated from there. Blue and positive margins of victory mean the Democratic candidate won that county that year. Red and negative margins of victory mean the Republican candidate (Trump) won that county that year. (The negative and positive aspects are not value judgments on the candidates; they just indicate which direction the election went.)
- The rightmost column is the 2016/2020 margin of victory increase. If it’s blue and positive, it means Biden improved upon Clinton’s performance in that county. If it’s red and negative, it means Trump in 2020 improved upon his own performance in 2016. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the candidate won the county (e.g., Waukesha County voted for Trump both years, but Biden improved upon Clinton’s showing there).
Below are snapshots of several top 10s of the data: Counties by total voter population (as of March 1, 2024), counties by most improved performance by Biden, and counties by most improved performance by Trump.
Here are the most important top-level data points from the full table.
- Trump won 58 of the 72 counties of Wisconsin in 2020. However, he lost Sauk (24th-highest voter population) and Door (41st-highest) after winning them in 2016.
- Biden improved upon his performance in 30 counties, ranging from 0.2 percentage points in Racine (6th-highest voter population) to 8.2 points in Menominee (lowest voter population).
- Trump improved upon his 2016 performance in 40 counties, ranging from 0.1 points in Wood (23rd-highest voter population) and Polk (29th-highest) to 4.8 points in Kewaunee (51st-highest) and Lafayette (65th-highest).
- The margin of victory in 2016 and 2020 for Trump stayed the same in Marathon County (11th-highest voter population) and Sheboygan County (12th-highest).
- Biden improved upon Clinton’s performance in 17 of the top 20 counties by total voter population.
As noted in previous articles in this series, a map of which counties voted for which presidential candidate sometimes make a state look like it heavily voted for the Republican (in this case, Trump). That’s because the less-populated and/or more rural counties tend to lean to the Republican Party, while more-populated and/or more urban counties tend to lean to the Democratic Party. But populations are not evenly distributed across counties. Those lesser-populated counties are more numerous in most states.
But of course, there are exceptions. In Wisconsin’s case, the counties with the 3rd- to 8th-highest voter populations — in order, Waukesha, Brown, Outagamie, Racine, Winnebago, and Washington — all voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. That was especially the case for Waukesha and Washington (20.8 and 38.1 point margins of victory in 2020 for Trump).
Yet Biden cut the margins of victory in those counties from what they were for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In particular, he outperformed her in Waukesha by 5.9 points — Clinton lost the county by 26.7 points, while Biden only lost it by 20.8 points. And while both Biden and Clinton won the top two counties in voter population — Milwaukee followed by Dane — in their respective campaigns, Biden increased his margin of victory in both. He won Milwaukee by 39.8 points (2.9 points higher than Clinton’s 36.9 points) and Dane by 52.6 points (5.2 points higher than Clinton’s 47.4 points).
So, it’s not enough for Trump to win those big counties like Waukesha or Washington. If he wants to win Wisconsin, he needs to expand his margins of victory in such counties, possibly back to the levels of what they were in 2016. It’ll be imperative for him to also make inroads into Milwaukee and Dane. Trump is never going to actually win those counties, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to cut down Biden’s lead in them.
Could Other Elections in Wisconsin Suggest How 2024 Will Pan Out?
As stated in previous installments of this series, other elections that have happened in Wisconsin can provide some insight into what might happen in 2024, but such data must be taken with a grain of salt. Here is a summary of the main reasons for tempering predictions for president based on other races in the state.
- Every race has different underlying factors (e.g., the candidates themselves, strategies, spending, the issues) influencing how they play out.
- Elections from different kinds of election years have different levels of voter turnout (e.g., midterms have lower rates of voter turnout than presidential elections), meaning different sets of voters are influencing the results in different years. Many presidential election voters did not participate in the midterms.
- Elections might not cover the same geographical areas (e.g., governor’s elections are statewide, but state house seats are divided into districts).
Governor
Wisconsin’s gubernatorial elections aren’t typically blowouts — the last such occurrence was in 1998, when Republican Tommy Thompson defeated Ed Garvey by a whopping 20.97 points. But they’re not quite the barnburners that the state has been for the presidential race. The election victories are also more evenly split between the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the last three governors have each won a reelection campaign. (Thompson also won in 1986, 1990, and 1994.)
- Democratic victories: James Doyle in 2002 and 2006, Tony Evers in 2018 and 2022
- Republican victories: Thompson in 1998, Scott Walker in 2010 and 2014
Walker also won a recall election in 2012 that was held mostly in response to Wisconsin Act 10, a bill which was introduced in the state legislature at Walker’s request and later signed into law. Among the most contentious components of the bill was changes to the collective bargaining abilities of labor unions.
Walker would survive the recall election and even get reelected in 2014, but the victories would run out. Walker’s attempt to parlay his Wisconsin success into a presidential campaign for 2016 fizzled out, and current governor Tony Evers defeated Walker in his second reelection bid in 2018. Evers has won both his gubernatorial campaigns by smaller margins than Walker did.
Since Wisconsin’s governor is elected in midterm elections, one must be careful in comparing it to the presidential election due to a different overall set of voters showing up. Those who vote in presidential races don’t always vote in midterms. Still, do governor’s races have any sort of correlation with how Wisconsin votes for president? Below is a table comparing the margin of victory for winning gubernatorial candidates to the margin for the victor of the state in the succeeding presidential election.
The margins of victory for the 2018 governor’s and 2020 presidential race were pretty close to being the same. Other than that, though, they haven’t been all that similar. But the party who won the governor’s contest also subsequently won the state for president four of the last five times (the exception being Republican Scott Walker in 2010 for governor and Democrat Barack Obama for president in 2012). Three of those times, it was done by Democrats.
Since Evers, a Democrat, won in 2022, the trend suggests that Biden could win the state again in 2022. But remember: Correlation does not imply causation. There are many other factors at play that can’t necessarily be seen at the surface level.
U.S. Senate
At the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. Senate races in Wisconsin were anything but competitive. The 2006 election was a 37.83 percentage point beatdown favoring Democrats. The 2000 (24.51 point) and 2004 (11.24 point) elections were significantly closer but still managed to be blowouts.
But from 2010 onward, U.S. Senate races in the state have been much tighter. Four of the last five elections for this office in Wisconsin have been between 1.01 and 5.55 point margins of victory. They’ve also been much more bipartisan. Democrat Tammy Baldwin won in 2012 and 2018, and is running again in 2024. Republican Ron Johnson won in 2010, 2016, and 2022.
Since Wisconsin is one of the states that is holding a U.S. Senate election alongside the presidential election, how have previous instances of this occurrence in the state played out? Below is a chart comparing U.S. Senate margins of victory in Wisconsin to the presidential election when they are in the same year.
The last four times have seen the same party win the state’s governor’s race and Electoral College votes. Another trend is that the difference in the margins of victory for both races have decreased over time (with a slight uptick in the disparity in 2016). That indicates that ticket-splitting — when a voter picks a candidate from one party for one office and then a candidate from a different party for another office on the same ballot — has mostly decreased for these two offices over time.
State Legislature
The state legislature is starkly different compared to the other offices we have looked at. The presidency, governorship, and U.S. Senate is arguably purple (with perhaps a hint of a bluish hue) in Wisconsin. That’s not the case for the state house or state senate, which are both definitively red.
The Republican Party is so dominant that, following the 2022 elections, it gained a veto-proof majority in the state senate and was only a couple seats shy of a veto-proof majority in the state house. A veto-proof majority refers to when a party has enough seats in a chamber that it can override a governor’s veto if the whole party votes accordingly.² With Democratic Governor Evers, the Republican legislature is nearly capable of doing just that.
Since the partisanship of the state legislature is so different from voting for president, governor, and U.S. Senate, there probably isn’t much we can use of it to predict was might happen for president in 2024. Individual seats are also limited to specific geographical areas, and voters (whether they are Republican, Democrat, or something else) aren’t going to be split evenly across them. There might be an inordinate number of Republicans in certain districts but the same thing for Democrats in other districts.
There are also a couple other issues we run into for Wisconsin.
- State legislative elections happen in both midterm and presidential elections, so we see different kinds of voters turn out in both types of years.
- The state senate only has 16 of its 33 seats up for election in 2024. Thus, roughly half of the population won’t even vote on races for the upper chamber of the legislature, and the results won’t be representative of how the state votes for president.
Lastly, like for every other state, state legislative races are further down the ballot than the presidential race is, so we see a phenomenon called “ballot drop-off.” This refers to the fact that voters tend to participate at higher rates for the first few offices that are listed on a ballot compared to those further down. The presidential contest is at the top, but the state house and senate might be the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. race that is listed below offices like governor, attorney general, or secretary of state. So, even when they are being voted on at the same time, on the same ballot, some voters will make a pick for president but skip over the state legislative races.
The Partisan Affiliations of Wisconsin Voters
Wisconsin is not one of the 31 states that tracks the partisan affiliations of voters. So, to generally estimate the partisan divide of the state, we have to infer by other means. What do we know about how recent Wisconsin elections play out for the parties?
- Wisconsin has been won by Democratic presidential candidates eight of the last nine times, but several of those have been very competitive (most relevantly, 2016 and 2020).
- Incumbent governors in Wisconsin for both Republicans and Democrats are quite successful in getting reelected at least once, and both parties have won four of the last eight gubernatorial elections.
- The two incumbent U.S. Senators in Wisconsin, one Republican and one Democrat, have both had at least one successful reelection bid and have mostly had competitive races.
- The state legislature is handily Republican, with the party holding 2/3rds of the state senate and nearly 2/3rds of the state house.
Given that the president, governor, and U.S. Senate races are statewide (i.e., everyone in the state votes on it), and the aforementioned particular issues with comparing voting on state legislative candidates to that of presidential candidates, it seems that the state legislature is not very representative of the overall partisanship of the electorate. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is an almost equal number of Democrats and Republicans. There are several other things we don’t know.
- How do voters that would identify as independent vote? How many of them typically vote Republican and how many typically vote Democrat? Some that identify as independents actually vote more consistently with Republicans than some Republicans, or more consistently with Democrats than some Democrats. So, they might skew our perception of how many Democrats and Republicans there would be if Wisconsin tracked voters by their party affiliation.
- What are the turnout levels like for those voters that would identify as Democrats compared to those that would identify as Republicans? Generally speaking in U.S. elections, Republicans tend to turn out at higher rates than Democrats do. How much is this the case for the voters of Wisconsin?
The closest thing I could find to a gauge of the state’s partisanship was this poll by Pew. It shows 42% of respondents identifying as either Republican or “leaning” Republican, and another 42% of respondents identifying as either Democrat or “leaning” Democrat. But that data comes from 2014, and it does not appear that Pew followed up that survey more recently.
All that said, it seems that the number of Republicans and Democrats in The Badger State is relatively even compared to many other states. That could still mean a difference of 100,000 or so voters, but for Wisconsin’s population size that’s a fairly close divide.
2024 in Wisconsin: Who has the Advantage?
Just before the 2020 election, the big three election forecasters had Wisconsin as slightly favoring Democrat Joe Biden. Now, with a little over seven months out from the 2024 election, what do these three say about the rematch between Biden and Trump? As of March 27, 2024, here are their ratings:
- Inside Elections: Toss-up
- Cook Political Report: Toss-up
- Sabato’s Crystal Ball: Toss-up
The race for Wisconsin was tight in 2020 (possibly a bit more than Inside Elections, Cook, and Sabato predicted), and it could be just as close if not closer in 2024. The Big Three certainly think so, and it’s understandable. Despite incumbency advantages, just as Trump was vulnerable in 2020, so is Joe Biden in 2024.
One of the questions now is whether Trump’s campaign can capitalize. And there is still plenty of time for various things to change over the final seven months of campaigning. But one thing that is for certain is that the state is very much up-in-the-air. The road to the White House — whether it turns out to be reelection for Biden or a return for Trump — might run through Wisconsin.
- Note that Dave Leip’s Election Atlas has Republicans as blue and Democrats as red, instead of the usual conception of Republicans as red and Democrats as blue. The reasons for this are described here.
- Usually, a veto-proof majority is notable when the governor and the legislature are different parties, but veto-proof majorities have come into play in various states when the governor and legislature are the same party but disagree on a particular bill.
