Purple Reign: The Roots of Wisconsin’s Frequent Electoral Swings

THIS STORY IS PART OF OUR ‘PURPLE REIGN’ FEATURE. READ MORE HERE. 

Perched high in the middle of the country, Wisconsin stands at the center of national politics, a swinging battleground of White House hopes and Senate dreams.

No other state’s presidential election results have ever been as closely divided as many times in as short a period as Wisconsin’s were from 2000 through 2020, with four of six races decided by less than one percentage point each. Another heart-stoppingly tight contest is expected this fall.

Pundits call this a purple state. But long before states were painted purple, red or blue, Wisconsin glowed in all those colors and more.

“Wisconsin, politically speaking, is not one moderate state” but rather “one very conservative state overlapping another very liberal one,” Marquette University scholar John D. Johnson said in 2021.

The Republican Party’s origin story was set here, as was that of anti-communist witch hunter Joe McCarthy. And yet this is also hallowed ground for the Progressives who reshaped our state and national governments and the Socialists who ran our largest city.

Primary elections were born here, along with the GOP’s first presidential primary winner, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette Sr.

This is where Teddy Roosevelt turned an assassination attempt into a talking point. This is where John F. Kennedy’s ride toward Camelot became a gallop. This is the state that Hillary Clinton seemingly took for granted and the one that Joe Biden and Donald Trump dare not ignore.

Now, as Republicans convene in Milwaukee to kick off the final round of America’s quadrennial cage match, Wisconsin again balances on the edge between victory and defeat for those who seek the Oval Office.

The forces that drove us to that edge are foreshadowed in the ever-twisting plot and history-bending characters of this state’s 176-year-long story. And in many ways, Wisconsin’s story is also the story of the party that this state birthed, and of its journey from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other.

The Earliest Days

Politics is about people, and at Wisconsin’s political debut in 1848, a lot of its people were immigrants from Germany and other countries. That triggered a controversy over voting rights in crafting the new state constitution.

Although delegates to the state’s constitutional convention didn’t spend much time talking about allowing women to vote, they did debate a provision granting the vote to “white males who were foreign-born and not U.S. citizens,” according to Wisconsin Votes: An Electoral History, the most complete chronicle of voting in this state. “Some Whigs opposed the provision, well aware that many of the foreign immigrants … leaned toward the Democrats,” veteran UW-Madison political scientist Robert Booth Fowler wrote in his 2008 book.

The conservative Whigs lost that round. Non-citizens were able to vote in Wisconsin until 1912, when the constitution was amended to limit voting to U.S. citizens. That restriction remains in place today, but anxiety over immigrants voting – and specifically voting for Democrats – remains a theme in current debates over immigration. This November’s ballot includes another constitutional amendment, reiterating that only citizens can vote, driven by Republican fears that the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority might allow non-citizen voting by somehow finding a loophole in the current language.

Black voting rights were also controversial in fledgling statehood. Although the constitutional convention rejected the idea, voters extended the franchise to Black men in an 1849 referendum that Fowler called “radical for its time.” The results were thrown out on a technicality, until the state Supreme Court ruled the referendum valid 17 years later.

Debates over racial equality weren’t limited to voting rights. Wisconsin was becoming a center of anti-slavery sentiment at a time when Black people remained enslaved throughout the South.

In November 1848, the first time that Wisconsinites were able to vote in a presidential election, they gave 27% of their votes to ex-President Martin Van Buren, a former Democrat running on the ticket of the Free Soil Party, which opposed expansion of slavery to new states. It was the minor party’s best performance outside New England, and more than double its 10% share of the national vote.

Although Democrats carried Wisconsin in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections and accounted for two of the state’s first three governors, “There was no coherent political party operating in Wisconsin, Democratic or Whig,” during that period, just a set of factions maneuvering to serve their own interests, according to Fowler.

Before 1860, “Wisconsin also became a battleground for a variety of third parties and a center for the many turbulent issues that [ripped through] pre-Civil War politics in the United States: prohibition, the extension of slavery and slavery itself, political corruption, immigration and ethnic antagonisms, to name a few,” Fowler wrote.

The Birth and Rapid Ascent of the GOP

One of those third parties was formed in a Ripon schoolhouse.

In 1854, both the Democratic and Whig parties were split between pro-slavery Southern and anti-slavery Northern factions. Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s immigrant-majority population was furious over a congressional bill that not only would repeal an 1820 compromise prohibiting slavery in the new Kansas and Nebraska territories, but also would deny voting rights to noncitizen immigrants there, the Wisconsin Historical Society noted.

As people gathered to discuss the issue, Alan Bovay, a New York-born Whig lawyer, pushed for formation of a new anti-slavery party that would take the name “Republican,” backed by influential New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley.

On March 20, 1854, a group of 54 Ripon voters decided to disband their community’s Whig and Free Soil parties and establish the Republican Party. Wisconsin’s first slates of Republicans captured two of the state’s three U.S. House seats and the governor’s office in the 1854 and 1855 elections, and newly elected state lawmakers appointed a Republican to the U.S. Senate. Voters backed Republican nominee John Fremont in the 1856 presidential election.

At the same time, the Whig Party collapsed. It wasn’t a factor in 1856, when Republican Fremont ran second nationally to Democrat James Buchanan. In just two years, the Wisconsin-born third party had reached major-party status.

Four years after that – and only six years after the party’s birth in Ripon – Republicans elected their first president, Abraham Lincoln. Wisconsin voters supported Lincoln with a comfortable 57% majority, far more than his 39% nationwide plurality in the fractious four-way race of 1860.

Although the Republican platform at the time opposed only slavery expansion and did not call for abolition, slaveholding Southern states were so fearful of Lincoln’s intentions that they started seceding before his inauguration, leading to the Civil War.

Less than 20 years after its founding, the organization would start calling itself the Grand Old Party, later abbreviated as GOP, to highlight its heritage of preserving the Union. At the same time, the post-war party was attracting wealthy Northern industrialists who started to gradually pull its policies in a more conservative, pro-business direction.

The GOP kept its grip on this state for three-quarters of a century, the longest that any party has held that much sway. From 1855 through 1930, Republicans carried Wisconsin in 16 of 19 presidential elections and won 35 of 38 biennial gubernatorial races.

Progressives and the Rise of Reform

Still, “Republican success did not mean Republican dominance,” Fowler stressed. Democrats remained competitive into the early 20th century, and soon a new challenge emerged from within Republicans’ own ranks.

While he remained a Republican, as governor and later U.S. senator, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette Sr. became a top leader of the growing Progressive movement, which evolved nationwide in response to the concentration of economic power in large corporations and of political power in big-city party machines.

He was in the forefront on many Progressive initiatives, championing legislation to regulate railroads and lobbyists, safeguard the rights of workers and farmers, and establish a state civil service system.

La Follette also helped come up with the Wisconsin Idea, which holds that government is most effective when it’s controlled by voters – not special interests – and guided by expert advice. This led to the creation of the state’s Legislative Reference Bureau,  a critical agency that researches issues for lawmakers, and to the involvement of UW faculty in helping shape public policy.

At La Follette’s urging, voters approved a referendum to nominate each party’s state candidates through primary elections, taking that power away from party bosses for the first time in the United States, starting in 1906. Later, under Gov. Francis McGovern (one of La Follette’s Progressive successors), Wisconsin enacted the nation’s first effective state workers compensation law and the first state income tax.

Power Shift

In presidential elections from 2000 to 2020, most of Wisconsin’s counties have been swinging toward Republicans, particularly in rural areas. But the 10 counties that grew more Democratic include the three most populous. Already-blue Dane and Milwaukee counties turned even bluer, while still-red Waukesha and Ozaukee counties are looking more purple. 

Source: John D. Johnson Marquette University Lubar Center

In the Senate, La Follette helped achieve another Progressive priority — empowering voters to directly elect U.S. senators, who previously had been appointed by state legislatures — when the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin had extended primaries to presidential elections, starting in 1912, and La Follette was all in. The state’s delegates had backed him at the 1908 Republican National Convention, and in 1912 he hit the campaign trail.

He won the nation’s first GOP presidential primary, in North Dakota, and the third, in Wisconsin, but that was it.

The competition was stiff that year, as former President Theodore Roosevelt challenged his handpicked successor, incumbent William Howard Taft, for becoming too conservative. Roosevelt won most of the primaries, but Taft carried the still-dominant caucuses and won the GOP nomination.

Unwilling to give up, Roosevelt turned a Progressive group that La Follette had founded within the Republican Party into a separate party that nominated Roosevelt. A bitterly disappointed La Follette threw his support to Democrat Woodrow Wilson as the new organization, reshaped in Roosevelt’s image, was nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.

Roosevelt was campaigning in Downtown Milwaukee when a psychologically disturbed New Yorker shot him on the spot where the Hyatt Regency hotel now stands. But the combination of Roosevelt’s heavy overcoat, metal glasses case and the 50-page speech in his pocket helped slow down the bullet enough to save his life. The famously macho ex-president insisted on delivering his remarks at the Milwaukee Auditorium (now the Miller High Life Theater). He opened by telling his audience that he had been shot, showing off his bloody shirt and boasting, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He refused to go to a hospital until he finished his roughly 90-minute address.

Roosevelt ended up with 27% of the national popular vote in 1912 – the most of any third-party candidate in U.S. history – although his Wisconsin share was just 15%. The split among Republicans helped Wilson to win the White House, and to carry Wisconsin with 41% to Taft’s 33%. From Teddy on, minor-party and independent candidates have been viewed as spoilers, an image that still hangs over bids by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others in this year’s presidential race.

Socialists on the Scene

About the same time the Progressive movement was growing throughout Wisconsin, Socialism was on the rise in Milwaukee.

Like the Progressives, the Socialists advocated for workers’ rights and clean government, but with a more powerful role for the public sector. The party’s Milwaukee branch focused less on doctrinaire ideology than on improving public services, earning the nickname “sewer Socialists.” In fact, new sanitation systems and a municipal water utility, along with public parks and improved schools, were among the top achievements of the three Socialist mayors who governed Milwaukee for most of the period between 1910 and 1960.

Historian John Gurda calls Austrian immigrant Victor Berger “the godfather of Milwaukee Socialism.” As the movement’s local leader, Berger came up with “the Milwaukee Idea” of using union members as foot soldiers in political campaigns, a tactic later embraced by Democrats.

Socialists started to win aldermanic and supervisory seats in 1904, but their biggest victory was in 1910, Fowler writes. That was when voters elected Emil Seidel as the first Socialist mayor of any major American city, handed the party Common Council and County Board majorities and sent Berger to Washington as the nation’s first Socialist congressman.

Both the Progressive and Socialist movements opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, believing the war would benefit big business at the expense of their domestic policy priorities. And both paid a price – although more on the national stage than in Wisconsin.

Over La Follette’s opposition, Congress had approved Wilson’s proposed Espionage and Sedition Acts. La Follette correctly predicted that Wilson would use the legislation to crack down on dissent — and Berger was one of the first targets.

Out of Congress after just one term, Berger editorialized against the war in his Socialist newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader. Federal authorities then prosecuted him and other prominent Socialists for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Berger was convicted soon after he won a comeback bid. The House refused to seat him. In the special election to fill his seat, Milwaukee’s voters defiantly re-elected Berger by an even wider margin, but the House again rejected him, leaving his seat vacant for the rest of that term. The Supreme Court threw out his conviction in 1921, clearing the way for him to return to Congress in 1922.

By then, Congress had repealed the Sedition Act and the restrictions on free speech that it had added to the Espionage Act. However, other Espionage Act provisions remain in force, including those being used to prosecute former President Donald Trump for taking classified documents when he left office.

Divisions over the war led to the national decline of the Progressive and Socialist movements, according to Fowler and Gurda. But the story was different for Wisconsin’s German-Americans, some of whom had faced discrimination during the war. They showed their appreciation for the anti-war movements at the polls.

Berger captured 26% of the statewide vote – including 42% of the Milwaukee vote – when he ran for the state’s other Senate seat in 1918. La Follette won re-election with 80% of the vote in 1922.

And Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who had run better in Wisconsin than nationwide in four previous races, captured 11.5% of Wisconsin’s 1920 vote, more than three times his national share and his highest in any state, with 31% in Milwaukee. Debs famously ran that last race from prison after his own Espionage Act conviction, a precedent that is often cited as Trump faces dozens of felony charges, including 34 counts on which he was convicted in New York.

By contrast, Wilson’s support for the war proved disastrous for Wisconsin Democrats, as “every Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the five races in the 1920s was decisively defeated,” Fowler wrote.

La Follette still harbored his own presidential ambitions. He had again won the Wisconsin and North Dakota Republican primaries in 1916, followed by his third victory in the Wisconsin primary in 1920.

In 1924, La Follette scored yet another double win in the Wisconsin and North Dakota primaries.

But, like Roosevelt in 1912, La Follette was not content to accept one more defeat on the GOP convention floor. He revived the Progressive Party, which had dissolved after the 1912 election, and this time he won its nomination.

Although he was underfunded and lacked a strong ground operation, the 69-year-old La Follette campaigned energetically across the country in the race against incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge and Democratic nominee John Davis, according to Fowler.

La Follette captured 16.6% of the national vote, the third-best showing of any minor-party candidate in the 20th century, after Roosevelt in 1912 and Ross Perot in 1992. He carried Wisconsin and its 13 Electoral College votes – one of only four third-party candidates in the century to win a state – and he ran second in 11 Western and Midwestern states.

The Progressives’ Decline

Like its 1912 version, La Follette’s Progressive party was short-lived, disappearing after his death in 1925. Most Progressives remained within the Republican fold, and Wisconsin was still a majority-Republican state.

It took the Great Depression to change that. After the economy crashed on Republican President Herbert Hoover’s watch, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt carried the state in 1932 with 63% of the vote, in what Fowler called “an unprecedented earthquake-like electoral shakeup.”

Democrats also captured the governor’s office that year, for the first time since former Milwaukee Mayor George Peck’s two terms in the 1890s, and they scored a rare Senate victory.  Republicans had held the seat not occupied by La Follette for 15 of the previous 18 years.

Roosevelt won big in Wisconsin again in 1936, and his New Deal programs drew most of the Black voters who had previously remained loyal to the party of Lincoln. But as another war with Germany loomed, German-Americans again deserted the Democrats, Fowler wrote. In 1938, Republican Alexander Wiley won the first of his four terms in the Senate, while the governor’s office returned to GOP hands for the next four years. FDR barely carried the state in 1940, with 50% to Republican Wendell Willkie’s 48%, and narrowly lost it to Republican Thomas Dewey, 50% to 49%, in the wartime election of 1944.

Meanwhile, the Progressives weren’t finished, and neither was the La Follette family. Fighting Bob’s older son, Robert “Young Bob” Jr., had succeeded him in the Senate, while his younger son, Phil, had been elected governor in 1930.

Both were Republicans, but both felt out of place as the party continued to move right, according to Fowler. Together they formed yet a third incarnation of the Progressive Party, aligning with FDR’s New Deal principles. Under its banner, starting in 1934, Phil returned to the governor’s office for two terms and Young Bob was re-elected twice.

It didn’t last. The movement lost members to the two major parties. Phil suffered a career-ending defeat in the 1938 gubernatorial election. Although the Progressive Party won back the governorship in 1942, it finally disbanded in 1946, and Young Bob entered that year’s GOP Senate primary.

That primary turned out to be the final confrontation between Progressives and conservatives in the Wisconsin Republican Party. La Follette faced off against a Marine veteran named Joe McCarthy, who played to Cold War fears of communism and presented himself as a fresh alternative to the no-longer-youthful Young Bob.

McCarthy’s victory inadvertently aided Wisconsin Democrats, Fowler wrote, because “by knocking out La Follette as a Republican, McCarthy ensured that postwar liberals would turn to the Democrats.” Wisconsin politics then started to mirror the rest of the country, with a generally liberal Democratic Party and a generally conservative Republican Party.

A State Divided

2000: In the closely contested 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore carried not only the blue strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane counties, but also large swaths of southern and western Wisconsin, while the Fox Valley and Milwaukee’s suburban counties favored Republican George W. Bush. The map didn’t change much for Bush’s 2004 match against Democrat John Kerry. 

2008: Democrat Barack Obama showed statewide strength in the 2008 race, leaving support for  Republican John McCain concentrated mainly in the Milwaukee suburban counties. But when Obama sought a second term against Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, the state reverted to something closer to the 2000-2004 pattern, although tinged a bit more blue in the south and west.  

2020: Regional divisions hardened with Republican Donald Trump on the ballot, as rural counties turned deeply red while Dane and Milwaukee counties remained Democratic powerhouses and GOP dominance started to wane in the suburbs. The map for Trump’s 2020 face-off with Democrat Joe Biden barely changed from Trump’s 2016 race against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

For his first few years in the Senate, McCarthy attracted little notice. That changed in 1950, when he started making unsubstantiated claims that Communists had infiltrated the State Department, CIA and other agencies. After his 1952 re-election, he became chair of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and launched a series of hearings trying to expose Communists, aided by committee chief counsel Roy Cohn.

But when McCarthy took on the U.S. Army, the Army fought back. As McCarthy leveled charges about the service being soft on communism, the Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of seeking favorable treatment for a draftee who had been a McCarthy aide. The televised 1954 showdown, known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings, reached a climax when McCarthy claimed a member of Army attorney Joseph Welch’s law firm had Communist ties. Welch shot back, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

Public opinion soured on McCarthy after seeing his bullying of witnesses. The Senate censured him later that year. McCarthy “turned increasingly to alcohol to relieve his frustrations,” contributing to his 1957 death in office, according to the History Channel.

Yet McCarthy’s influence lives on in some ways. The far-right conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society moved their headquarters to his hometown of Appleton in 1989. And McCarthy’s attorney Cohn later became a mentor to Trump, starting in the 1970s when the future president was a New York developer facing federal housing discrimination accusations. Trump “completely absorbed all of the lessons of Cohn, which were attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, and winning is everything,” Matthew Tyrnauer, director of a documentary on Cohn, said in a 2019 interview with NPR.

A Postwar Swing State

After World War II, Wisconsin swung back to the GOP column. Democrat Harry Truman carried the state in 1948, but Republican Dwight Eisenhower rolled up big margins in 1952 and 1956. Republicans also won all seven gubernatorial elections from 1944 through 1956.

However, with the aid of former Progressives, Democrats were building up their organization and consolidating their power centers in Milwaukee and Madison. Their first big success came in the 1957 special election to replace McCarthy. Democrat William Proxmire waged a tireless campaign and won with 57% of the vote to become the state’s first Democratic senator since the 1930s. Another Democrat, Gaylord Nelson, followed up by capturing the governor’s office in 1958, winning reelection in 1960 and then joining Proxmire in the Senate two years later. That was the first time that Wisconsin voters had picked Democrats for both Senate seats. “Suddenly Wisconsin had become an authentic, and competitive, two-party state,” Fowler wrote.

Even though Republicans would carry Wisconsin in five of the next seven presidential elections, this was no longer a Republican state, and ticket-splitting was common. Democrats maintained their hold on both Senate seats until 1980. Each party won four of the eight gubernatorial elections from 1964 through 1982, as the governor’s term shifted to four years starting in 1970.

The newly revitalized Wisconsin Democrats played a key role in the 1960 presidential election. Primaries were still outnumbered by caucuses, and Wisconsin’s April primary was the second in the nation that year.

Democrat John F. Kennedy had faced no opposition in New Hampshire, where the Massachusetts senator held the advantage as a fellow New Englander. Wisconsin was the first real contest against Hubert Humphrey, his Senate colleague from neighboring Minnesota, and Kennedy made it a top target.

Kennedy won the primary with 56% of the vote, gaining needed momentum toward capturing the nomination. But he lost the state in November, with 48% to Republican Richard Nixon’s 52%.

Four years later, Wisconsin joined the rest of the nation in giving Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, whose appeal was limited to his party’s right wing. Goldwater’s vocal opposition to the recently passed Civil Rights Act vaporized nearly all remaining Black support for the GOP, even though most congressional Republicans had voted for the landmark legislation.

But LBJ’s 24-point trouncing of Goldwater – which resembled Eisenhower’s margins in his two victories over Democrat Adlai Stevenson – was the last time any presidential candidate won the state by that much. 

Nixon carried Wisconsin two more times, with a 4-point lead over Humphrey in 1968 – when segregationist George Wallace pulled more than 7% of the vote – and a 10-point lead over the more liberal Democrat George McGovern in 1972.

Then the state swung Democratic again for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Unlike most other Democrats, the former Georgia peanut farmer was able to attract substantial rural support as he edged Republican incumbent Gerald Ford by less than 2 points.

Carter also benefited nationally from backlash against Ford’s pardon of Nixon in the Watergate scandal. Before Trump wrapped up this year’s GOP nomination, several of his primary rivals promised to follow Ford’s lead and pardon Trump for the federal felony charges against him. 

From Reagan to the Blue Wall to the Cheesehead Revolution

Wisconsin veered right again in 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan carried the state by almost 5 points over Carter, while 7% of the vote went to independent John Anderson, an Illinois Republican congressman who had picked former Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey as his running mate. At the same time, Republican Robert Kasten defeated Nelson for the GOP’s first Senate win since the 1950s.

Reagan scored a more decisive 9-point victory in 1984 over Democrat Walter Mondale, who like Humphrey was a former senator and vice president from Minnesota. Kasten won a second term in 1986, in the same election that kicked off Tommy Thompson’s record 14-year run as governor.

In 1988, the state turned blue, at least for statewide federal elections. Wisconsin voters backed Democrat Michael Dukakis over Republican George H.W. Bush by 3.6 points in 1988; Democrat Bill Clinton by 4.3 points over Bush in 1992; and Clinton by more than 10 points over Republican Bob Dole in 1996.

Independent Ross Perot was a factor in both of Clinton’s elections, drawing more than 21% of the state vote in 1992 and more than 10% in 1996. Both times, Perot drew rural voters attracted to non-traditional candidates, Fowler wrote.

Meanwhile, voters picked Democrat Herb Kohl to succeed Proxmire in 1988. When Democrat Russ Feingold defeated Kasten in 1992, both of Wisconsin’s Senate seats were again in Democratic hands. And after Thompson left for a Cabinet post in 2001, Democrat Jim Doyle won two terms in the governor’s office.

Wisconsin was looking so consistently Democratic that it was considered a brick in the “blue wall” of Midwestern, Northeastern and West Coast states that voted for Democrats in all six of the presidential elections from 1992 through 2012.

But this part of the wall may not have been as solid as it seemed, says longtime Wisconsin political observer Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School Poll. Democrats scored extremely narrow wins over Republican George W. Bush, with Al Gore carrying the state by just 0.2 points in 2000 and John Kerry coming out only 0.4 points ahead in 2004.

Green Party candidate Ralph Nader drew much of his support from Madison when he picked up 3.6% of the vote in 2000, Fowler said. However, Nader’s backing all but evaporated in 2004, after his showing in hotly contested Florida likely cost Gore the 2000 election, notes David Canon, professor emeritus of political science at UW-Madison.

In both elections, Bush ran strongest in rural and suburban areas, balanced by the Democrats’ strength not only in Milwaukee and Madison but also in mid-sized and smaller cities, Fowler wrote. The Democrats carried much of south-central and southwestern Wisconsin, while Bush was favored in the southeast – except Milwaukee County – and the Fox Valley, according to maps developed by Marquette’s Johnson, research fellow at the Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.

After those close races, Fowler wrote, “Today, Wisconsin is ‘America’s most competitive state,’ most definitely a ‘classically purple state.’ Yet only a fool would make confident predictions about it, given its remarkable history.” 

Democrat Barack Obama proved those words true when he smashed through the urban-rural divide with a convincing statewide showing in his 14-point win in 2008. Republican John McCain’s support was concentrated in the suburban WOW (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) counties.

Once again, rural voters were swinging toward the non-traditional candidate, says Anthony Chergosky, assistant professor of political science at UW-La Crosse. Disaffected rural voters typically gravitate toward outsider candidates when they believe the status quo isn’t working for them, adds Amber Wichowsky, chair of Marquette’s political science department. 

Indeed, in 2012, when Obama was the incumbent and no longer the outsider, voting patterns started to shift back toward the geographic balance of 2000 and 2004, although southwestern Wisconsin remained bluer than it had been in the Bush years. Obama still carried the state by 6 points over Republican Mitt Romney.

In both of his races, Obama drew in voters who had not participated in previous elections. That was particularly true in 2012, when Milwaukee’s Black wards racked up unprecedented turnout as their residents rallied behind the nation’s first African-American president.

Between Obama’s victories, Republican Ron Johnson defeated Feingold in 2010, creating a split in the state’s Senate delegation that continued after Democrat Tammy Baldwin bested Thompson to succeed Kohl in 2012. That’s the opposite of the nationwide trend, where it’s becoming increasingly common for states to elect two senators of the same party, Canon says

The 2010 election also ignited a series of events that propelled three Wisconsin Republicans to national prominence in what they called the Cheesehead Revolution.

First, Scott Walker captured the governor’s office in a GOP wave that helped Reince Priebus move up from state party chair to chairman of the Republican National Committee the following year.

Then, amid massive public protests, Walker and the GOP-led Legislature pushed through Act 10, the legislation that stripped most public-sector employees of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Enraged labor forces launched Wisconsin’s first gubernatorial recall campaign, leading to a 2012 rematch between Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who had also been his party’s 2010 nominee. But Walker won again, boosting his national profile by becoming the first U.S. governor to survive a recall.

That fall, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney chose Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. Ryan was already House Budget Committee chair and would go on to lead the powerful Ways and Means Committee, rising to speaker of the House in 2015.

The Final Runup to 2024

None of that prepared anyone for the shock of 2016, when Trump drove a hole through the blue wall by edging Democrat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Clinton’s fellow Democrats blamed her for not personally campaigning here or in Michigan, a decision that she insists was based on the best polling data available.

Trump carried Wisconsin by 0.7 points, but his margin in rural counties was far larger, as the divide with urban areas intensified. Obama had carried every southwestern Wisconsin county in 2008, yet most swung to Trump in 2016.

Generally speaking, blue areas grew bluer, particularly Milwaukee and Dane counties, while red areas grew redder, says Canon. The notable exception was in the WOW counties, a longtime Republican stronghold that became more Democratic – though still red – reflecting a nationwide trend of suburban distaste for Trump. Yet the votes that the GOP lost in Milwaukee’s suburbs were offset by gains in rural Wisconsin, Franklin says.

Like Obama, Trump drew in new voters, but where Obama did so by appealing to a broader base, “Trump polarizes the electorate in a way Obama did not,” pushing some voters away, Chergosky says.

Playing into the cultural divide, the self-proclaimed billionaire chose to “campaign as an ordinary man,” Wichowsky says. This strategy particularly attracted white men without a college degree, who had supported Republicans by 4 points in 2012 but backed Trump by roughly 25 points in Wisconsin, Franklin adds.

Trump’s victory was the downfall of the Republicans’ Cheesehead troika. All initially opposed him, then tried to work with him.

Walker ran against Trump for the GOP nomination, but pulled out before the Iowa caucuses. Democrats accused Walker of putting his political future ahead of his state responsibilities, as part of the 2018 campaign that ended in his defeat by Tony Evers.

Priebus had unsuccessfully called for Trump to drop out of the race after the release of a tape on which he bragged about mistreating women. Nonetheless, Trump named Priebus as White House chief of staff, only to fire him a year later.

Ryan, as speaker, tried to walk a narrow line between pro-Trump forces and traditional Republicans, until he ultimately gave up and decided not to seek re-election in 2018.

The patterns of the 2016 election didn’t change much in 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden carried the state by the same 0.7-point margin that Trump had scraped together against Clinton. But a small shift of voters is enough to swing an election, because “Wisconsin has almost the perfect combination of urban, rural and suburban voters to produce a 50/50 electorate in the Trump era,” Chergosky says.

In 2020, Trump won the less-populated rural counties by bigger margins than in 2016, but Biden won Milwaukee, other cities and fast-growing Dane County by larger margins than Clinton did. Most notably, Trump won the WOW counties and the Fox Valley by smaller margins than in 2016, as college-educated suburban voters turned against him. That combination was just enough to tilt the balance in Biden’s favor.

Wisconsin was one of six states where the 2020 election was decided by less than 1 percentage point, up from three in 2016, but it is the only state that was that close in four presidential elections over 20 years, according to the Smart Politics blog. And in both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the “tipping point” that put the winner over the needed 270 electoral votes, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

In their all-but-certain rematch, Biden and Trump are both campaigning hard here, determined to avoid Clinton’s 2016 mistake. As known quantities – “almost like two incumbents,” Wichowsky says – they are less likely to draw in new voters, Canon says. And both are unpopular in polls, raising questions about whether some voters might sit out or back third-party candidates, Franklin says.

Because Trump and Biden have nearly equal bases, the race again could come down to the swing voters who decided the last two elections – a group that Franklin says is less fixated on politics. “Politics is not central to their identity,” Franklin says. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking everyone is as partisan as the people on Twitter.”

After Wisconsin’s long tradition of passionate politics, the least passionate voters may now hold the most power in a state that could again tip the Electoral College balance and deliver its winner to the White House.

A Timeline of Wisconsin’s Presidential Preferences

Wisconsin’s presidential preferences shifted from Republican to reliably Democratic over the 20th century. But the tight races of 2000 and 2004 foreshadowed those of 2016 and 2020. 

KEY:

R = Republican
D = Democrat
* = Presidential Winner

1952

61% – Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)*
38.7% – Adlai Stevenson (D)
0.3% – All others

1956

61.6% – Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)*
37.8% – Adlai Stevenson (D)
0.6% – All others

1960

51.8% – Richard Nixon (R)
48% – John F. Kennedy (D)*
0.2% – All others

1964

62.1% – Lyndon B. Johnson (D)*
37.7% – Barry Goldwater (R)
0.2% – All others

1968 

48% – Richard Nixon (R)*
44.3% – Hubert Humphrey (D)
7.7% – All others (George Wallace, American Independent, 7.6%)

1972

53.4% – Richard Nixon (R)*
43.7% – George McGovern (D)
2.8% – All others 

1976 

49.5% – Jimmy Carter (D)*
47.8% – Gerald Ford (R)
2.7% – All others (Eugene McCarthy, Independent, 1.7%)

1980

47.9% – Ronald Reagan (R)*
43.2% – Jimmy Carter (D)
8.9% – All others (John Anderson, American Independent, 7.1%)

1984

54.2% – Ronald Reagan (R)*
45% – Walter Mondale (D)
0.8% – All others

1988

51.4% – Michael Dukakis (D)
47.8% – George H.W. Bush (R)*
0.8% – All others

1992

41.1% – Bill Clinton (D)*
36.8% – George H.W. Bush (R)
22.1% – All others (Ross Perot, Independent, 21.5%)

1996

48.8% – Bill Clinton (D)*
38.5% – Bob Dole (R)
12.7% – All others (Ross Perot, Reform, 10.4%)

2000

47.8% – Al Gore (D)
47.6% – George W. Bush (R)*
4.6% – All others (Ralph Nader, Green, 3.6%)

2004

49.7% – John Kerry (D)
49.3% – George W. Bush (R)*
1% – All others (Ralph Nader, Independent, 0.5%)

2008

56.2% – Barack Obama (D)*
42.3% – John McCain (R)
1.5% – All others

2012 

52.8% – Barack Obama (D)*
45.9% – Mitt Romney (R)
1.3% – All others

2016

47.2% – Donald Trump (R)*
46.5% – Hillary Clinton (D)
6.3% – All others (Gary Johnson, Libertarian, 3.6%; Jill Stein, Green, 1.4%)

2020 

49.5% – Joe Biden (D)*
48.8% – Donald Trump (R)
1.7% – All others (Jo Jorgensen, Libertarian, 1.2%)

Frequent contributor Larry Sandler has covered Wisconsin politics for more than four decades.