Wisconsin has been the closest Midwestern state in each of the last two presidential elections. Trump will likely need to “WOW” the state’s voters to win it back.
WOW isn’t just in all caps because it’s an exclamation — it’s also the political acronym for the suburban counties around Milwaukee: Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha. These three regularly supply the largest single group of votes for statewide GOP candidates.
Win big here, and the Republican has a real shot at victory.
Trump’s problem is that he has slumped in these counties compared to the pre-2016 Republican norm. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried Ozaukee County by 31 points and swept Waukesha by 34.
Trump’s winning margins in these places were much lower in 2016: 19 points in Ozaukee and 27 in Waukesha. He lost the state in 2020 largely because those margins dropped again, to 21 points in Waukesha and a mere 12 points in Ozaukee.
Trump has experienced similar declines in high-income, highly educated ZIP codes across the country. And in the WOW zone, half the residents of both counties have at least a college degree and they rank No. 1 or No. 2 in terms of median household income.
Trump came much closer than Romney did to carrying the state because, as he has across the country, he offset those losses with massive gains among whites without a college degree.
This is clear when looking at map of the 20 counties where Barack Obama and Donald Trump both won twice. They are either in the rural eastern part of the state or in the manufacturing regions of Outagamie, Racine, and Kenosha counties.
Tiny Pepin County is a perfect example of this trend. Nestled on the border with Minnesota, it had not gone for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide. It flipped from going for Obama by 2 points against Romney to backing Trump by 23 points in 2016 and 26 points in 2020.
Trump could try to win the state by increasing his already high margins in these places, perhaps by increasing turnout. Perhaps that would work, but that tactic failed in 2020 to offset the even larger decline in his vote in the WOW counties.
Democrats, for their part, will try to increase turnout in their base regions. While Dems only win a few counties in Wisconsin these days, the ones they do win are dominated either by racial minorities (Milwaukee, Menominee), union voters (Ashland, Bayfield, Douglas), or university and government employees (Eau Claire, La Crosse, Portage, Madison and its suburbs).
These places give the Democrats lopsided majorities that give them a fighting chance.
The Harris-Walz campaign will likely try to stoke turnout among the state’s white college student population in these areas using abortion rights as a driving issue. A similar effort in the Madison area in 2020 sparked much higher turnout increases than occurred statewide, significantly contributing to Biden’s narrow victory margin.
That leaves Trump with two options: increase his vote share with ethnic minorities or reverse somewhat his losses over the years with educated whites.
There’s some evidence that he is hiking his support among non-whites compared with 2020. The recent American Greatness/TIPP poll had Harris leading 65-30 among non-whites, while the New York Times/Siena poll shows Harris up by 70-17 with black voters and 60-38 with other minorities.
That doesn’t sound great, but Trump lost non-whites by nearly 3-1, or 50 points, per the 2020 exit poll. Non-whites were about 13% of the 2020 electorate, so losing them by 15 points less would turn Biden’s 0.6 percent win into a 1.3-point loss for Harris – assuming everything else stays the same.
That’s a big assumption, though, and one Trump should not bank on. College-educated whites cast 30 percent of the state’s votes in 2020, so losing them by just 4 points more would wipe out the gains from minority voters.
This means Trump needs to do more than just rally the base and talk more to minorities. He needs to figure out how to stop college-educated whites from continuing their leftward drift, and the ex-prez has a host of issues he can concentrate on to do just that.
A recent Marquette Law poll showed that the economy was the most important issue for college-educated voters, and Trump trailed Harris by only 6 points among them when asked about the handling of that issue. Trump does even better with college voters on immigration policy, trailing Harris by only 2 points.
Trump lost college-educated whites by 13 points in 2020. He’ll likely win in 2024 if he can use issues like these to keep that margin level, while keeping gains with non-whites.
Wisconsin may be the key to the election. Trump will win if he carries it while also flipping Arizona and Georgia. If he can do that, he’ll be back in the Oval Office despite everything that has happened since he left.
Wow indeed.
