Wisconsin: the 'WOW' counties vs. the Driftless
For an area called "Driftless," its seen quite the political drift in recent years.
Happy Thursday!
If you’re new to Battleground, make sure you check out posts from earlier this week on Ohio, Iowa and Indiana as they all provide great context for today’s analysis on Wisconsin!
Topline Takeaways
Biden’s win is due to his ability to keep things close in the “WOW” counties, a Republican stronghold that has become more competitive during the Trump era.
The state’s “Driftless Area” continues to swing toward Republicans after supporting Democratic candidates since the farm crisis of the 1980s.
The nationalization of political parties combined with the erosion of local media sources makes rural voters in the state more likely to engage with issues that don’t directly affect their daily lives. For now, this dynamic benefits Republicans.
In-depth Insights
Trump continued to build off of his gains in rural areas but his 2020 loss is primarily due to his lagging performance in what’s known locally as the “WOW” counties.
The “WOW” counties are a set of “collar counties” that surround the northwestern corner of Milwaukee: Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. The counties are traditional Republican strongholds and have been the party’s answer to Democratic strength in Milwaukee and the counties to its south: Racine and Kenosha. These trends were upset by Trump’s candidacy in 2016: Republicans watched their support drop substantially in the “WOW” counties but were saved by flipping both Racine and Kenosha for the first time in almost 50 years. This collection of urbanized counties (relative to the rest of the state) have functioned as political counterweights throughout the 20th century, offsetting each other’s preferences, forcing the state’s more rural counties to the west to be the deciders of close statewide races.
Despite Biden’s successes in keeping margins close in the WOW counties, he failed to stop the bleeding in the rural “Driftless Area,” a geological region in the southwestern corner of the state that also crosses into Minnesota, Iowa and northwestern Illinois.
The Driftless Area is a portion of the Midwest that avoided the flattening effects of glaciation during the ice age. Compared to the surrounding plains, the Driftless Area is home to steep forested, ridges and deeply carved river valleys. This more rugged landscape benefited small-scale family farms and was unsuitable for larger, row-crop agricultural operations. Counties in the Driftless Area supported Republican presidential candidates until the farm crisis of the 1980s.
(I did a deep dive into the farm crisis in yesterday’s post on Iowa, definitely give that a look for much more info on how this event shifted political attitudes among voters in this part of the Midwest.)
The farm crisis of the 1980s devastated family farmers in this region and voters blamed Republican agricultural policy for favoring corporate farms over smaller family farms. As a result, voters left the Republican party in droves and created a sizeable island of blue counties amidst a sea of red. This shift lasted through the Clinton and Bush administrations but hit a wall after helping Obama ascend to the presidency in 2008. While many heralded this region as a new Democratic stronghold, extolling its values of “morality, politeness and doing the right thing,” that all changed when Trump came to town in 2016.
Forecasting the Future: Trump effectively tapped into the populist frustrations of voters in the area, convincing many that he would be their voice in Washington. David Kaufman, a native Wisconsin journalist explains, “There’s a sense of frustration and profound hopelessness in a lot of rural Wisconsin that there’s little that can or will be done to help them.” This feeling of inadequate representation has been worsened by the nationalization of local political parties, as candidates eschew a focus on local issues in favor of broader, nationalized topics that often lead to a sharper partisan divide. Jeremy Gragert, a member of the Eau Claire City Council, explains how these changes shaped his most recent campaign:
Trump’s populist approach is further bolstered by recent changes in our media landscape: it’s much harder to highlight explicitly local issues when less resources are directed toward local journalism. “When local news fades, social media fills the hole,” explains Lewis Friedman, a professor at UW-Madison’s School of Journalism. Conspiracy theories regarding abortion, pedophilia and QAnon can travel much more easily over social media as posts can be micro-targeted to users with compatible ideologies who are less likely to verify the information they encounter. Even the talk radio landscape has shifted toward a focus on nationalized talking points:
While Democrats have held on in recent statewide races (Gov. Tony Evers recaptured a bit of the Driftless Area in his 2018 campaign) the winds of change are blowing against them. Republicans have successfully adapted their campaign tactics to our shifting media landscape which may give them an edge in upcoming elections. To make matters worse, these changes have greatly complicated pollsters’ ability to predict Republican support, as polls greatly underestimated Trump’s final vote margin in the state. Wisconsin is likely to remain in the spotlight as a swing state and we should expect continued surprises in upcoming elections.
Leftover Links
Democrats in Texas are making headlines for walking out of the legislature in protest of an election reform bill. Their moves are modeled after Wisconsin Democrats who did the same in 2011.