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Trump’s Victory in Wisconsin: An Analysis
By Ali Zifan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
At first glance, it appears that Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin due to Democrats staying home. The numbers I’m looking at (link to politico) show Trump with essentially identical vote totals to Romney in 2012. By contrast, Obama received about 230,000 more votes in 2012 than Clinton did last week.
However, breaking down the margins by “region” is more revealing. I use scare quotes because this is only a very rough, very high level break out. If I have time, I’ll do a deeper, more thorough break out of regions, but for now I think this is worthwhile.
Conservative Region
This region includes three suburban counties surrounding Milwaukee (Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee). This is where Republicans run up the score in off-year elections, is the region that gave Senator Ted Cruz a victory in the primary. This is also where you’re most likely to find pockets of NeverTrump resistance on the Right.
Total Votes Cast (includes both Democrat and Republican totals):
2012: 375,207
2016: 365,883 (-2.5%)
Republican Margin:
Romney 2012: +132,439
Trump 2016: +107,486
Marxist Region
Dane County is where Madison is located. Its residents are state government employees, millennial university students, and 60’s burnouts who never stopped protesting.
Total Votes Cast:
2012: 302,854
2016: 304,729 (+0.6%)
Republican Margin
Romney 2012: -131,930
Trump 2016: -146,236
Milwaukee Region
Milwaukee County is separate from the Marxist Region, because the dynamics of a massive black voter base are different from the lily-white Dane County electorate. Obviously, it would be expected for margins to fall off here with no black candidate on the ballot.
Total Votes Cast:
2012: 490,944
2016: 434,970 (-11.4%)
Republican Margin
Romney 2012: -169,660
Trump 2016: -162,895
Rural Region
This is every other county in the state. Obviously, there are cities included in here, but none of them are as predictable and reliable in their vote margins as the previous three regions. Only one (Green Bay, population 105,000) has a population over one hundred thousand. Some pockets lean Democrat, some lean Republican and the region often swings back and forth.
Total Votes Cast:
2012: 1,887,617
2016: 1,839,038 (-2.6%)
Republican Margin
Romney 2012: -36,053
Trump 2016: +228,902
Conclusion
In comparison to 2012, Trump did worse with the conservative base, while Clinton improved with the Marxist base, but lost some votes in Milwaukee (while holding her margin there). Trump cleaned house in the non-ideological, small-city/rural swing portions of the state, though this was despite slightly reduced turn-out in those regions. I do not believe that Ted Cruz could have won Wisconsin, and if he had been the nominee I do not believe that Ron Johnson would have won reelection to the Senate. For the record, I voted for Cruz in the primary.
Bonus Region
Just for fun, I offer up Menominee County, an Indian Reservation. They tend to vote for Democrats in similar proportions to blacks. In 2012, Romney received 13% of the vote (179 total votes). In 2016, Trump received 21% of the vote (269 total votes). So it wasn’t entirely a “whitelash.”
Published in General
What was the margin in Rhinelander?
I don’t think this conclusion follows from the data.
Romney was not very conservative, and he was a Bush acolyte. Cruz is far more like Reagan, except for his foolish insistence on dragging religion into politics to an uncomfortable degree, and he is not mormon, which made many christians uncomfortable with Romney.
My quick calculation is that Trump got about 108,000 more votes than Romney* in the rural region while Clinton got about 156,000 fewer votes there than Obama**.
* [(1,839,000/2) + (228,000/2)] – [(1,887,600/2) – (36,000/2)]
(Trump’s Vote Total – Romney’s Vote Total)
** [(1,887,600/2) + (36,000/2)] – [(1,839,000/2) – (228,000/2)]
(Obama’s Vote Total – Clinton’s Vote Total)
When does the state release the % of registered voters by the various demographics that turned in a ballot?
Sweet analysis. I think you summed it up well. In WI and much of the upper Midwest…..Trump was able to turn many more rural Democrats to him, than Hillary was able to turn conservative suburbanites to her. Now in states like Arizona and Texas…..the opposite happened. Not sure why the difference.
I’m not so sure. Many people I heard who were supportive of Trump I wouldn’t have expected to be so. I’m also not certain that someone who was very conservative would have been able to win them over.
I just read on NRO that 14% of the WI electorate decided late, and broke 2:1 for Trump. Given the margin of victory (or loss) that explains a bit. Trump laid low the last two weeks, and had improved his message to conservatives, while Hillary was beset by the two headed dragon of WikiLeaks and the FBI.
My sense is that Hillary Clinton’s name is poison in Wisconsin.
That’s based on anecdote and instinct, not raw data. Polls show Trump’s more unpopular. But he won all the voters who dislike them both.
To give the exact numbers:
Romney 2012: 1,408,746
Trump 2016: 1,409,467
For every Romney vote Trump lost, he picked up a new one (plus 800 or so) — or you could say that for every new vote Trump gained, he lost a Romney vote. Obama 2012 defeats Trump 2016; Romney 2012 defeats Clinton 2016. That’s why I’m extremely reluctant to say any other Republican could or could not have won. Between those two vote counts there are multiple ways to get past Clinton’s 1,382,000, and potentially a way to put together a much more decisive coalition.
Incidentally, Trump beat Clinton by 27,257 votes (give or take a few as they finalize the count). The Green party candidate got 30,980. For what it’s worth.
For long-term consequences for the state’s politics, I do think the amount by which Johnson and other Republicans outperformed Trump is significant. Feingold got about 1700 fewer votes than Clinton. Johnson got almost 70,000 more than Trump. Democrats didn’t turn out for Clinton, and they didn’t bother for Feingold et al either. Whereas even Republicans who couldn’t stand Trump turned out for the downballot. Voter motivation looks like a huge disadvantage for the Democrats going into 2018.
A good and interesting start, but I think you probably have to segment this more finely. I live in a fairly conservative part of a Republican county that Obama won and saw a considerable number of Gary Johnson yard signs sat alongside Ron Johnson and GOP Congressman signs. Given that R. Johnson got something like 70,000 more votes in the state than Trump last I saw, I think there is evidence of considerable dissatisfaction with Trump among conservative Wisconsinites—which shouldn’t surprise given that the state rallied to Cruz (not a natural fit for Wisconsin at all!) in a last-ditch attempt to deny Trump the nomination in the late-season primary.
Also, saying “rural” may oversimplify or even confuse the demographic question. E.g., the flip of the traditionally union/D counties down in the Driftless Area (the SW along the Mississippi River) is remarkable and worth investigating. But that’s mining country, not dairy land. (And seems to have flipped in all four states in the area: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, & Illinois.) So “blue-collar whites,” may be salient where “rural” isn’t. Wisconsin farmers tend to be pretty Republican as a group, last I looked. In the southwest, I’d try to look at it a bit like West Virginia (though obviously the coal industry and Scots-Irish culture are significantly different there).
The eastern part of the state, Milwaukee and suburbs excepted, from roughly the Illinois border to Green Bay (the city, at the base of Green Bay, the bay, visible at upper right, to the left of the long, skinny Door Peninsula) has a decent amount of genuinely rural countryside, but economically, it’s a manufacturing stronghold, making everything from Case tractors, Johnson floor wax, Harley-Davidsons, John Deere utility vehicles, Mercury boat motors, Pierce fire trucks, Oshkosh military vehicles, kit aircraft, Kleenex and Huggies, Kohler fixtures, Bemis toilet seats, Ariens snow blowers, Manitowoc cranes, and Neenah Foundry manhole covers, to a ton of things down the value-added chain, not mention prepared foods and the like. So factory employment is a big, big, big deal there. And Ron Johnson, a manufacturing CEO, may (or may not?) have been able to speak to these folks in a way that Russ Feingold, a career pol whose positions mostly fit the Madison demographic, could not. Moreover, they might have trusted Trump as “a businessman” over Clinton as a politician for similar reasons.
Anyway, I think your analysis is a good first stab at it, but I suspect the real story, if anyone can turn it up, will have a lot to do with regional and local economies rather than the sort of broader urban-suburban-rural-crazy segmentation here, valuable though it is, particularly in indentifying higher-order cultural affiliations and identifications (which, like religiosity, may have a lot to do with the general anti-“p.c.,” i.e., cultural leftism, trend that people seem to have identified).
Well said.
From another angle there’s also Mike Gallagher, with a very different background, who outdid both Trump and Johnson and seems to have won a noticeable crossover vote.
I’m more comfortable with “blue-collar” as a descriptor of Brown County/Green Bay than “rural,” too.
It’s fair to note that, just as Trump may have won some votes not available to any other Republican, Romney may have won some voters in the Southeast due to Ryan’s presence on the ticket who no Republican running this year would have won. I don’t think it was a significant factor, but I may underestimate that effect. 2012 was closer than 2008.
Also, Bush was only about a percentage point off in 2004, as I recall. That would be the most recent election before the Obama effect, and it would be interesting to compare. To what extent is Trump’s rural result the aberration, or to what extent is it correcting back to the mean after Obama? I’ve never looked at the 2004 data. But the extent to which Trump’s county wins parallels Walker’s is interesting.
Thanks for all the responses. Just wanted to reiterate that this was put together with limited time, so certainly the “Rural” region is the weak point. It covers everything from the city limits of Green Bay to the smallest unincorporated farm town.
Without regards to the conclusion about what type of candidate could and could not win the state, I just wanted to make clear that there is a real significant difference between the type of Republican voter that resides in the Milwaukee suburbs compared to the rest of the state.
I took a brief look at the primary results, to see how that fit with the general results, but the Kasich effect makes the story murky.
Looking forward, Wisconsin has an incredibly weak Senator up for reelection in 2018. Tammy Baldwin has virtually no appeal in the vast “Rural” region. I can think of a number of potential GOP candidates that could take her out.
Who are some of the Republicans being talked about to run against Baldwin.
Sean Duffy, congressman from the 7th district in northern Wisconsin, is probably the most speculated name at this point. He’s a very strong retail politician with substance to back it up. Given the district he represents, he obviously knows how to connect with the “Rural” region, but he’s also well regarded by conservatives in Milwaukee and regularly appears on local talk radio down here. If you’re a certain age you might also remember him as a cast member from “Real World” and “Road Rules” back in the 90’s.
There are also the well known names like Walker, Ryan, or David Clarke that could make formidable candidates, although at this point I see no rumblings of any of them considering a run.
Agreed.
I do think it’s interesting to note that Trump didn’t win the Green Bay area either — that’s one twist to it. And Republicans cleaned up.
I’m hoping that’s true.