Changes Since 1992: Wisconsin

Previously, I wrote about two states separated by hundreds of miles, Arkansas and West Virginia, which due to similar circumstances have experienced a dramatic shift from Democratic to Republican control over the past two decades. The voters at the heart of that shift are working-class whites, moderate Democratic-leaning voters for decades who feel marginalized by an increasingly urban, liberal national party.

But while those two states are perhaps most emblematic of the dramatic shift, the revenge of the working class can be felt in more subtle ways in other areas across the country—most notably Wisconsin, the state that before 2016 had last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984.

Unlike West Virginia or Arkansas, where the shift was rapid and didn’t allow for much time as true battleground states, Wisconsin has generally been considered a presidential swing state for years, even though it ultimately would support the Democrat in the end. Here are the winning presidential margins of victory from 1992 on:

1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012	2016
Clinton +4.3	Clinton +10.3	Gore +0.2	Kerry +0.4	Obama +13.9	Obama +6.7	Trump +1.0

Over the past seven elections, the state has been decided by one percentage point or less four separate times. And in most, the winner’s margin of victory has been under ten points: Only Clinton in 1996 and Obama in 2008 managed to win a truly decisive victory, on their way to equally solid wins nationally. But in the end, Democrats always came through, in the state that birthed such progressive icons as Robert La Follette and Russ Feingold. Conventional wisdom held that the polls might be close, that the final result might be a nailbiter, but Wisconsin would always ultimately serve its role as the cornerstone of the electoral blue wall.

Clinton was so convinced that history would hold that she famously never visited the state during the general election. And, judging only by the public polls, her campaign had a point—the final RealClearPolitics average had her ahead by six and a half points. The argument that the polls were all wrong isn’t exactly true—in the end, they predicted a narrow Clinton victory, and what we got was a narrow Trump victory (with Clinton winning the national popular vote)—but one place they were clearly wrong was Wisconsin.

Maybe they should have paid more attention to state politics. In 1992, the state House of Representatives had a narrow 51-47 Democratic majority; today, Republicans hold a commanding 64-35 majority. Republicans had a 17-16 majority in the state Senate in 1992; today that majority is a more robust 20-12. And, in 1992, the two U.S. Senate seats were both held by Democrats, with Russ Feingold defeating incumbent Republican Bob Kasten by more than six points; in 2010, Feingold lost reelection by five points to Ron Johnson, and lost a rematch to Johnson this year by a little over three points.

These numbers might seem unremarkable after looking at the sudden shifts experienced in Arkansas and West Virginia over the same period. But unlike those states, whose residents tend to share many attitudes about a variety of cultural and economic issues, Wisconsin has always been a state deeply divided between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, and even a small change in the balance of power can have deep and lasting consequences.

After the election, Jim Geraghty at National Review posed an interesting rhetorical question, summing up the past six years of Wisconsin politics:

“…after a victory by Trump, two victories by Ron Johnson, three victories by Scott Walker, a persistent 5-3 split in favor of the GOP in the state’s Congressional delegation, and consistent GOP majorities in the state House and Senate since 2010, it seems fair to ask: Is Wisconsin now a red state?”

There was speculation, which turned into conventional wisdom, following the GOP’s 2010 successes in the state, that it was merely an outgrowth of momentary Tea Party anger, which would eventually fade away. Following Scott Walker’s victories in 2012 and 2014, this became a belief that only certain types of Republicans, like Walker himself, could win major statewide offices consistently. Now, following wins by Walker, Johnson, and Trump, all very different types of people, all within two years of each other, it is apparent that the conventional wisdom will have to change once more.

Unlike West Virginia and Arkansas, Wisconsin is not yet a state that has shifted convincingly from one party to another. I think it would be a mistake to consider it as anything other than a battleground at all levels, from presidential elections on down, at least for now. But at the very least, the days of Wisconsin being classified as a “blue-leaning swing state” are over, or should be. Wisconsinites have now shown a willingness to vote for Republicans of all different types, at every level. It is time for Democrats to accept the fact that Wisconsin is a true purple state, no different from Florida or Virginia—and they ignore working-class white voters at their peril, lest the Badger State become the Arkansas of the Midwest.