In 2016, historically liberal, progressive Wisconsin voted for Trump, not by much but enough for Trump to take Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes. Wisconsin may have been one of the biggest shocks of election night. Of course for most people it was still a distant second to President Trump winning.
Wisconsin’s liberal bent came honestly. German immigrants, including Bohemians and Czechs and Slovenians, were often ideological refugees. Norwegian culture, the other large source of non-Yankee immigration, was more communal than the nation as a whole, the sort of culture that would embrace sitting around together naked in saunas. The Republican Party was born in Wisconsin, but it was the radical anti-slavery party, not the party of Karl Rove. Urban industrial Wisconsin developed on skilled labor, and there is a strong union tradition. Wisconsin enacted the first progressive income tax, the social insurance legislation that was the model for the New Deal, and collective bargaining for public employees.
That collective bargaining business didn’t last long.
Things have changed, sort of. Scott Walker and Paul Ryan are obvious, and both the state senate and assembly are majority Republican. U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin is one bright spot for the Democrats, but for the 2018 election Senator Baldwin is the primary target of the Republican Party. Republicans are spending more money on the Baldwin race than all other Senate races combined. Wisconsin is the laboratory for modern Republican political infrastructure, but Baldwin is leading in the polls, and in the polling for the Governor’s race Scott Walker is trailing.
I don’t know Ms. Baldwin, but friends tell me she is a lovely woman. We don’t really have a lot of lovely U.S. Senators.
The striking thing about the 2016 presidential vote in Wisconsin is the striking thing in Oregon, in Louisiana, even in Texas. Urban areas, Madison and Milwaukee in Wisconsin, Portland and Eugene in Oregon, vote blue. Rural areas and small towns mostly vote red.
It doesn’t surprise me. Rural and small town residents face personal economic pressures and limits that urban residents don’t face and don’t understand. Local business ownership is dead. Agriculture is mechanized and ownership is centralized. Locals’ interactions with state and federal government are as often as not burdensome–taxes and regulatory restrictions–and the benefits received are often not obvious. The average resident may receive indirect benefits from crop subsidies, for instance, but that’s not obvious to the small town parts manager at a struggling car dealership. Even in areas where a thriving local economy is driven by recreation and tourism, land costs price locals out of the market.
Rural residents could potentially benefit from increased government services, universal health care for instance, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t rational reasons for rural residents to deeply distrust government, and to have preferred Trump to Hillary. Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin during the 2016 campaign, so why would a rural Wisconsin resident think the Democrats shared their concerns? Nobody likes to be taken for granted. Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t other irrational reasons for rural Republican votes, race or homophobia or religion or whatever, but those reasons aren’t peculiarly rural, and drive urban votes as well. It’ll be interesting to watch how rural Wisconsin votes in November.
