MADISON, Wis. — It’s an adage among Wisconsin Republicans: To paint the state red, one must be able to draw a line from southeast Wisconsin, around Milwaukee County, and straight up north through Brown and further without hitting a blue county.
The Democrat map on Tuesday uses a broader brush: maximize turnout in the stronghold counties of Dane and Milwaukee, build on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margins in battlegrounds Brown/Outagamie/Winnebago counties, and eat into the margins through swingy western Wisconsin and the deeply red 7th Congressional District.
Broad themes emerge in conversations with the chairmen for both state parties and other longtime partisan political strategists in the state. President Trump winning by less than a percent in 2016 running against an unpopular Democrat candidate means he now has to outperform his own winning margins nearly everywhere, and perhaps nowhere so much as the famously red Milwaukee suburbs, rural northern Wisconsin and the Green Bay media market.
Both parties point to Kenosha County as one they’re watching closely on election night. Not only is it part of that crucial “straight line” through the state for Republicans, but now some see it as a bellwether of how both candidates’ core messages on race and policing play among voters; widespread unrest erupted after the police shooting of Jacob Blake this summer, leaving him paralyzed.
Democrat strategist Joe Zepecki says he’s watching Dane County, or what he calls the “Big Blue Machine”–which the New York Times recently included on a list of counties to watch nationwide. Dane sent U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin about 228,000 votes in 2018–more than 10,000 votes above what Hillary Clinton netted two years previously, despite midterm elections traditionally producing lower turnout. (Overall statewide, the 2018 gubernatorial election netted about 2.6 million votes, contrasted with about 3.1 million in the 2016 presidential election.) Should turnout rise further in a county where it’s almost certain to benefit Biden, higher numbers of votes for Trump across areas like rural Wisconsin may not be able to propel him to a result in the same way they did four years ago.
That’s not the only lesson from the governor’s election, however. It’s fair to say the “BOW” counties–Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago–have both parties apprehensive heading into Tuesday. All three counties voted in the majority for both Sen. Baldwin and former Gov. Walker in 2018. They’ve voted for both liberal and conservative justices. And on Tuesday, Biden doesn’t even have to match Obama’s non-winning 48% vote share in 2012 to win the state: Democrat strategists say 45% (over Clinton’s 41%) could be enough to flip Wisconsin back to blue. If other regions perform well, that percentage could shrink even more and still help deliver Wisconsin to Biden.
“[45%] should be enough to land a solid win here,” Wisconsin Democrats chairman Ben Wikler said.
No conversation about a winning map in Wisconsin is complete without the core Republican base: Milwaukee’s suburbs.
“I think the big surprise would be if we really blow it out of the water in the WOW counties,” GOP chairman Andrew Hitt noted of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. Winning margins for Trump there that matched or exceeded 2016 would put him in a stronger position elsewhere in the state; Democrats, on the other hand, say Trump’s polling unpopularity among particularly suburban women means the GOP can’t count on those areas in the same way statewide Republican candidates have depended on them in the past.
“Higher turnout doesn’t necessarily mean good things for Republicans anymore,” Wikler said of WOW, noting their turnout for liberal-backed state Supreme Court justice Jill Karofsky in the spring of this year. “We think we’re going to be dramatically outperforming Hillary Clinton in terms of the vote share in the WOW counties.”
When multiple Republican strategists were asked what happens on Tuesday if those counties fail to perform for Pres. Trump, they say there’s few other places for Trump to get the votes he’d need. A win without 2016’s victory margins or better in the WOW counties would mean heightened pressure on a higher vote share in the Green Bay media market and, perhaps more importantly, sweeping up votes in higher quantities than 2016 in rural Wisconsin’s already-deeply red counties.
That’s where longtime Republican strategist Joe Handrick tells News 3 Now votes are likely almost capped out, leaving Trump’s only potential new voting pool in the WOW counties where he says about 50,000 Republican voters simply didn’t select a presidential candidate at all in 2016. Common sense, he believes, indicates that Biden’s popularity as a candidate when compared to Clinton will draw third-party voters to the Democrat base; in a race that broke nearly cleanly in half, Trump is the only candidate from 2016 that remains in this year’s race.
“Hillary is gone, but Trump is still here. This suggests that, if they return, they are easier for Biden to get,” he noted in a Twitter thread on Oct. 17.
Core population counties like Dane and Brown lost far higher numbers of votes to third parties than they had in the previous two elections; now, polls and strategists suggest those voters will largely swing toward Biden.
Republicans are hoping for a surprise elsewhere, however. Ramped up efforts to reach Black and Hispanic voters in the city of Milwaukee could mean moving the needle on the Republican vote in Wisconsin’s largest city, potentially increasing their share of votes in a city traditionally forming part of the core of the state’s Democrat base.
“I really think that the president is going to increase his margins in both communities, and I think that could be a little bit of a gamechanger in this election,” Hitt said.
Democrats push back on that idea, however. There’s no internal evidence that any shift is occurring, Zepecki said, and others like Wikler point to mixed messaging from the Trump campaign on issues important to those communities.
“I think they’ll see through that,” he noted.
More here on how Wisconsin’s regions will play their part on the state’s political map on Tuesday night.
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