As DNC gathers, Democrats grapple with its fall among Wisconsin's rural voters

Wisconsin has 72 counties. In the seven presidential elections from 1988 to 2012, Democrats carried an average of 42 of them.

Democrats not only won the statewide vote each time, but they were competitive far and wide in Wisconsin — east, west, north and south.

That is no longer true today.

In 2016, Democrats won only 12 counties.

And in 2020, they won just 14, despite winning the state as a whole.

The Democratic Party’s geographic foothold has shrunk in Wisconsin, amid a plunge in support among rural voters in the central, western and northern counties.

The new election map has a lot less “blue” than the old one.

That hasn’t stopped Democrats from winning big elections, which it has done with regularity in the Trump era.  Winning statewide races is not about winning the most counties or the greatest acreage, but the most votes.

Democrats have regularly done that by making big gains in a relatively small number of more populous places, especially the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison.

Tim Walz running mate selection underscores the importance of rural voters

But as Democrats wind up their national convention in Chicago, the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate has underscored the importance of the party’s performance with rural voters, particularly in the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Vice presidential candidates have little measurable impact on presidential campaigns, but the addition of Walz is widely seen as a balancing act, an effort to complement a presidential nominee from California’s Bay Area (Harris) with a Midwesterner who grew up in small-town Nebraska and represented a rural Minnesota district in Congress.

Wisconsin’s election history over the past two decades helps explain the political logic behind that.

This is a state where the party’s collapse in rural counties came later than in many parts of the country. And it’s a state where stemming that erosion is a big key to the party’s future success (the same kind of challenge Republicans face in stemming their suburban decline in Wisconsin).

Rural voters make up more than a third of the Wisconsin vote, but the exact share depends on how you define “rural,” a term with no single agreed-upon meaning.

And in polling by the Marquette Law School, rural voters still make up about 30% of self-identified Democrats in this state, though that number is down from 37% less than a decade ago.

Democrats have shown in recent years they can still win elections in Wisconsin while getting trounced in rural counties, with victories for president in 2020, for governor in 2018 and 2022, and U.S. Senate in 2018.

But their path to victory is different and arguably narrower now than it was before the rural realignment.

Thanks to the gains they have been making among suburban voters, reversing or even stopping their erosion in rural Wisconsin could give Democrats the upper hand in this state.

But if their share of the rural vote continues to decline, that would leave the party increasingly disadvantaged in congressional and legislative races, and on a knife’s edge in statewide elections.

Do Democrats, in fact, still have more ground to lose in rural Wisconsin?

To try to answer that question, let’s take a closer look at the scale and timing of the GOP’s rural surge.

The big rural swing against Democrats began in Wisconsin at the state level with the 2010 red wave that made Scott Walker governor.  The turning point at the presidential level was the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

There are several ways to illustrate those shifts, using different barometers of the rural vote.

First, let’s look at the “town vote.” Because Wisconsin is divided into more than 1,800 cities, towns and villages, combining the votes in Wisconsin’s more than 1,200 towns is a reasonable measure of the rural vote, since towns are where rural voters overwhelmingly live.

Bill Clinton was last Democrat to win the 'town' vote in Wisconsin

Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to win the “town vote” for president, which he did by 1 point in 1996.  Democrats lost the town vote by 12 to 14 points in 2000, 2004 and 2012. Then the bottom fell out in the two Trump elections of 2016 and 2020: Democrats lost the town vote by more than 25 points.

In elections for governor, the big shift occurred six years earlier. Democrats lost the town vote by 8 points in 2002 and less than 6 points in 2006 but that deficit ballooned to 23 points in 2010, 25 in 2014, 23 in 2018 and 24 in 2022.

Another indicator is the shrinking number of counties and municipalities that are voting Democratic, since the majority of state’s 72 counties and roughly 1,850 municipalities are lightly populated.

Democrats won an average of 55 counties in the two presidential elections won by Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996), an average of 26 counties in the two George W. Bush elections (2000 and 2004) and an average of 46 counties in the two elections that Barack Obama won handily in 2008 and 2012.

But the roster of blue counties shrank dramatically in the two Trump elections, as noted above, with large swaths of central, western and northern Wisconsin turning solid red.

The 14 counties carried by Biden in 2020 were: Milwaukee, the state’s biggest; Dane County and neighboring Sauk, Iowa and Green;  the small and historically blue northwestern counties of Douglas, Ashland and Bayfield; the most populous counties in western Wisconsin, La Crosse and Eau Claire; the southern Wisconsin county of Rock (which includes Janesville and Beloit); the central Wisconsin county of Portage (Stevens Point); the resort county of Door; and the tribal reservation county of Menominee.

The list of blue communities has also shrunk.  Democrats won more than 600 Wisconsin municipalities for president in 2000 and 2004, 1,200 in 2008, 800 in 2012. But only 250 voted Democratic for president in 2016 and only 242 did in 2020.  That’s about one-eighth of the state’s municipalities.

In 2016, 536 communities in Wisconsin switched from Obama to Trump, and 509 of them voted for Trump again in 2020. These communities are overwhelmingly small and concentrated in the state’s less populous western half.

Twenty-three counties switched from Obama to Trump in 2016, most of them small counties in the west or north, and all but two voted for Trump again in 2020.

You can measure this trend at the regional level as well. Democrats won the small Wausau media market in north central Wisconsin in the presidential contests of 1988, 1992, and 1996, then lost it by less than 5 points in 2000, 2004 and 2012.  The bottom fell out in 2016 and 2020, when Democrats lost the Wausau market by almost 18 points.

In western Wisconsin’s La Crosse market, Democrats have gone from winning by almost 10 points in 2012 to losing by more than 5 in 2016 and 2020.

And finally, these shifts are reflected in the polling, too. In 2015-16, Republicans had an eight-point advantage in party identification among rural voters in Wisconsin, according to Marquette’s polling.

In 2023-24, that grew to a 22-point advantage.

In short, the rural realignment occurred from 2010 to 2016.  That’s when the state’s election math changed, and that’s when the map shrunk for Democrats.

Since then, the Democratic share of the rural vote has continued to decline a little, but these shifts have been more on the margins.  The trend lines have flattened.

Joe Biden lost the “town vote” by 25.3 points in 2020, a tiny bit worse than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost it by 25.2 points. Democrat Tony Evers lost the town vote for governor by 23.8 points in 2022, slightly worse than his 23-point defect in 2018.

The one major Democrat over the past decade who has been reasonably competitive in rural Wisconsin was Sen. Tammy Baldwin in her one-sided 2018 re-election victory, when she lost the town vote by roughly 15 points.

But in other big partisan races, Democrats now routinely lose rural voters by 24 or 25 points, using this measure.  There is no sign in recent years of a rural recovery for the party. Instead, the question is whether the party can limit its losses.

It’s worth pointing out here that despite these trends, Democrats are still more competitive with rural voters in Wisconsin than they are in most other states between the coasts. That is especially true in southwestern Wisconsin.

This could be a hopeful sign for the party’s ability to stabilize its vote in rural Wisconsin.

But it also could mean Democrats have still more ground to lose.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How much further can Democrats fall with Wisconsin's rural voters?