Gilbert: For Donald Trump, Wisconsin in 2024 looks a lot like Wisconsin in 2016

Eight years ago in Wisconsin’s GOP primary, Donald Trump suffered his last big defeat on his way to the nomination, undone by a huge geographic divide over his candidacy.

Trump won the Republican vote in the rural north and west but was thrashed in metropolitan Milwaukee and Madison.

This year, Trump wrapped up his party’s nomination long before Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary (and will campaign today in Green Bay).

But the regional schisms in the GOP over the former president have re-emerged, a polling analysis shows.

Trump is much more popular among Republican voters in the small towns and rural counties of northern and western Wisconsin than he is among Republican voters in the cities and suburbs of metro Milwaukee and Madison, according to multiple surveys conducted by the Marquette Law School.

These regional divisions were a hallmark of Trump’s defeat in the Wisconsin primary eight years ago, when he lost by 13 points to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Then they faded after the 2016 election, as GOP voters across the state largely united around his presidency.

But since Trump left the White House the old fault lines have re-appeared and grown much wider over the past year, the Marquette polling shows.

Republicans in the north and west of the state are overwhelmingly positive in their views of Trump. These are voters who live outside the major media markets of Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.

Combining three Marquette polls over the past nine months, Trump has a “net favorability” rating of plus 71 among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in these northern and western counties. That net rating is the difference between the share of GOP voters in these counties who view him favorably (84.3%) and the share who view him unfavorably (13.6%).

But his numbers aren’t nearly as good in more populated regions of the state. Trump’s rating among Republicans in the suburban “WOW counties” outside Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) is plus 42: 69% favorable, 27% unfavorable.

In the Madison media market, it’s lower still at plus 24 (62% favorable, 38% unfavorable).

And it’s plus 11 among GOP voters in Wisconsin’s biggest county, Milwaukee (55% favorable, 44% unfavorable).

In other words, across metropolitan Milwaukee and Madison, a large minority in his party (anywhere from 27% to 44%) views Trump negatively.  These areas are home to around 40% of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in the state. And they are the regions where the party has seen its biggest decline in the Trump era.

There is no real parallel to these geographic divides on the Democratic side. There are Democratic voters in Wisconsin who don’t like President Joe Biden, just as there are Republican voters who don’t like Trump.  The same kinds of regional differences don’t exist among Democrats over Biden, however.

Yet they’ve become very familiar Republican fault lines, reflecting regional differences in education, economics, culture, religiosity, age and diversity.

One result has been a recurring pattern in statewide Republican primaries dating back to the 2000s here: the more “populist” candidates win rural and northern Wisconsin; the more “traditional” Republicans carry the populous suburbs of southeastern Wisconsin, and the geographic divide is consistent and stark.

The 2016 Wisconsin primary was a vivid example.

Trump came here as a very polarizing Republican frontrunner. After driving GOP Gov. Scott Walker out of the presidential race, he had virtually no support from Republican activists and officials in the state and faced intense skepticism and hostility on conservative talk radio.

Marquette’s polling ahead of the April primary found an unmistakable pattern to Trump’s standing in Wisconsin.  He was most unpopular with Republican voters in the state’s most important Republican stronghold: the suburban WOW counties. Trump was overwhelmingly disliked there. Voters either recoiled from his rhetoric and style or mistrusted his politics. In these three counties, 25% of Republicans viewed Trump favorably and 63% viewed him unfavorably.  (These findings are based on six Marquette surveys taken from August of 2015 to March of 2016).

The polling also showed that Trump’s numbers were better the farther Republican voters lived from Milwaukee. In the state’s northern and western counties (more than half the geographic area of Wisconsin), Trump had a positive rating: 51% of GOP voters liked him and 34% disliked him. The regional variation within the party was extreme: Trump’s net favorability ranged from minus 38 in one part of the state to plus 17 in another.

And that’s exactly how Trump’s double-digit defeat unfolded. He lost to Cruz by almost 40 points in the WOW counties and by almost 30 in Milwaukee County, while carrying dozens of small counties across northern, central and western Wisconsin.

What happened to these huge regional divisions after the 2016 Wisconsin primary, as Trump became the Republican nominee and then president?

With the help of Marquette pollster Charles Franklin, I went back into the polling to answer that question.

Marquette has conducted 43 Wisconsin polls since the April 2016 primary. We grouped those surveys into several time periods: the summer and fall of 2016, when Trump was the party nominee; the Trump presidency (2017 to 2020); the first two years after Trump was president (2021-22); and the three most recent polls taken over the past nine months.

What the polling shows is that these geographic differences within the party began to narrow after Trump became the nominee in 2016 and gained popularity with GOP voters.

And they all but disappeared when Trump became president and his popularity peaked among Republican voters.

For example, Trump’s net favorability among suburban Republicans in the WOW counties went from minus 38 before the 2016 primary, to plus 20 after he wrapped up the nomination, to plus 73 during his four years in the White House.  At that point, Trump was just as popular with Republicans in these suburban counties outside Milwaukee as he was with Republicans across northern Wisconsin — a sea change from 2016.

And he was almost as popular with GOP voters in Milwaukee County and the Madison media market, two places where he was broadly disliked by Republican voters during the nominating fight.

Trump's suburban-rural gap disappeared then re-emerged

In effect, the Republicans’ suburban-rural gap over Trump had mostly disappeared.

But that pattern didn’t last, either.

In the aftermath of Trump’s defeat, his effort to overturn the election and his departure from the White House, the regional fault lines got a little bigger again, as Trump’s negatives rose among Republican voters in the state’s three biggest media markets: Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.

And those fault lines have dramatically widened in the three surveys Marquette conducted over the past year (one in the summer of 2023, one in the fall of 2023, and one in late January of this year).

While Trump’s popularity remains high with Republicans in northern and western Wisconsin, it has declined significantly in the WOW counties, the Madison region, Milwaukee County, and even the Green Bay media market.

And over the past nine months, the geographic differences over Trump among Republican voters are as large as they were eight years ago.

What does this mean for the 2024 election?

Biden has problems in his own party, of course.  In Marquette’s last Wisconsin poll, one in five Democrats said they had an unfavorable view of the president, similar to the share of Republicans who view Trump negatively.  Both men are saddled with high negatives in the electorate as a whole.

The good news for Trump is that he won Wisconsin eight years ago despite big regional fault lines within his party.

And his overall popularity with GOP voters is a little higher now than it was when he won the 2016 election.

At the same time, it is lower than it was when he lost the 2020 election.

The re-emergence of the GOP’s rural-suburban split over Trump is a sign of how enduring the political differences are between these two branches of the Republican coalition.

And it’s a sign that so far, former president Trump isn’t unifying his party’s voters the way that President Trump did.

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: Wisconsin Republicans revert to 2016 regional splits on Donald Trump