Donald Trump took Wisconsin in 2024 presidential election by scoring broad gains, and by stemming Republican bleeding in suburbs

In one key respect, the 2024 presidential election in Wisconsin was like most presidential elections in Wisconsin.

The state’s 72 counties overwhelmingly shifted in the same partisan direction – in this case, toward the Republicans.

Donald Trump’s second victory in Wisconsin in three tries was fueled by gains across most of the state. These gains were not huge — nothing like the massive rural vote shifts that carried Republicans to victory in 2016.But they were geographically broad-based. Trump did worse than he did four years ago in just a handful of counties.

And unlike 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden, this time there was virtually nowhere in Wisconsin where Democrats made matching inroads of their own. In that 2020 race, big shifts toward Democrats in the Madison and Milwaukee suburbs more than offset Trump’s rural gains.

By contrast, this time Trump mostly stopped his party's bleeding in the suburbs.

For example, he won Republican Waukesha County over Vice President Kamala Harris by 20 points, just slightly down from his 21-point margin in 2020.

Trump won neighboring Ozaukee County by roughly 11 points, just one point off his 2020 margin.

And while the former president lost Dane County – Madison and its suburbs – by 188,000 votes, that wasn’t a whole lot worse than his 2020 deficit of 181,000 votes.

These were all places where Republicans have been methodically losing ground in recent election cycles, costing them the 2018 race for governor and the 2020 presidential contest. In effect, the GOP’s decline in big counties had been overwhelming its gains in lots of small counties.

But this time, the dynamic shifted. Trump widened his edge in small counties while mostly “holding serve” in the big counties, largely replicating his 2020 performance not just in metro Milwaukee but also in the Fox Valley, where Brown and Outagamie counties voted for Trump by the same modest margins they did four years ago.  

The result was a dramatic comeback Trump victory in Wisconsin, but still one very much in keeping with the state’s penchant for close calls. Trump’s narrow win was not robust enough to carry his party to victory in an extremely close U.S. Senate race in which Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin held off GOP challenger Eric Hovde.

While there are still some votes to be counted, this may end up being the fifth time in the past seven presidential elections that Wisconsin was decided by less than a percentage point, and the seventh time in the past nine elections that the winning candidate for president got less than 50% of the vote here.

Trump’s gains over 2020 were actually narrower in Wisconsin than they were in most other states, where he improved across many different segments of the electorate. In fact, Wisconsin may end up being the closest of the battleground states, all of which Trump carried. The difference for Trump between losing this state in 2020 and winning it in 2024 was a net shift of about 50,000 votes.

In western Wisconsin, a transformative shift toward Trump

One thing Trump’s victory signified in Wisconsin is that the state’s rural realignment is ongoing. Even after all the ground Trump gained in 2016, he has added to his margins in both 2020 and 2024, showing he still had more room to grow his small-town vote.

In some places, his performance was only a point or two better than it was four years ago. But in others, his gains were bigger than that. Trump’s performance in western Wisconsin, which had a history of voting Democratic for president before 2016, has been transformative.

Along the upper Mississippi River, Crawford County voted for Democrat Obama for president by 20 points in 2012, then voted for Trump by 5 points in 2016, 8 points in 2020 and 13 points in 2024. Nearby Grant County voted for Obama by 14, then for Trump by 9 in 2016, 12 in 2020 and 18 in 2024. Farther north in Trempealeau County, Republicans went from losing by 14 points in 2012 to winning by 13 in 2016, 17 in 2020, and 21 this time.

Trump made gains in small counties in other regions of the state, as well.  Ashland, a traditionally blue county on Lake Superior, voted Democratic by 31 points in 2012, and by roughly 11 in 2016 and 2020. This time, it voted Democratic by just 5 points.

Trump’s biggest gain in a larger county came in Kenosha, which he won by 0.3 points in 2016 and by 3 points in 2020. This year, he won it by 6 points.

Statewide, Trump ran more than 50,000 votes ahead of the GOP’s Senate candidate, Hovde.  Hovde did slightly better than Trump in suburban Waukesha and Ozaukee counties but could not match Trump’s performance in other places. Viewed another way, Baldwin marginally outperformed her party’s standard bearer, Harris, and that was especially apparent in smaller counties in the north, center and west of the state.

In the end, it appears that Trump and Baldwin will win their respective races by very similar margins, in both cases a shade under one percentage point. In polarized Wisconsin, where ticket-splitting has declined over the decades, it sometimes takes two very close races to produce a split partisan outcome.

In fact, the last two Senate races in Wisconsin – 2022 and 2024 – have that in common. Both were won by incumbent two-term senators who eked out victories even as their party was losing the other marquee contest on the ballot. Two years ago, it happened when Republican Sen. Ron Johnson won re-election by roughly a point and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won re-election by 3 points.

Thanks to their narrow victories over the past two years, Johnson and Baldwin will continue to form an unlikely political odd couple. Wisconsin has now had U.S. senators from opposing parties for 14 years running, the longest streak in the state’s history, and one that should continue until at least 2028, when Johnson’s seat comes up again.

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 Trump won Wisconsin vs Kamala Harris in 2024 presidential election