REDDER AND BLUER — It’s easy to overlook how close Wisconsin has been, and for how long. Beginning with Al Gore’s 5,700-vote win in 2000, four of the state’s last six presidential contests were decided by less than 25,000 votes. Yet this key battleground state has received fewer visits from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump since July than the other two bricks in the so-called Blue Wall, Michigan and Pennsylvania. One reason: Of the trio, Wisconsin offers the smallest electoral vote payoff — just 10, compared to 15 from Michigan and 19 from Pennsylvania. Still, the state remains essential to Democratic chances if Harris cannot replicate Joe Biden’s Sun Belt victories in 2020. At the moment, she leads Wisconsin by a single percentage point, according to polling averages. As part of Nightly’s efforts to illuminate the battleground states that will decide the presidency, tonight we’ll hear from arguably the single best chronicler of the Wisconsin political map, Craig Gilbert. A former Washington bureau chief and national political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he has covered every presidential campaign since 1988. Gilbert is currently a Lubar Center Fellow at Marquette Law School, home to the highly respected Marquette Law School poll. What issues are dominating the political debate in Wisconsin this year? Are they different than in any of the other battleground states or about the same? I think they are very similar: the economy, then abortion and immigration, then a longer list below that. The advertising doesn’t always reflect that, as we’ve seen with all the transgender ads. The question on both abortion, which advantages Democrats, and the border, which advantages Republicans, is how many voters outside of each party’s base are voting on those issues. In the polling here, Trump is certainly advantaged on the economy, but scores worse than Harris on character and personal traits, which is a different kind of issue. The state’s political dynamics appear to have shifted quite a bit over the past decade or so. As you wrote recently, some parts of Wisconsin are getting redder and others are getting bluer. How might that shape the outcome on Election Day? Basically, the big gains for Democrats have come from big and growing Dane County (especially the Madison suburbs) and the Milwaukee suburbs, which run the political spectrum from very blue to very red. The big gains for Republicans have come mostly from small towns and rural counties, and from outside metro Madison and Milwaukee. The rural shift was behind Trump’s win here in 2016 and the suburban shift was behind Biden’s win here in 2020. I expect both trends to continue. But we don’t know which one will be more powerful this time, or whether we will see some new wrinkles in the map. In the 2022 midterms, those aged 18-24 in Wisconsin voted at a rate that was double the national average. In the nationally watched 2023 state Supreme Court election, college students again played a key role. How much will the youth or college vote matter? There are more than 300,000 college students in Wisconsin, and election day registration can make them easier to mobilize. So, they are definitely part of the equation and have a history of voting in strong numbers. Also worth noting: we are seeing a big gender gap in the polling here this fall among voters under 30, with young men split down the middle and young women overwhelmingly backing Harris. Western Wisconsin, which isn’t the most populous part of the state, appears to be getting an inordinate amount of attention from the two campaigns this year, both in terms of visits and ad spending. What makes it so important? It’s interesting for lots of reasons. Democrats have been unusually competitive with rural voters there, dating back decades. It has a history of swings and split-ticket voting. It is home to the only U.S. House district in the state that voted Democratic for Congress in 2020 and Republican for president. It has the most competitive House race in the state this year [in Wisconsin’s 3rd District]. There are tons of “Obama-Trump” communities there, places that voted for Obama twice and then swung to Trump in 2016 and 2020, though some of these same communities have voted Democratic for governor or Senate at least once since 2016. And parts of western Wisconsin are in Minnesota TV markets, meaning they have had more exposure to Tim Walz. It probably won’t look dramatically different than it did in 2020, but this is one of the places where campaigns sense there are more persuadable voters. What does Donald Trump’s path to victory look like in Wisconsin? What about Kamala Harris? One big question is whether Trump is close to “maxing out” with rural voters, given how big his gains were in 2016, and how flat the population growth is in many places. If so, it probably means he needs to make inroads elsewhere, perhaps among voters of color and working-class whites in Milwaukee and in smaller blue-collar cities like Green Bay, Racine, Janesville. And it is very important for him to at least slow down the erosion in the Milwaukee suburbs. For Harris, she can probably count on an even bigger vote margin in Dane County, since that is a pretty relentless 40-year trend, and on more suburban gains in Milwaukee, since that has been a consistent trend across all kinds of races beginning in 2016. Democrats would of course like to stop the bleeding with rural voters. One important battleground for both sides is the Fox Valley region around Green Bay and Appleton. It leans a little Republican but is the most purple population center in Wisconsin and does zig and zag a little. If you had to pick the winner of Wisconsin and you could know the results or turnout from just one region, county or city in the state, what would it be and why? It has gotten harder than ever to pick a single barometer or bellwether region or place precisely because different parts of the state are moving in opposite directions, which means whoever wins, that party will be simultaneously losing ground in some places and gaining it in others. The easiest answer is the big counties, Milwaukee, Dane and Waukesha, because the vote shifts there in a Democratic direction were the story in 2020. If I had to pick just one, it’s a total cliché, I can’t believe I am saying this, but if red, suburban Waukesha continues to trend away from the GOP at the same pace as it did in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, the math gets very hard for Trump. But if that trend flattens out, if Republicans simply lose no or almost no additional ground there this time, that would be a very good sign for Trump. I am not going to pick Sauk County, west of Madison or Door County near Green Bay, which have gotten tons of national attention because they are the state’s only two counties that voted for the winner in both 2016 and 2020. They are small and not very representative demographically and I doubt they are “predictive.” But they are awesome places to visit, as I have done many times. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie.
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