All Eyes On Wisconsin

RYAN COSTLEY: On November 8, 2016, as I sat in my living room watching CNN electoral maps quickly turn red, I remember feeling speechless. No state baffled me more than Wisconsin. I had made fun of the Trump campaign for visiting the state not two weeks earlier, saying that they were wasting their time and did not have a clue what they were doing. Hillary Clinton ultimately lost the state by 0.77 percentage points—less than 23,000 votes.

As we look ahead to 2020, it is difficult to predict which exact states will be the most contested. However, as it stands today, I view Wisconsin as the most likely tipping-point state. By tipping point, I mean the state most likely to put a given candidate above the required 270 electoral votes to win. The reasons for this are two-fold. The first is that any Democratic candidate is likely to focus most of their time and energy on the upper Midwest. Obviously, Florida will be extremely close and, yes, many Democrats, including myself, do not view Ohio and Iowa as lost. Many would also contest Arizona and North Carolina. Some may even reach for Georgia and Texas. That said, if a Democrat is sitting in the White House in January of 2021, it is probably because they defeated Donald Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This inevitable focus on the upper Midwest is the first reason Wisconsin is the tipping point.

The second reason is that Wisconsin is likely to be the most difficult of the former blue-wall states for Democrats to win back. In 2016, President Trump won Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. This razor-thin margin was made possible in part by poor turnouts in Democratic strongholds such as Detroit and Ann Arbor and by multiple counties going for Trump that had previously voted for President Obama just four years earlier. It is not unreasonable to suspect that if the Democrats nominate a candidate more popular than Hillary Clinton (which statistically will not be difficult), Michigan would be the first state to move back into the blue column. Pennsylvania is the home base for voters who probably picked who they saw as “the lesser of two evils” in 2016 and have since moved away from Trump. According to Morning Consult, the President’s approval rating has plummeted by 17 percentage points since taking office. This could be a product of the trade war hurting his rural standing, his hostility towards cities, further angering liberals in Philadelphia, or simply the fact that he is no longer being compared to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s prospects in Pennsylvania were placed under increased scrutiny when Democratic Governor Tom Wolfe (who I believe would be a fascinating vice-presidential selection) defeated his Republican challenger by more than 16 percentage points in 2018. All in all, Pennsylvania looks likely to be one of the first states (after Michigan) to move away from Trump in 2020.

This brings us back to Wisconsin. Of the three most important states, Wisconsin is the least racially diverse, had the closest election in 2018, and the most shocking loss for Democrats in 2016. If a Democrat is able to win Wisconsin, it is likely they put together a coalition that will also win over Michigan and Pennsylvania. Put another way: there are many scenarios in which Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania but wins Wisconsin and the general election. There are fewer scenarios, however, in which Trump loses Wisconsin but holds on to Michigan/Pennsylvania and wins the election. 2020 is unlikely to be a one-state election, but Wisconsin will be as close as we get to such an occurrence.

So, what is the state of the race in Wisconsin? It is difficult to say for sure due to the fact that there is not yet a Democratic nominee. As of September, Trump’s approval in the state has decreased by about 17 percentage points since taking office. Last month, Fox News conducted a poll of 1,512 registered voters in Wisconsin (a very good sample) that showed Trump trailing Joe Biden 48% to 39%, Elizabeth Warren 45%-41%, and Bernie Sanders 45%-40%. While these numbers could definitely move, it is safe to say that the White House and the RNC should be nervous about the President’s reelection prospects. That said, Democrats who say this election is going to be a landslide are also wrong. One advantage of being an incumbent president is that while the other side is spending time and money on a primary, you can blitz battleground states with targeted messaging. The Trump team is doing just that and raised $125 million in the third quarter of this year.

The Democrats are already planning on making Wisconsin a priority, as they should. The 2020 Democratic National Convention will be in Milwaukee, ensuring the nominee will not skip the state, as Clinton so infamously did in 2016. But the party will have to do more than hold a convention to win there in 2020. The nominee and the DNC have to be able to win back some rural and suburban voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 after voting for Barack Obama in 2018. The state is simply too white and too rural to simply focus on urban turnout. On the other hand, Madison and Milwaukee do offer opportunities for Democrats to reach out to young, diverse voters that helped them all across the country in 2018. Throughout the primary, there has been an implicit debate about whether or not the party should focus on winning back rural voters or firing up their diverse, liberal, urban base. The entire conversation is a false choice. To win Wisconsin and the election, they will have to do both. 

Ryan Costley is a sophomore in the SFS studying International Politics. He is from Atlanta, Georgia.