On Wisconsin
by digby
This piece about the state of the electorate in the crucial swing state is super interesting. All the analysts consider the state to be the focus of much of the 2020 campaign and it’s worth looking at a state that can elect both Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin to the Senate to see how the divide breaks down:
Hillary Clinton’s victorious Election Day model for Wisconsin was wrong. But her mistake was widely shared. The weekend before the 2016 election, a knowledgeable pollster unaffiliated with Clinton assured me that Wisconsin would be closer than many supposed — but Democrats would prevail nonetheless.
Wisconsin is not a Democratic bastion, despite presidential victories that stretched from 1988 until 2016. Obama’s solid wins in 2008 and 2012 were solid exceptions (and solid evidence of what an exceptional politician he was). Obama’s comfortable margins in the state obscured other, perhaps more relevant, data points. In 2004, John Kerry defeated George W. Bush in Wisconsin by little more than 11,000 votes – less than four-tenths of 1%. Al Gore won the state over Bush in 2000 by fewer than 6,000 votes.
Between its warm embraces of Obama, Wisconsin elected Scott Walker, an aggressive Republican partisan, as governor in 2010, again in 2012 in a recall election and once more in 2014. After going for Trump in 2016, the state voted for liberal Democrat Tammy Baldwin, the nation’s first openly gay U.S. senator, in a landslide in 2018, and also elected Democrat Tony Evers for governor over Walker by a very slim margin. Wisconsin is home to Obama-Walker-Trump-Baldwin voters, political shape-shifters who seem to defy reason as well as partisanship.
After the 2016 debacle, Vinehout and Kane zeroed in on another species of voter who contributed to the surprise: rural white men who were not regular voters. “I called up the clerks. I called up the poll workers. I wanted to know what happened,” recalled Vinehout in a telephone interview. What the clerks and poll workers told her was that a number of Wisconsinites who voted in 2016 were new faces. In rural counties like Buffalo, Vinehout said, “ward-level data shows that a lot of people came to the polls for the first time.”
Some Democrats fear that Trump has the equivalent of reserve troops — non-college-educated white males who didn’t vote in 2016 but who, after four years of Trump’s domination of media, political culture and the very oxygen we all breathe, might turn out in 2020.
You can register and vote in Wisconsin on Election Day. In three counties in this southwest corner of the state, each of which flipped from Democrat to Republican, same-day registration jumped from 2012 to 2016 — up 22% in Vernon County, up 40% in Crawford, up 54% in Grant. “They were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and they were farmers and they were mostly men,” Vinehout said of the new voters. “And they voted for Trump.”
Read on for one of the most interesting breakdowns of the state of a swing state in 2019 that I’ve read yet. It is fascinating and slightly scary. It’s certainly not a slam dunk, either way.
Here’s a little taste of the dynamics they discovered abut 2016.
At BLOC, canvassers are trained to listen more than talk, asking residents what their concerns are. At times, the interaction veers from outreach toward constituent service. “Sometimes we’re connecting them, and we’re teaching them how to look up their representatives,” Lang said of BLOC’s canvassing in poor Milwaukee neighborhoods. “Do you know who your alderperson is? And they’re like, ‘Actually, no.’”
The political intelligence such conversations yield can be useful.
Maletha Jones, a BLOC canvasser, said that when she knocked on doors in 2016, a majority of the people she talked to said they supported Trump. “I guess they really didn’t like Hillary because of her background,” Jones said. “They wanted to give Trump a try.”
Jones said many of the black residents she spoke with in Milwaukee in 2016 had heard that Trump at one time had had a black girlfriend. Based on that, she said, many concluded he was probably not racist. Keisha Robinson, program director at BLOC, said she had personally reached the same conclusion about Trump, for the same reason.
As both the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 election confirmed, black voters were targeted with propaganda from Russian agents during the presidential campaign. Much of it was dedicated to disparaging Clinton with the goal of suppressing turnout. According to both Jones and Robinson, many black voters they encountered in Milwaukee were both extremely distrustful of Clinton and favorably disposed toward Trump. “Some people were actually excited at the idea of Trump,” Robinson said.
Two-thirds of Wisconsin’s black population resides in the city of Milwaukee. Trump ultimately received few votes from blacks in the state. But the shape of that vote was hugely significant. From 2012 to 2016, the black vote margin in Wisconsin shifted a little more than 6 points from Democrat to Republican. A vote analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress found that black turnout fell 19 points from 2012 to 2016. Clinton, the report stated, “would have emerged victorious – though just barely – if she had retained Obama’s black support.”
Interesting, no?
There’s more about those farmers and the black vote and various strategies to turbo-charge the turnout on both sides. None of it is foolproof and, needless to say, nobody knows how much or what kind of interference on Trump’s behalf will be deployed. And, again, running against Trump is like running against an alien from a foreign planet so nobody knows nothin’.
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