In the quest for 270 electoral votes, this year’s presidential candidates have made numerous overtures to Wisconsin voters. Although the battleground state offers just 10 electoral votes, pollsters and political experts believe those votes could be enough to tip the balance in favor of former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
Who exactly Wisconsin would vote for is much harder to determine.
To get an impression, 60 Minutes traveled to the Badger State, where margins have been razor thin for years. Wisconsin was the only state where the margin was less than 1% both times Trump was on the ballot, and in fact the difference between victory and defeat was a fraction of a percent in four of the last six presidential elections.
A purple state with purple people
As presidential election history suggests, Wisconsin is politically purple. The senators are divided by party: Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin represent the state. But one thing that might set Wisconsin apart from other battleground states is that the voters themselves are quite plum. Many share their fate on Election Day, saying they are voting for a person rather than a party, playing ping-pong between Republicans and Democrats over the years.
“I don’t vote Republican or Democrat or anything,” Wisconsin voter Joe Conlon told 60 Minutes. “I vote for who I like best. And that’s how it turns out.”
Conlon went on to explain that he voted for George W. Bush twice, then Barack Obama twice, and then Donald Trump twice. He plans to vote for Trump again this year.
To Brian Schimming, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, this kind of interparty voting history isn’t surprising.
“There’s a pretty good independent streak here in Wisconsin,” Schimming said. “That has been proven time and time again.”
Schimming told 60 Minutes that the Democratic and Republican Parties each have reliable voter bases, but independents often vote on the issues of the moment and the concerns they feel when they go to the polls.
“I always tell candidates running here statewide, ‘Don’t make too many assumptions about what the voters are going to do,’” he said.
As the candidates compete for these toss-up supporters, geography may matter. Although Wisconsin often becomes a state where elections are decided by fewer than 25,000 votes, the individual counties themselves are not so evenly divided. In 2020, more than 80% of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had double-digit margins for Trump or President Joe Biden.
In Kewaunee County, where Barack Obama won by 11 percentage points in 2008, Trump defeated Biden by nearly 33 percentage points — a swing of nearly 44 points in 12 years.
According to Charles Franklin, the poll director at Marquette Law School, this shift has nothing to do with the makeup of the county’s residents.
“It’s not the demographics that are changing,” Franklin told 60 Minutes. “It’s how we think about our candidates, how we think about the parties. It is Trump’s appeal to the working class, to voters with less education, to those who have not gone beyond high school or at least not beyond high school. And his appeal there is a change for the Republican Party from where we were 20 years ago.”
Dane County tells a different story. Dane County, the fastest growing county in Wisconsin, is home to the capital, Madison, the University of Wisconsin and high-tech companies that have moved in and created jobs. Just one of these companies, Epic Systems, employs more than 12,000 people in Wisconsin alone.
This is where the Democrats are running up the score. Biden won 50,000 more votes in 2020 than Barack Obama did in 2012.
The Political History of Wisconsin
A look through Wisconsin’s history books shows how the political pendulum has been swinging in the state for decades.
A one-room schoolhouse in Ripon is the birthplace of the Republican Party itself, a group founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Shortly thereafter, the Wisconsin Supreme Court made it the first state to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. A faction of Wisconsin Republicans founded the Progressive Movement, a group of reformers who pushed for safer workplaces and cleaner cities, among other things.
In 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and two years later Wisconsin passed the nation’s first equal rights legislation, giving women full legal equality with men.
Wisconsin enacted the first state unemployment insurance law, Wilbur Cohen of Wisconsin was a key architect of the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin championed the very first Earth Day.
On the political downside, Wisconsin was home to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican whose efforts to root out communists during the early Cold War led to the country’s “Red Scare.” Also headquartered in Wisconsin, the John Birch Society is a conservative advocacy group that promotes a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and has been criticized for its extremist views and conspiracy theories.
Political pollster Charles Franklin said this rich political history has played out in the state’s government.
“While many states were lopsided and all had Democratic governments or all Republican governments, our history is very much a mixture of divided governments,” Franklin said. He went on to explain that after the Tea Party burst onto the national scene in 2010, Wisconsin began to become increasingly polarized. The 2016 elections exacerbated this.
“Trump contributed to that polarization,” Franklin said. “And now there is a more nationalized polarization, as opposed to a polarization based primarily on state politics, as was the case for us in the beginning.”
The sprint to the finish
Donald Trump’s support in Wisconsin has been underestimated in the last two presidential elections. A complicating factor in predicting voter opinion is that the state has same-day registration, meaning residents can register to vote on Election Day, excluding them from any preliminary estimate of the number of registered voters. In 2020, more than 219,000 people did just that — and a majority of those same-day voters turned to Donald Trump.
For Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, this is a troubling proposition.
“I definitely don’t sleep at night thinking about people who are in nobody’s polls, in nobody’s models showing up and voting for Trump,” Wikler said. “I need to find the same kind of voters to make sure they vote for Kamala Harris.”
From Green Bay to Eau Claire to Milwaukee, the Trump and Harris campaigns have stormed Wisconsin in a last-minute sprint to Election Day. As they try to make their case to voters, one thing is certain: No one knows how this race will go in the Badger State.
“It’s very, very close,” Republican Chairman Schimming said. “And I think both sides would say that.”
Click here to watch Jon Wertheim’s 60 Minutes report on Door County, Wisconsin.
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Scott Rosann.
