Curious about election result changes in one of the swing states, once Wikipedia had the final vote counts of the 2016 election (allowing a relatively simple copy to an Excel spreadsheet), I took a look at stats for Wisconsin’s two most recent presidential elections to see if I could spot signs of any trends. The exercise confirmed what I already knew about the divides in both parties – better than expected.
The 2016 rift in the GOP is marked by two factions (not including Trump himself): conventional Republicans (for the lack of a better term) and grassroots Republicans. Their division is somewhat analogous to that which dominated the Cold War. The USSR was trying to take over the world one satellite nation at a time. One group of American anti-Soviets felt that the threat had to be managed through diplomacy. The other felt that this status quo means the problem never gets solved, favoring Reagan’s vision for actually defeating the Soviets.
Grassroots Republicans were fed up with the notion that elected Democrats were a force that can be bargained with. The Tea Party arose, centered on anger “at federal deficits, at Washington’s habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency.” Perhaps the movement got a little courage from the public groundswell against the Harriet Miers nomination to SCOTUS that resulted in actual government responsiveness that elevated Samuel Alito to the Court. (Confirmation anniversary is January 31, mark yer calendars.) The Tea Party was sidelined by GOP leadership, demonized by the press, and Tea Party groups were obstructed by the IRS.
As the map shows, Romney beat Trump in the heavily urban and suburban region where Republican faith in conventional leadership was still widespread. Trump beat him in flyover Wisconsin, where faith in business-as-usual was shot down like Leisure Suit Larry at a NOW rally. I doubt anyone thought Trump had all the answers, but the most favorable opinions viewed him as a step in the right direction. His reality show reflected an attitude that not enough Americans motivate themselves into making business deals; I imagine many fans believed he would bring that attitude toward governance. The more wary Trump voters saw a Clinton presidency as a threat grave enough to warrant taking a chance on The Donald – especially after Antonin Scalia died.
Crossover voters were dissatisfied that Democrat fiscal policies didn’t translate into better economic times for themselves. In addition, they felt that the working class was being increasingly back-burnered in favor of the activist class and its excessive focus on social issues. I was surprised that there were only three counties where Clinton got more votes than Obama – but not surprised which counties were in that mix: Dane (home of the state capital), affluent Ozaukee (due north of Milwaukee), and even more affluent Waukesha (due west of Milwaukee). Clinton energized the social justice warriors and the donor class, but not the rank and file. She would have won the state if Milwaukee turnout hadn’t dropped like a rock.
Since then most Republicans have advanced on the learning curve, but the Democrats not so much. Trump’s support has grown over the years, and he has become increasingly mindful of more than just the economic threats posed by the opposition. The Democrat leadership still puts most of its energy into the upper tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, supporting “diversity” through discrimination, racial harmony via racial stereotyping, sex-change operations for minors in the name of gender self-actualization, appeasing Iran in the vain hopes that the regime will go along with peaceful coexistence if we’re nice enough, appeasing private-sector criminals in similar fashion.
She would have won the state if Milwaukee turnout hadn’t dropped like a rock.
Correction: She would have won the state if Milwaukee had dropped 100k ballots at 3am.
That was the real problem- Trump was actually popular, unlike the usual gop losers like Jeb or Mittens, so their vote fraud machine needed some expansion. It worked well in 2020.
Interesting that this time they “found” enough ballots at 3am to steal the Senate seat but not the electoral votes. Hmmm…
But the problem goes back to Ruy Texeira and John Judis, who sold them on the idea that all they had to do was keep the borders open and the great brown tide would sweep America away and give them permanent victory without having to address any of the actual concerns of the actual electorate.
Including the concerns of the actual Hispanics who are Americans and worry about the same things other Americans worry about, like being able to afford food and not get robbed while you shop for it.
Crazy, huh?
Well it is an interesting state. Pretty much evenly divided Red and Blue but with a degree of amity not seen everywhere. We have a Progressive Governor who (just my opinion of course) is realistic enough to not try and force too much nonsense in an environment where he knows half the electorate is not on board. Covid lockdowns for instance were less onerous than in neighboring Walzistan. Baldwin v Hovde makes sense in this context. We have one outstanding R senator, Johnson. Makes a degree of sense to have the other half get a voice as well, and Baldwin has met the low standard of not being a public idiot. Red, Blue, if you have a 51:49 % advantage you don’t go all Mandate Mania around here. And once you actually value Democracy the whole Bumbling Biden/Harris switcheroo smells like last week’s roadkill.
Statewide, Trump got 2,685 fewer votes than Romney and Hillary got 238,449 fewer votes than Obama. In Milwaukee County they lost by 28,855 and 43,616, respectively. I don’t think a lack of normal levels of cheating was the factor. I think that urban voters of both parties were genuinely demoralized by the election. The choices were a Democrat-turned-third-party-organizer-turned Republican with no governing record vs an aged plutocrat closely associated with the power structure that was ignoring working-class Democrats.
It’s worth noting that Bernie Sanders won the Wisconsin primary. Milwaukee is the only county he lost, but not by much – Hillary got 51.68% of that vote. Primary turnout is always significantly lower than that of the general election due to much less participation from working-class voters. I think the primary represented a rift between the SJWs and the country club Dems, hinted at by his strong showing in Dane County.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Wisconsin_Democratic_presidential_primary
I don’t know how much of this is walk-back from his book but Ruy Teixeira has been pretty vocal over the last four years that their analysis was more a rejection of the GOP claim that working-class Latino voters would eventually swing Republican rather than that Latinos could replace white working-class voters as Democrats. Their theory posited a demographic trajectory where middle and upper-middle class folks continued to swing Republican but those losses could be made up by Democrats capturing more working-class voters of all races. He’s been banging the drum for the last four years that the Democrat’s Woke policies have been driving working class folks of all races to the GOP.
I’m not disagreeing that a lot of Democrats misread what Teixeira and Judis said as a replacement theory but those Democrats ignored that the foundation of the party was still supposed to be the white working-class.
Much like Kevin Phillips had one insight, and beat it into the ground in the subsequent two decades, engagng if lefty fantasies in Post Conservative America, he might have gotten some perapective in the 90s, but he dropped the ball, then again if he were alive, he would be ranting about Orange Man about something
Teixeira, probably had an inkling of an insight, but he overextended himself, if the GOPe had gone on their merry way, I’m not absolutely sure, they won’t scuttle Trump’s agenda,
then the Dems would have a shot
Teixeira has a substack, The Liberal Patriot, where he regularly expounds on the need for Democrats to recapture the working class and how to do that. When you look at the details, it is Make the Democrat Party Great Again. I subscribed just for the fun of pointing this out and telling him he should lead what followers he has out of the party.