Since former President Donald Trump last won an election in Wisconsin, he has tried to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, soured his relationship with the Legislature’s most powerful GOP member and been indicted four times.
Those developments, and the former president’s divisive nature, have led some prominent Wisconsin Republicans to call for a GOP presidential nominee besides Trump, whom they say cannot win again in Wisconsin given his political liabilities.
No matter, Trump has remained popular with grassroots Republicans across the state. In Wisconsin’s suburban and rural areas, Trump is viewed favorably by a large majority of Republicans, according to Marquette Law School polling data.
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Now, as Milwaukee prepares to host the first GOP presidential debate on Wednesday and Americans look toward battleground Wisconsin, Republicans face a dilemma: With less than a year and a half before the 2024 presidential election, Trump is by far the leading candidate to become the GOP nominee. And if he is, it will take just about all Republican voters to return him to the White House.
That may be particularly challenging in Wisconsin, a perpetual swing state that could decide the 2024 presidential election.
“The establishment isn’t too kind to Trump in Wisconsin at all,” Dane County Republican Party chair Brandon Maly said. “I’ve looked at a lot of states — our Republican primary electorate is one of the most anti-Trump. But that doesn’t mean he can’t win a general here. It’s going to be close.”
Wisconsin Republicans have had a love-hate relationship with Trump, who said he isn’t participating in Wednesday’s debate, since he first announced his candidacy in 2015.
2016 election
Around the beginning of 2016, more Wisconsin Republicans viewed Trump unfavorably than favorably, according to the Marquette Law School Poll.
When then-Gov. Scott Walker dropped out of the race, he endorsed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for president, not Trump. Republican leaders across the state criticized Trump for the Access Hollywood recording in which he bragged about groping women, and other rhetoric he used on the campaign trail.
Trump lost to Cruz in the 2016 Wisconsin GOP primary, making the state among the last ones not to back the future president.
But any reluctance Wisconsin Republican leaders felt about backing Trump all but melted away ahead of the general election, when he faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“By November (2016) and after he was elected, Republicans really came around,” UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said. “The positive way to say it is, politicians are pretty flexible in their attitudes about candidates.”
By 2020, about 90% of Wisconsin Republicans viewed Trump favorably, the Marquette poll found.
After 2020
Since Trump left office, Wisconsin conservatives have slightly soured again on the former president. In June, 72% of Republicans viewed the former president favorably and 25% did not, the Marquette poll showed. And across every region of the state, Republicans now view Trump more favorably than when he announced his candidacy eight years ago but less favorably than when he was in office, according to the Marquette poll.
Nationally, according to polling averages conducted by FiveThirtyEight in June, Trump is the clear frontrunner among Republicans, beating the second-place Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, 54% to 23%.
But in Wisconsin at that time, Republicans were equally split between Trump and DeSantis, with each candidate garnering support from around 30% of those polled, according to the Marquette poll.
“Why is Trump only getting 31% of the first-choice primary vote here?” Marquette Law School Poll director Charles Franklin said. “That’s a surprising weakness.”
Republican nonvoters
While he may not be all of their first choice, Trump was still viewed favorably by a majority of Republicans in Wisconsin in June, with 65% of Wisconsin Republicans and independents leaning Republican viewing the former president favorably, compared to 33% who viewed him unfavorably.
“That third of Republicans still are mostly going to vote for him rather than vote for Joe Biden,” Franklin said. “The open question is, will they vote at all? Or will they skip the presidential office and go on down (the ballot) to vote for Senate and Congress” if Trump is the nominee?
In the June poll, 28% of independents, including those who lean to the left and the right, and 0% of Democrats had a favorable view of Trump.
Some Dane County Republicans have told canvassers they’d skip voting in the general election or at least on the presidential ballot if Trump is the nominee, said Maly, who added that many said the same in 2016 but still voted for Trump.
“I think the dynamics are a little bit different this time around,” he said. “Trump is more of a known quantity. And he does have a lot of legal baggage, of course. So that’s going to hurt him.”
Maly said he suspects that most of the people who said they won’t vote for Trump if he’s the nominee are bluffing.
“They want to seem like very loud voices in the party right now,” Maly said. “So, you build the narrative that Trump can’t win or have the support necessary to win. And in the end, they’re going to be faced with a binary choice. ... They’re going to vote for Trump.”
Trump base
Since 2016, the Republican electorate has included a significant segment of Americans motivated almost exclusively by Trump’s candidacy. That group may be critical to Republicans’ aspirations next year.
“I have to give Trump credit, despite my concerns and misgivings about him,” longtime Republican operative Mark Graul said. “I have never seen a more loyal following for any political candidate at any level than he has.”
Indeed, Maly said he expects more so-called “only-Trumpers” — people who will only vote if Trump is on the ballot — to skip the 2024 general election if Trump isn’t the nominee than “never-Trumpers” skipping it if he is on the ballot.
But if Trump is not the nominee, Graul said, “it opens up Republicans to voters that used to vote Republican, particularly in those suburban areas, but are trending very much in a Democratic direction.”
Since Trump was elected in 2016, Graul said, Republicans have struggled in suburban areas.
“As you think long term for the state of Wisconsin, we’re going to be in big trouble — the Republican Party — to win statewide races, if we don’t reverse or at least slow down the slippage we’re seeing in suburban areas,” Graul said. “We need to stop that from happening. Otherwise, winning statewide is going to become next to impossible.”
Electability concerns
Popular with the base, Trump would still need to pull in enough independents to win a general election, which is what worries GOP leaders in the state.
“I do not believe Donald Trump can win the state of Wisconsin,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said at a Milwaukee Press Club luncheon in May.
Vos, who launched a review of the state’s 2020 presidential election at the former president’s behest before their relationship turned acrimonious, is among Trump’s chief critics in Wisconsin.
Still, Republicans haven’t coalesced around any of Trump’s many GOP challengers yet. That may change depending on how Wednesday’s GOP debate in Milwaukee goes.
But if it doesn’t, Burden said he expects Republicans will again rally around the former president, since most of their public concerns revolve around his electability, not his performance in office or his integrity.
“The evidence from the last two presidential elections says just about all the Republicans are going to be with Trump in the end,” Burden said.
The 2020 election is over. Here’s what happened (and what didn’t)
While a handful of voters in 2020 risked going to prison by attempting to vote twice or in the name of a dead relative, as happens in any election, no evidence of widespread fraud has ever been produced in Wisconsin or elsewhere. Yet, many continue to question some of the practices clerks relied on to encourage eligible voters to cast ballots and make sure their votes were counted amid the first election in more than 100 years held during a pandemic. Here's what happened, and didn't happen.
The state has multiple, overlapping safeguards aimed at preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots, tampering with the ballots or altering vote totals.
Nothing in the emails suggests there were problems with the election that contributed in any meaningful way to Trump's 20,682-vote loss to Joe Biden.
"Despite concerns with statewide elections procedures, this audit showed us that the election was largely safe and secure," Sen. Rob Cowles said Friday.
The grants were provided to every Wisconsin municipality that asked for them, and in the amounts they asked for.
"Application of the U.S. Department of Justice guidance among the clerks in Wisconsin is not uniform," the memo says.
YORKVILLE — The Racine County Sheriff’s Office announced in a Thursday morning news conference that it has identified eight cases of what it believes to be election fraud at a Mount Pleasant nursing home.
The memo states that state law gives the Audit Bureau complete access to all records during an audit investigation and federal law and guidance does not prohibit an election official from handing over election records.
Drop boxes were used throughout Wisconsin, including in areas where Trump won the vast majority of counties.
Thousands of ballot certifications examined from Madison are a window onto how elections officials handled a pandemic and a divided and unhelpful state government.
"I don't think that you instill confidence in a process by kind of blindly assuming there's nothing to see here," WILL president and general counsel Rick Esenberg said.
The Associated Press reviewed every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvan…
The report is the latest to show that there was not widespread fraud in Wisconsin.
The clear insinuation was that someone not qualified to conduct an election improperly influenced these vulnerable voters. But the Wisconsin State Journal could not confirm the data.
The turnout at nursing homes in Brown, Kenosha, Milwaukee and Racine counties in 2020 was not much different from the turnout in 2016.