Lessons from the Wisconsin Supreme Court race: Why the alarm bells for Republicans are ringing louder
This story was republished Jan. 15, 2024, to make it free for all readers.
Over the past six years in Wisconsin, the right has been defeated twice for governor, once for president, once for U.S. Senate and three times for the state Supreme Court, most recently on April 4.
That’s a lot of losing in an important swing state where — if anything — Republican voters slightly outnumber Democrats.
So how gloomy should the GOP be these days about Wisconsin?
And how confident should Democrats be about winning this state’s 10 electoral votes and defending incumbent Tammy Baldwin’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024?
It’s fair to read this month’s double-digit court victory by liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz as a sign of the power of abortion to energize Democratic voters and hurt conservative candidates in the aftermath of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
This was a high-turnout, swing-state judicial election with national overtones and the winner put abortion at the center of her campaign.
But a spring election in 2023 can only tell us so much about a November election in 2024.
That’s why it’s important to look at the April 4 court race in the broader context of Wisconsin’s recent election history.
Republicans have a losing record in Wisconsin in the Trump Era
When you do that, the alarm bells don’t go away for Republicans. In fact, they get a little louder, because this conservative defeat carried echoes of many previous losses.
To see the bigger picture, let’s divide the past decade and a half into two different election eras.
We’ll call the first one the Obama Era since it coincides with the Obama presidency and comprises the election cycles of 2009 through 2016. Former President Barack Obama was the dominant national political figure during this time, and Republicans drew a lot of energy mobilizing against him.
We’ll call the second period the Trump Era. It begins with the Trump presidency (2017) but continues into the Biden presidency since former President Donald Trump remains a dominant political figure and has left a far bigger stamp than Biden on our current red-blue divide. Democrats are drawing a lot of energy mobilizing against him.
So, how have the parties performed, during these two eras, in the most consequential statewide elections in Wisconsin (for president, governor, U.S. Senate and state Supreme Court)?
In the Obama Era, the GOP was 9-4.
In the Trump Era, it is 2-7.
More:After second major loss, Wisconsin GOP leaders say it's about more than abortion
What the margins of victory tell us about Wisconsin's elections
Those numbers speak for themselves. But wins and losses aren’t the whole story in a 50/50 state where six of these 22 Wisconsin elections were decided by roughly 1 point or less.
Winning margins tell us something, too.
In the Obama Era, both parties won decisive victories, even though Republicans won more often. Democrats won a 7-point contest for president and a 6-point contest for Senate in 2012 and liberals won lopsided court victories in 2009 and 2015. Republicans won three races for governor by 5 to 7 points (2010, 2012 and 2014) and two races for Senate by roughly 5 and 3 points (2010 and 2016); and conservatives won court races by 15 and 5 points (2013 and 2016).
In the Trump Era, however, only one side — the left — has won decisive statewide victories in Wisconsin. Democrats won an 11-point race for Senate in 2018 and a 3-point race for governor in 2022. Liberals won double-digit court victories in 2018, 2020 and 2023.
In the Obama Era, Republican and conservative candidates topped 51% of the vote in 6 of our 13 key races.
But in the Trump Era, they have yet to reach 51%, and have only topped 50% twice, when Sen. Ron Johnson got 50.4% in 2022 and conservative court candidate Brian Hagedorn got 50.2% in 2019. In the other Trump Era races, Republicans won 48.4% and 47.8% for governor, 48.8% for president and 44.5% for Senate; and conservatives received 44.2%, 44.7% and 44.5% for Supreme Court.
By contrast, Democratic and liberal candidates topped 55% four times in this same period (for Senate in 2018 and the court in 2018, 2020 and 2023) and topped 51% for governor in 2022.
The lowest percentage of the vote a Democrat or liberal has received in any of these nine key Trump Era races is the 49.4% that losing Senate candidate Mandela Barnes got last year.
That is 2 points higher than the average GOP/conservative vote in these same 9 races (47%).
When you study the political map in Wisconsin, you begin to see why Republicans have had a lower ceiling in Trump Era elections than they did in Obama Era elections.
Wisconsin's decisive regional trends have come into focus
The state’s modern-day political map is defined by three big regional trends.
The first involves Republican gains in small towns and rural counties and across much of western, northern and central Wisconsin. These rural gains were responsible for very narrow wins for president in 2016, for Supreme Court in 2019 and for Senate in 2022.
But in what has become a very familiar pattern in the Trump Era, the right’s gains in less populous places have been eclipsed by losses in two big population centers:
The first is Dane County, the fastest-growing part of Wisconsin. Democratic margins in Dane County have gone from 20-40 points in the 1990s and 2000s to 50-60 points today. More important than the growth in point margins is the explosion in the party’s raw vote margins, since that is what decides elections.
Democrats were winning a less populous and less liberal Dane by around 50,000 votes in the 1990s. They won the most recent races for president and governor by 181,000 and 174,000 votes in Dane. Put another way, Dane County has gone from adding the equivalent of 2 or 3 points to the party’s statewide margins to adding almost 6 or 7 — a growing hurdle for Republicans to overcome.
Dane’s clout has exploded in spring court races as well, where it has even more impact because these races have smaller statewide turnouts. Protasiewicz won Dane by almost 154,000 votes on April 4. That is bigger than Hillary Clinton’s Dane County vote margin in the 2016 presidential election.
The second big geography problem for Republicans is suburban Milwaukee. Republicans have gone from winning the WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) by around 35 points for president in 2000, 2004 and 2012 to 28 points in 2016 and 23 points in 2020.
They’ve gone from winning the WOW counties by more than 45 points for governor in 2012 and 2014 to winning them by 22.8 points in 2022. In court races, conservatives won these counties by a combined 48 points in 2011. That dropped to 38 points in Hagedorn’s 2019 victory, then to 24 points in 2020 and 18 points this year.
The WOW counties have become the symbol of the GOP’s suburban struggles in Wisconsin. But the party’s collapse in the suburban communities within Milwaukee County has been costly, too, turning the state’s biggest county bluer and bluer.
Democratic margins for president and governor in Milwaukee County have grown in recent decades from the 20s to 40 points or more. Liberal margins for the court have grown from under 20 points in the 2000s to 46 points in this last election.
As these numbers illustrate, the nonpartisan spring election map is looking more and more like the partisan fall election map in Wisconsin.
That doesn’t mean the April 4 court race is a predictor of next year’s November elections. Like every campaign, it had its own dynamics, including the huge role of abortion politics, massive spending, a big advertising edge for the left, and whatever flaws you want to attribute to the conservative contestant, Dan Kelly, who has now lost both his court races by double digits.
But these court elections are more politically consequential and meaningful than they used to be. They draw far more spending and higher turnouts than in the past (turnout April 4 was almost 40% of the voting-age population, which would approach a traditional fall midterm turnout in some states). And candidates, parties and voters treat them much more like partisan elections than they used to. That’s why I’ve included them in the won-loss records of both parties.
The GOP's lower ceiling in the Trump Era
When you put the Protasiewicz-Kelly race in the broader election context of the last half-dozen years, it fits a Trump Era pattern of Republican decline in the state’s fastest-growing area (Dane) and its most populous region (metro Milwaukee). Suburban voters are heavily driving that trend, whether they are voting against the Dobbs decision on abortion or against their perception of the Republican Party under Trump.
Since 2017, the GOP’s ceiling — its level of peak performance in statewide elections — has been significantly lower than it was when Scott Walker forged a potent, two-legged, suburban-rural coalition.
And given its ongoing slide in Milwaukee and Madison, it’s hard to imagine how the party raises that ceiling without reversing its suburban losses.
As I noted in a column I wrote before the election, none of this means Republicans can’t win in Wisconsin next year.
But it does suggest they have a smaller margin of error than they did pre-Trump (and that Trump himself would have a difficult time winning Wisconsin a second time).
This shift is even more striking when you consider that in one important respect, Wisconsin should be more favorable turf for the GOP than it was in the Obama Era, not less.
As my colleague Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School pointed out to me, the GOP’s struggles in the Trump Era have come despite the fact that the partisan makeup of the Wisconsin electorate has shifted modestly in a Republican direction over the past six or seven years.
Franklin’s voluminous polling shows that from 2012 through 2016, Democrats enjoyed a 5-7 point edge in party identification, meaning more voters identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
But since 2017, Republicans have enjoyed a roughly 1-point edge in party ID. This shift toward the GOP has come entirely from “non-college” white men, who are the demographic base of the Trump coalition.
If Republicans are performing worse in big elections in Wisconsin despite these gains in party identification, there are only three ways that can happen.
One is by losing the turnout war (if, say, abortion or Trump is doing more to mobilize Democratic voters than Republican voters).
Another is by suffering defections from traditional GOP voters.
And the third is by losing the battle for the seemingly shrunken but still vital pool of swing voters and true independents out there.
Republicans are going to need to address some or all of the above if they don’t want to be disadvantaged in America’s pre-eminent swing state next year.