By Paula Escalada Medrano
Madison – In Wisconsin, four of the last six presidential races have been decided by less than one percentage point. Joe Biden won by about 20,000 votes in 2020, a similar number that tipped the balance in favor of Donald Trump in 2016, a margin so narrow that it has turned the state into a heated battleground.
It is therefore not surprising that the Republican Party has chosen the northern state to hold its national convention, which begins this Monday in the city of Milwaukee and in which former President Trump (2017-2021) will be elevated on Thursday as the Republican candidate for the general elections on November 5.
Nor is it surprising that both Trump and Biden have visited the state several times over the past year. The president’s last visit was just a week ago, when he participated in a rally in Madison, the capital (and the state’s big Democratic stronghold), where he reiterated the message: he will not abandon the campaign despite the criticism.
Biden’s poor performance in the first presidential debate held on June 27 has put the president on the ropes, strongly questioned for his mistakes and his advanced age (81 years old). Therefore, the results in states like Wisconsin (known as the swing or purple states, due to the closeness of the dispute) will be more important than ever.
Wisconsin, a very divided state
“For a long time, it has been an extraordinarily divided state and the most fascinating thing is that if you choose any community you see that almost all of them have changed their tendency in the last decades, from Republican to Democrat or vice versa, few have remained static,” John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University in Milwaukee, told EFE.
Although Democratic candidates have received the most votes in eight of the last 10 presidential elections, Donald Trump achieved the milestone of winning in 2016, after no Republican had won Wisconsin since 1984.
In a poll released two weeks ago (before the debate) conducted by Marquette University Law School, Biden and Trump were dead even at 50% among registered voters. However, among likely voters, Biden would lead Trump by one point.
Why is there always such a tight margin? According to Johnson, the explanation is that Wisconsin “has the perfect mix of rural areas (more Republican) and urban areas (more Democratic), suburbs and small towns, and it is demographic factors that lead to this state being so divided,” he explains.
With a predominantly white population (78.6%, compared to 6.3% African-American and 7.6% Hispanic, according to official census data), Wisconsin “has a much more Democratic lean than its demographic makeup alone would suggest,” the expert notes.
That’s because, he adds, there’s a history of support for Democratic candidates among the white, largely unionized working class, especially in the southwest of the state, a trend that “goes back to the Scandinavian immigrants who settled there 100 years or more ago, who brought a kind of social democratic politics to the state.”
According to Kathleen Dolan, a professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, who spoke to EFE, this year a new law must be taken into account that has changed the legislative map of the state and that was approved after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the previous distribution gave an advantage to the Republicans.
This rule will affect state legislative elections, but it could also have consequences for the presidential elections.
“Previously, many of the districts were so heavily weighted toward Republicans that Democratic candidates didn’t even bother running, but the new distribution will see the Democratic Party field candidates in 97 of the 99 districts” into which the state is divided for the state legislative elections, says Dolan.
So, he adds, “it’s possible that in many of those districts where there was no local Democratic candidate for the state Senate or the state Assembly, Democratic voters who previously did not vote will mobilize,” he says, and end up going to the polls to vote for Biden as well.
Dolan doesn’t think “it’s going to have a dramatic impact,” but in a state where “a very close election is expected,” each of the three million possible votes counts more than anywhere else.
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