Trump dogged by persistent weakness in Milwaukee area
The political divide in Wisconsin between big and small communities has widened dramatically in 2016, and that trend has hobbled Donald Trump’s efforts to put this battleground state into play.
Call it Trump’s “Milwaukee problem.”
His strength in Wisconsin’s smaller counties, rural areas and blue-collar communities has failed to erase a statewide gap between him and Hillary Clinton.
The reason is quite simple in geographic terms: Trump’s weakness in the Milwaukee media market, which has persisted throughout the summer and fall.
Trump is performing much worse than fellow Republican Mitt Romney four years ago in both the red and blue parts of southeastern Wisconsin, the state’s most populous and polarized region.
He’s losing the very Democratic city of Milwaukee by more lopsided margins than Romney.
And he’s winning the very Republican counties outside Milwaukee by much smaller margins than Romney.
In fact, the Milwaukee media market is the only major region of the state where Trump is doing worse than Romney at this stage of the presidential race, a polling analysis shows.
Unfortunately for Trump, it is the state’s biggest region, home to 40% of Wisconsin’s voters.
Trump’s candidacy has accentuated a problem that was dogging his party before he came along: an erosion of support in the country’s most densely populated places.
Democrats won the nation’s top 50 metro areas by a margin of more than 10 million votes in 2012, a number that seems likely to grow in 2016.
That’s partly because of longstanding trends; large metros are younger and more racially diverse, which makes them more Democratic.
But it also has to do with the particular nature of this race, including the large education gap that has emerged between voters who support Trump and those who support Clinton.
Trump is doing much worse with white college grads than white non-college voters. And those more educated voters are more highly concentrated in big cities and their suburbs.
That’s one reason for Trump’s lingering weakness in the ultra-Republican counties outside Milwaukee, which have among the highest rates of college education in Wisconsin. Trump lost those counties badly in the state’s April primary, and he’s still falling well short of the support a Republican nominee typically draws in the region.
To compare the geography of the 2012 and 2016 races in Wisconsin, we analyzed polling data provided by Charles Franklin of the Marquette University Law School (using Marquette’s three most recent polls this year and three polls from a similar time period four years ago).
We compared the regional patterns in the two races. And we also compared metro counties to non-metro counties, to gauge the divide between urban and rural voters.
The differences between 2012 and 2016 are striking. The political gap between big and small places has grown much larger. And populous southeast Wisconsin has moved in the opposite direction from the rest of the state.
Here is a look at the shifts by region:
Milwaukee media market. Clinton is winning the city of Milwaukee by a bigger margin than Obama in 2012 (56 points compared with 42 points). And she is losing the rest of the Milwaukee media market — which leans Republican — by a smaller margin than Obama (a 4-point deficit compared with a 16-point deficit).
When you include the city of Milwaukee with the rest of the 10-county Milwaukee media market, the region has gone from a 3-point GOP edge in the fall of 2012 to a 9-point Democratic edge in 2016.
Madison media market. Clinton is underperforming in this Democratic-leaning, 11-county region anchored by the state capital. She leads Trump by 19 points. At this stage four years ago, Obama led Romney by 31 points here.
Green Bay media market. This 16-county region in northeast Wisconsin is Trump’s core area of strength. He leads Clinton by 16 points. Romney led Obama by just 1.
Northern and western Wisconsin. This sprawling area combines the state’s remaining four media markets. It is politically diverse, comprising both blue and red rural counties; Democratic cities like Eau Claire and Stevens Point; and GOP suburbs like those east of the Twin Cities. Obama led this region by 18 points four years ago. Clinton leads by only 1.
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In other words, Trump is faring better than Romney did in every one of these markets except the Milwaukee media market.
That would be very encouraging news for the GOP nominee, except for two things.
Romney lost Wisconsin by 7 points in 2012, so merely outperforming him is not enough.
And Trump’s relative strength in the state’s smaller media markets is largely offset by his weakness in the southeast, Wisconsin’s population hub.
The other striking geographic shift this year involves the divide between rural and urban.
For this analysis, pollster Franklin divided the state’s voters into three groups, based roughly on population size.
The first group contained people who live in major metro areas (the four counties of metro Milwaukee; the two Wisconsin counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro; and the one county — Kenosha — in the Chicago metro area).
The second group contained people who live in smaller metro areas such as Green Bay, Madison and La Crosse.
And the third group contained people who live in non-metro areas — mostly rural counties.
Voters in the most urban group (the biggest metro areas) have swung 14 points in a Democratic direction since the 2012 race. They were evenly divided between Obama and Romney but now favor Clinton over Trump by 14 points.
Voters in the smaller metros have swung 13 points in a GOP direction: they favored Obama by 18 points in 2012 but favor Clinton by just 5 in this race.
And voters in the non-metro areas have swung 10 points in a GOP direction: they favored Obama by 4 in 2012 but now favor Trump by 6.
These shifts reflect many of the same regional patterns cited above: Trump’s weakness in upscale GOP suburbs like those in Waukesha County; Trump’s strength in the Fox Valley and parts of northern and western Wisconsin; Clinton’s weakness in rural communities and the softness of her support (compared with Obama) in college towns.
But the overall pattern is a bigger divide between the state’s most densely populated areas and its least densely populated ones.
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In the 2012 race, there was hardly any gap between voters in small, non-metro counties and voters in major metros. In this race, there is a 20-point gap. In Marquette’s last poll (taken Oct. 6-9), Clinton led among self-described “urban” voters by roughly 30 points, and Trump led among self-described “rural” voters by roughly 10 points.
Will this divide continue to widen in future presidential elections? Or has it been exaggerated this year by the peculiar strengths and weakness of Trump and Clinton — and by the massive education gap in this race?
One thing is clear. These patterns have proven very persistent this year. If they hold on election day, Republicans are likely to lose Wisconsin for the eighth consecutive presidential race.
A GOP candidate who combined Romney’s strength in educated suburbs with Trump’s strength in rural areas could in theory end that losing streak. George W. Bush was such a candidate, and almost won the state in 2000 and 2004.
But Trump has not been that candidate so far.
He has altered the map, and put together a GOP coalition that differs from the one Romney assembled in Wisconsin four years ago.
But unless Trump turns things around in the coming days, he may have simply found a different way to lose.