Leah Vukmir loses six of seven media markets in Wisconsin, but wins the big one in U.S. Senate primary
Republican Leah Vukmir won her U.S. Senate primary the same way Republican Scott Walker won his primary for governor in 2010, by running up the score in southeast Wisconsin and losing almost everywhere else.
It was also the same way Ted Cruz won Wisconsin’s GOP presidential primary two years ago against Donald Trump.
In fact, Vukmir was strong Tuesday in the parts of Wisconsin where Trump was weak in 2016 and weak in the parts where Trump was strong.
What does that mean for Vukmir’s bid this fall to unseat Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin?
Does it suggest she will overcome Trump’s lingering weakness with suburban voters? Or fail to replicate his strength with rural voters? Or both?
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Vukmir’s performance Tuesday placed her firmly in the Walker mold rather than the Trump mold in the pattern of her primary support. In a GOP contest between insider and outsider, suburbs and countryside, south and north, the former won in each case — as it has time and again in Wisconsin.
Vukmir won the 10-county Milwaukee media market by 24 percentage points against Kevin Nicholson — and lost each of the state’s six other media markets. She won only 15 counties and lost 57.
But she won the bigger counties and by larger vote margins. Her four best counties by far were the four that make up metropolitan Milwaukee: Waukesha, which she carried by 37 points; Milwaukee, which she carried by 33; Ozaukee, which she carried by 30; and Washington, which she carried by 28.
The only media market she won, Milwaukee, made up 46% of the GOP vote in the statewide primary, which is pretty typical. She carried it by 24 points.
Nicholson carried the 18-county Green Bay media market (which supplied more than 22% of the statewide GOP vote Tuesday) by 6 points. He won the Madison media market by 5 points, the Wausau media market by 11 points, the La Crosse media market by 20 points and the two media markets that border Minnesota (the Twin Cities and Duluth) by 16 and 18 points.
But those smaller markets didn’t generate nearly the raw vote margins for Nicholson that Milwaukee did for Vukmir.
Despite the staggering amount spent by groups on his behalf — more than $10 million — Nicholson failed to rewrite the state’s Republican math or map. No one has won a major GOP primary in recent decades without winning southeast Wisconsin.
Nicholson’s strategy of attacking Vukmir as an insider effectively pitted him against the state’s GOP leadership, her political base in the ultra-red suburban counties outside Milwaukee and even conservative talk radio (a major force in GOP politics in southeast Wisconsin). That is a lot to overcome in a state with an unusually strong, almost machine-like Republican infrastructure.
Nicholson sought to portray Vukmir as soft in her support of Trump, and pro-Nicholson groups aired TV ads showing video, from March 2016, of Vukmir decrying Trump’s “offensive” rhetoric.
But Vukmir’s qualms about Trump were widely shared by GOP voters in Wisconsin at that time, as underlined by Trump’s double-digit loss to Cruz in the presidential primary.
In that 2016 contest, Trump performed a lot like Nicholson, winning the majority of the state’s counties but getting pounded in greater Milwaukee.
Eight months later, Trump overcame that setback and won the general election in Wisconsin in a very unorthodox way for a Republican, underperforming in the GOP suburbs outside Milwaukee but utterly dominating small towns throughout the state. Many of those small towns had voted in 2012 for Democrat Barack Obama for president and for Tammy Baldwin for Senate.
In fact, there are 24 counties in Wisconsin — mostly in the more rural western half of the state — that voted for Baldwin in 2012 and then Trump in 2016.
Vukmir, a product of the state’s Republican southeastern suburban belt, lost many of them by double digits to Nicholson in Tuesday’s GOP primary.
How she performs in those counties this fall will be one key to the Senate fight in November.
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