{"id":20096,"date":"2017-01-23T05:26:15","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T05:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=20096"},"modified":"2017-01-23T05:26:15","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T05:26:15","slug":"will-rural-wis-trump-voters-swing-back-dems-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/will-rural-wis-trump-voters-swing-back-dems-2018.html","title":{"rendered":"Will rural Wis. Trump voters swing back to Dems in 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Will rural Wis. Trump voters swing back to Dems in 2018<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Will rural Wis. Trump voters swing back to Dems in 2018:-<\/strong> Donald Trump was propelled to victory in Wisconsin by the most volatile part of its electorate \u2014 rural voters with a long history of big election swings, almost always against the party in the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n

That pattern could pose a special challenge to Republicans defending their power in 2018 and 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

Does their track record suggest these restive voters will \u201csnap back\u201d in the next few years?<\/span><\/p>\n

Or do the seismic rural shifts in Wisconsin last fall signal a more lasting trend away from the Democratic Party?<\/span><\/p>\n

As dust settles, parts of political map scrambled<\/span>
\n You can find fodder for both theories in the roller-coaster history of Wisconsin\u2019s rural vote that culminated in November\u2019s election earthquake.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s colossal margins in the state\u2019s least populated places were the key to his 2016 victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

An examination of 50 years of Wisconsin election returns shows little precedent for the size of his rural landslide.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it also shows that large shifts in the rural vote have been a recurring phenomenon.<\/span><\/p>\n

The presidential swings in Wisconsin\u2019s smaller counties have been consistently bigger than the swings in the state\u2019s larger counties.<\/span><\/p>\n

Analysis: One new presidency gives rise to two divergent grass-roots movements<\/span>
\n And they\u2019ve been twice as large, on average, as the swings in the national popular vote.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve been continually disappointed for economic and other reasons. They have tended to react increasingly strongly against whoever seems to be in power. It is almost like a pendulum gaining force,\u201d Democratic pollster Paul Maslin said of the state\u2019s rural voters.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maslin calls the rural north the \u201cswinging gate\u201d of Wisconsin politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Democrats, the optimistic view is that these rural counties, after swinging so hard in 2016, will swing back again in 2018 and 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more pessimistic view is that 2016 marked a rural pivot away from Democrats, like a \u201cdam bursting,\u201d said Maslin.<\/span><\/p>\n

The red flag for Democrats is the utter collapse they suffered last fall in northern and western Wisconsin, which followed heavy rural losses in Republican Scott Walker\u2019s three victories for governor in 2010, the 2012 attempted recall and 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

Democrats in Wisconsin (and Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan) have a long history of performing better with rural whites than Democrats in most other states.<\/span><\/p>\n

If that is now changing, if the rural vote in the upper Midwest goes the way of the rural vote in the South or Great Plains or Appalachia, it will not only hobble the party in state races, but turn Wisconsin from a Democratic-leaning presidential battleground into something more like a toss-up. Regionally, it will open the upper Midwest to Republicans and multiply their paths to victory in the Electoral College.<\/span><\/p>\n

GOP pollster Gene Ulm believes the rural leg of the Democratic coalition in the northern Midwest has become less and less reliable over time.<\/span><\/p>\n

But he\u2019s not quite ready to declare a realignment.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne data point does not a trend make,\u201d said Ulm. Republicans made rural gains in the region in 2012 and 2016 when it was the party out of the White House, he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDoes the trend continue as the party in power?\u201d Ulm said.<\/span><\/p>\n

One caveat for the GOP is that Trump\u2019s victory was exceedingly narrow in Wisconsin. And that slender victory depended on unheard-of rural margins, boosted by opponent Hillary Clinton\u2019s deep unpopularity with those voters. Those mammoth GOP margins may be hard to repeat, especially coming from some of the \u201cswingiest\u201d voters in America.<\/span><\/p>\n

How swingy?<\/span><\/p>\n

For this analysis, we combined the state\u2019s 46 rural counties (the ones that lie outside any metropolitan area) into a single bloc and tracked their presidential vote over the decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider how the pendulum has swung since the 1990s:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 In 1996, Wisconsin\u2019s rural counties swung 7 points in a Democratic direction (from a 2.5 point Democratic margin in 1992 to a 9.2 point Democratic margin in ’96). The national shift was just 3 points.<\/span>
\n \u2022 In 2000, these same counties saw a 14-point Republican swing, compared to an 8-point Republican swing nationally.<\/span>
\n \u2022 In 2008, these counties swung 14 points in a Democratic direction, compared to a 10-point Democratic swing nationally.<\/span>
\n \u2022 In 2012, they saw a 10-point Republican swing, compared to a 3-point GOP swing nationally.<\/span>
\n \u2022 And in 2016, Wisconsin\u2019s rural counties shifted 18 points in a GOP direction, compared to a 2-point Republican swing in the country as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

Several things stand out about this history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the national vote, these swings were almost entirely against the party in the White House (the only exceptions were 2004, when there was very little swing, and President Clinton\u2019s 1996 re-election). And the swings in rural Wisconsin were much bigger than in the country as a whole. That was especially true last fall.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, the voting patterns in 2016 were unlike anything that has happened in Wisconsin in modern times. While Trump\u2019s statewide victory was narrow, he won these 46 rural counties by a combined 19 points \u2014 a bigger margin than any Republican in the past half-century. That includes Ronald Reagan\u2019s landslide in 1984 and Richard Nixon\u2019s landslide in 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n

The shift from 2012 was so big \u2014 when these same rural counties split their vote 50\/50 between former President Obama and Mitt Romney \u2014 that it can\u2019t be explained just by high Republican or low Democratic turnout; it’s clear that large numbers of people switched from voting Democrat (for Obama in \u201908 and \u201812) to Republican (for Trump).<\/span><\/p>\n

What sticks out even more about 2016 is the immense divide between the state\u2019s rural counties and its bigger metropolitan counties. Over the past half century, that gap has remained a fairly modest one. The \u201cnon-metropolitan vote\u201d has almost always been more Republican than the \u201cmetropolitan vote,\u201d but not dramatically so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last fall, the gap became an abyss. Trump lost the metro vote by 5 points and won the rural (non-metro) vote by 19. The rural-metropolitan gap was four times bigger than its 50-year average, reflecting far bigger divisions by class (income and education) and population size.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump: Why didn’t marchers vote?<\/span>
\n Some of the counties that saw the biggest shifts toward Trump had been trending Republican for decades. But others had been trending Democratic for decades. Trump\u2019s gains in rural counties bore little relationship to their long-term partisan trend, making it even trickier to predict which way they will go in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

What these voters do in 2018 and 2020 will depend, of course, on events, the economy, and how Trump and the GOP Congress perform and behave in power.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the history of these voters does offer some potential clues.<\/span><\/p>\n

The swingy, anti-Washington bent of these rural counties suggests they are much less partisan than populous Madison (blue), Milwaukee (blue) or Waukesha (red). Many of these counties voted by large margins for Obama just eight years ago. Some have swung back and forth from one party to the other. Until the 2016 race, there was no overall rural trend toward the GOP in Wisconsin, based on presidential voting. That history argues against a Republican rural realignment in the state.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is swingy,\u201d House Republican Sean Duffy said of his northern Wisconsin district, which Trump won by a much wider margin than its partisan makeup would have suggested.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut just because now Mr. Trump has a Republican Congress and is in the White House, does that mean it\u2019s going to swing back? I would argue not. It\u2019s about, \u2018Does Mr. Trump deliver?\u2019\u201d said Duffy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those rural voters drawn to Trump out of economic frustration and a basic desire to shake things up may be the most likely to shift back if Trump doesn\u2019t deliver or if Republicans overreach.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think 2018 is going to be a much better political environment for Democrats around the country than 2016. It\u2019s all on them (Republicans). It\u2019s their person in the White House,\u201d said House Democrat Ron Kind, whose southwestern Wisconsin district was one of about a dozen Democratic seats nationally to vote for Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf they fall back on their old ideological agenda, they\u2019re going to face an electoral revolt in two years,\u201d Kind said of the GOP.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of the Republican swing last fall in rural and blue-collar communities, along with Walker\u2019s recent dominance of the rural vote, could be a sign that some realignment is occurring. Those rural voters who were drawn to Trump for reasons of culture and identity may be especially unlikely to abandon him, particularly if he moves his party in the more populist direction he signaled in his blunt inaugural address Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 2018 midterms \u2014 including the races in Wisconsin for governor and U.S. Senate \u2014 will be the first major indicator of where these rural voters are headed.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the 2020 presidential contest will be the second.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s rural appeal turned out to be the elusive formula that turned Wisconsin red after three decades of presidential misses by the GOP.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/politics\/2017\/01\/22\/rural-voters-trump\/96927428\/<\/span><\/div>\n

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