Changes in Voting Patterns & Increased Turnout Resulted in Wisconsin Going Blue

Wisconsin has received a lot of attention for being a swing state in presidential elections, and this state has had a significant role in the results of the 2020 election. There were some small differences from 2016 in voting patterns among a few suburban and rural areas of the state that resulted in Wisconsin turning blue this election.  

According to Reid Magney, who is the Public Information Officer at the Wisconsin Election Commission, the Wisconsin election results have not yet been officially certified. However, the unofficial results show that Joe Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes in 2020. In 2016, President Donald Trump defeated his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton by 23,000 votes in Wisconsin. The margin was less than one percent. 

Professor Kathleen Dolan is a professor of political science at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin and the Co-editor in Chief of The American Journal of Political Science. 

She said that President-Elect Joe Biden won Wisconsin by doing better in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, and that he did better in some of the suburbs inside and around Milwaukee County than Clinton did in 2016. She said this was because of increased voter turnout, along with those who might not have voted in 2016.  There also were voters who shifted toward Biden for this election. 

She said that one of the biggest surprises in this election was that places like Brookfield and Mequon voted at lower rates than they did in 2016. 

She also said that areas of Ozaukee County voted for Trump at lower rates than in 2016, which may have played a part in the state turning blue. 

“We will have to see if this is a reaction to President Trump, or if it is part of a trend of some of the suburbs that are closer to the city becoming a bit bluer,” says Dolan. 

Mary O’Neil is a teacher and a Biden voter who lives in Oshkosh, which is in red Winnebago County. She said she wasn’t surprised by Wisconsin switching to blue for this election. 

“I was hoping it was going to be blue,” she said. “And I did feel like because of some of the things going on with Kenosha and COVID and everything, the bigger urban areas are recognizing the bigger issues that need addressing.” 

More populated counties such as Milwaukee, Madison, Eau Claire, and La Crosse have traditionally been blue in past elections. The 2020 election voting patterns in Wisconsin weren’t significantly different than the 2016 results, but there was an increase in voter turnout that caused the state to be blue this year. 

According to the unofficial results provided by the Associated Press, the only rural areas that switched from red to blue were Sauk County and Door County.  

In 2016, Trump won Sauk County with 14,799 for Trump and 14,690 for Clinton. But in 2020, Biden won with 18,108 votes while Trump had 17,493 votes in this county. Similarly, Door County was red in 2016 with 8,580 votes for Trump and 8,014 votes for Clinton. But this election, the county turned blue with 10,044 votes for Biden and 9,752 votes for Trump. So these results show that part of the reason Biden won over Trump was due to larger voter turnout in these areas, according to the Associated Press.  

However, most other rural areas that were Republican in 2016 stayed that way in the 2020 election. When asked about why rural areas of Wisconsin tend to vote red, Dolan said that there isn’t one specific explanation for this.  

“The shift to rural counties voting Republican has been a trend that has been happening for the past 20 years,” she says. “Part of it might be the sorting of populations that takes place.  Younger people and those with higher levels of education tend to leave rural areas for cities and bigger towns and those groups tend to vote more Democratic than Republican.” 

O’Neill mentioned that she went up to rural Wisconsin this Labor Day and was surprised by how many Trump signs she saw in comparison to where she lives. She said that a lot of the areas appeared to be lower income and she said that she feels like many of them are uninformed. 

 “I think they are looking at what Trump says very literally and not what the real facts are,” she said. “I don’t think they are investigating underneath the surface of what he’s saying.” 

The unofficial results show that many of these rural areas are supposed to be red, although the results are not yet officially certified in Wisconsin.