‘Wisconsin’s struggling through a reckoning:’ Voters split ticket between Trump and Baldwin

CATHY WURZER: We're going to turn to election results in neighboring Wisconsin, which delivered 10 electoral college votes to Donald Trump. That pushed him over the 270 mark and led to the Associated Press calling the race for the former president in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. While Trump carried Wisconsin, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won her very competitive Senate race in that state. Just a few hours ago, she gave a victory speech in Madison.

TAMMY BALDWIN: And while I am overjoyed at this victory, I have to acknowledge the results of the presidential race. While we worked our hearts out to elect Kamala Harris, I recognize that the people of Wisconsin chose Donald Trump, and I respect their choice.

CATHY WURZER: Baldwin will get a third term in the United States Senate after beating Republican challenger Eric Hovde by just a percentage point, about 29,000 votes. In the presidential race, Trump beat Harris by the same margin. There's something interesting happening in Wisconsin. UW-Eau Claire political science professor Adam Kunz is here to explain. Professor, welcome.

ADAM KUNZ: Hi, Cathy. Thanks for having me.

CATHY WURZER: Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time. So Senator Baldwin nodded perhaps to her split-ticket voters in Wisconsin. Does she have a group of supporters who also support Trump?

ADAM KUNZ: Well, as we're digging into the data, I think that's the story that we're looking at. If you look at the counties that are in Wisconsin-- so we have 72 counties. And in terms of her performance, she outperformed Kamala Harris in every single one of those except two counties, which were Dane and Menominee counties, two very, very different counties. And even in those counties where Trump carried the vote, Hovde underperformed him pretty significantly.

So I think that's-- what that's telling us is that Baldwin is appealing to a group of people, rural Wisconsinites, people in suburban areas just outside of Milwaukee, Madison, Eau Claire, those areas that are on the fringes. And she's appealing to them in a way that Harris did not.

CATHY WURZER: That shouldn't surprise, though, I mean, because she's a legendary politician in Wisconsin. If there was a Mount Rushmore of Wisconsin politicians, she probably would be on it. Yet she squeaked by, which surprised me. Or shouldn't it?

ADAM KUNZ: Actually, I'm not that surprised by it, Cathy, to be honest with you. If you compare the results of this Senate election to the last Senate election, which we had in 2022 with Johnson, the percentage points are pretty similar. So we're about within one percentage point of challengers. I think that what that's telling us is that since 2020, Wisconsin's been struggling through a reckoning as to what it is.

So since COVID, I think we've now had two Senate elections, both within one percentage point of one another. And I think incumbents always have an advantage. Johnson had an advantage. Baldwin's always going to have an advantage if she's an incumbent.

But I think what we're seeing in the pattern here is that Wisconsinites are searching for a post-COVID identity in a lot of ways. This is really, really different from her results in 2018, when there was not a presidential election. She was mostly unchallenged. She ended up with a 10 percentage point lead over her challenger in 2018.

But if you go back to her earlier elections, for instance, those were narrower. Those were time periods when we had a general election and a presidency on the ballot. So I think, in other words, what I'm saying is that we're seeing a pattern that remains unchanged for the last four years.

CATHY WURZER: Interesting. Thanks for the background. I appreciate that. Say, I'm wondering what you think-- well, obviously, we talked about ticket splitting. Is there a long history of ticket splitting in Wisconsin?

ADAM KUNZ: There is not, at least in recent memory. So if you go back to 1968, this is-- that was the last time that there was a president that was elected by one party and a senator that was elected by a different party. So we had Richard Nixon who was elected in Wisconsin on the Republican ticket for the presidency. And then we had Senator Nelson from the Democratic ticket, who was elected in 1968.

And that pattern, in terms of split-ticket voting, has not really carried through over the last, say, 56 years or so. But I think that hides something, which is the fact that Senate elections work differently. In Wisconsin, we have class 1 and class 2 senators, which means that they're not always going to be up for an election during a general election year. So every time there's a president that's elected, we may not be electing a senator at the same time.

And I think the other thing to note, too, is that prior to 1968, this was more common in Wisconsin. This has actually happened a couple of times in 1940 with a progressive candidate and then in 1912 with a split with a senator named La Follette.

And so I think what this hearkens us back to is a time period at the early turn of the 20th century, a period where the nation is doing a lot of soul searching. We're coming out of the Gilded Age. We're dealing with a lot of the challenges of wealth, wealth centralization. People are feeling the pressure at home. They're feeling the pressure at the grocery store. And there's a lot of soul searching that's happening. So you're going to see chaotic results that maybe we haven't seen in the postwar era.

CATHY WURZER: Yet I'm seeing your maps. And I know enough about Wisconsin to be dangerous, since I went to school there. And I'm seeing rural Wisconsin quite red. I think Trump's rural coalition, which helped him win Wisconsin in 2016 and nearly did the same in 2020, seems still very strong. I mean, Grant County went for Trump by, what, 58%. Iron County, far northern Wisconsin, 63%. So can you shed some light on what's happening in rural Wisconsin?

ADAM KUNZ: Yeah, that's always the story in Wisconsin, is what's the difference between the suburbanites around Milwaukee and Madison and Eau Claire and Green Bay versus the rural Wisconsinites in the middle of the state and those northeastern counties, et cetera? And I think the story to tell there is-- Kathy Cramer is a really good professor down at Madison who recently gave a talk at our campus about this. And it's the idea of resentment voting.

And basically, it's a reaction to the perception that something feels off. Even if reality does not necessarily bear that out, if your perception of the economy is I'm not feeling the benefits of that, even if it's statistically not true, but if your perception is such that you're feeling off, you're going to vote against the incumbent. And this election was all, in Wisconsin at least, about voting against the incumbent party, which was Biden's party.

We can talk all the time about how high the stock market is, whether or not inflation is down, whether or not job losses are or are not being felt. But if the average rural American perceives it such that that's not the case or if they're not seeing that at home in their dining room table or in their pocketbook, they're always going to vote against the person that's in power. And what we've seen in the last several election cycles is that tennis game back and forth with rural Wisconsinites.

There's always a perception that something's wrong. And whoever's in power, it must be them that's to blame. And so I think any candidate going forward in Wisconsin is going to have to break through that perception game.

CATHY WURZER: Because Walz and Harris did talk about the economy. I mean, they made the middle class a pretty central part of the campaign. But obviously, that economic message fell short in rural Wisconsin and in rural Minnesota, too, for that matter. But is there something that Democratic candidates have to talk in a different way then to rural voters?

ADAM KUNZ: I mean, this is the question of the hour, right? Is there something that Democratic candidates can say differently? I think part of the challenge is the way we consume information these days. I think that most people are getting their information pretty much on an ad hoc basis.

Cable news is not dominating as much as it used to. And so it's mostly social media. You're getting your information in fractured and outlying ways. And so controlling the message is very difficult.

I think the other thing to keep in mind, too, is that it doesn't really matter how much the messaging might change if you're not seeing real-world results. And so I think Walz and Harris did a really great job of trying to get that message out. But if people are not actively listening, then that's a problem.

We saw right at the eve of the election, for instance, Google searches just exploded throughout the country, asking questions like, who's running for president? Did Biden step down? And you can see the graph just exponentially increasing. That tells us maybe something that the average voter is not as plugged in as we think we are.

You and I, Cathy, are plugged into this because we pay attention to this sort of thing. But a big perennial issue in political science since the 1964 is whether or not the average voter thinks the same way that we do and whether or not they're as ideologically committed or as plugged in as we are. And it may be the case that most voters just-- an election is a thing that happens every couple of years. And we do it, and we move on.

CATHY WURZER: You are a plugged-in person, professor, and you are at UW-Eau Claire. And it really was ground zero for so many of the-- I mean, everyone came through Eau Claire multiple times and both sides.

ADAM KUNZ: Yeah.

CATHY WURZER: Are you kind of happy it's over?

ADAM KUNZ: I'm ready to be done. I'm tired of throwing away all of the ads that came into my mail. I mean, I got probably-- I don't know-- maybe $200 worth of advertising that ended up in my mailbox. I'm tired of blocking text messages and phone calls on my phone.

And I think everybody's pretty beleaguered by this. And I for one, as someone who teaches political science and especially long-term history of political theory and political thought, I'm a student of history, and I recognize that elections are part of a long-term story here. And so it'll be interesting to see how things play out. As someone who prefers to teach and prefers to engage with the public on this sort of thing, my goal now is to reach out to all my students, regardless of ideology, to the community members, regardless of ideology, and try to make sense of what the future looks like.

CATHY WURZER: All right. I wish you well. And I appreciate your time here. Thank you so much.

ADAM KUNZ: Thanks, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: Adam Kunz is a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.