But those very features have led to a sharp diminishing in the WOW counties’ status as a redoubtable Republican stronghold. As well-educated, well-off voters have fled the GOP nationwide, so too have they in suburban Wisconsin. While these three counties still back Republican and conservative candidates for office, they’ve been doing so by smaller and smaller margins.
Tuesday’s election for Supreme Court saw the smallest such margin this century: Just 59% of voters backed Dan Kelly, the conservative choice, compared with 41% who supported Protasiewicz. That 18-point spread was just about half as large as George W. Bush’s performance in both of his White House bids, and smaller still than Trump’s 23-point win.
At the same time, Milwaukee County has similarly shifted to the left: Protasiewicz dominated on Tuesday, carrying the county by 46 points, far wider than, say, John Kerry’s 33-point win in 2004 and even bigger than Biden’s 43-point victory. While the county is mostly made up of the eponymous city, a sizable swath is suburban, too, and has been subject to similar patterns.
Collectively, as illustrated in the map at the top of this post, these four counties, which together make up the Milwaukee metropolitan area, now represent a huge problem for Wisconsin Republicans. In 2014, a GOP high point, then-Gov. Scott Walker won the region by 7 points on his way to reelection. Less than a decade later, Protasiewicz prevailed by 13 points, a massive 20-point shift.
It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court race was officially nonpartisan, and progressive candidates have often done much better in such contests in the Trump era than their Democratic counterparts in partisan elections. (Biden, for instance, carried Wisconsin by less than a point; Protasiewicz’s margin stands at 11 points.) But Supreme Court outcomes in Wisconsin are now almost perfectly aligned with partisan ideologies, saddling Republicans with the burden of figuring out how to reverse this trend.
As they have elsewhere, Republicans have enjoyed increased success in rural parts of the state, but as populations plateau or decline in these areas, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to make up for losses in suburbia. In addition, affluent suburbanites tend to vote at higher rates, which means they’re more apt to participate in oddly timed elections, like those for Supreme Court in Wisconsin, which always take place in the spring.
Protasiewicz’s victory is by no means a guarantee of future Democratic success in the Badger State, where statewide elections are usually close affairs and partisan contests are regularly won by Republicans (including Sen. Ron Johnson just last year). But if the GOP keeps on its present course, and in particular remains an implacable foe of abortion rights, then it remains at serious risk of seeing more blowouts like Tuesday’s.
