Wisconsin's Donald Trump-Tammy Baldwin split election announced

Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin was re-elected Tuesday because she outperformed her party’s standard-bearer, Kamala Harris, in much of Wisconsin, but especially in smaller counties and lower-income and lower-rate precincts where former President Donald Trump made his biggest gains. . of university education.

Does this mean there are a lot of Baldwin-Trump voters in Trump Country?

The word “much” would make it longer.

The difference between these two contests in Wisconsin was very small: Republicans won the presidential race there by nine-tenths of a point, while Democrats won the Senate race by nine-tenths of a point. The difference between the results of these two races was less than 2 percentage points and 60,000 votes.

According to exit polls, 4% of Trump voters in Wisconsin voted for Baldwin, while 3% of those who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris voted for Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde. This suggests there were very few ticket splitters, but Baldwin had slightly more help from them than Hovde.

Another clue about the two elections is that Hovde received about 54,000 fewer votes than Trump, his party’s presidential candidate, while Baldwin outvoted Harris by a much smaller margin. She received nearly 4,500 more votes statewide than Harris.

This suggests that the modest difference between these two races is largely related to the small share of Trump votes that Hovde did not receive. Where did Trump’s votes go?

There are only three possibilities. Some Trump voters crossed over and voted for Baldwin. Some voted for a third-party candidate for the Senate (two non-major party candidates, Phil Anderson and Thomas Leaguer, received about 71,000 votes – 2% of the total). And some Trump voters skipped the Senate race. Approximately 21,000 fewer votes were cast for the Senate than for the President.

However, we cannot tell from the election results exactly what the distinction between these three groups is. However, we can say something about where Baldwin outperforms Harris the most and where Hovde performs least well relative to Trump.

Good resource for this an analysis After the election, Marquette Law School fellow John Johnson combined demographic data from the census with precinct-level election results to show how the two parties performed in each of these two races in different types of communities.

Where did Baldwin outperform Harris?

Baldwin outperformed Harris by three points in wards with lower levels of college education (known as election “reporting units” in Wisconsin). She lost those places overall, but by a smaller margin than Harris. By contrast, she did not outperform Harris in places with the highest shares of college graduates, which both Democrats won easily.

Revenue followed a similar pattern. Baldwin outperformed Harris in low-income places and did not outperform Harris in the highest-income places where both Democrats performed well.

Baldwin did slightly better than Harris in the majority-white wards, where the vast majority of Wisconsinites live, and in the majority-black wards.

But his lead over Harris was biggest in predominantly Latino districts, and that lead shifted significantly to Trump in this election. But these wards account for a very small share of Wisconsin’s vote, so they don’t explain much of the difference between the two races.

Finally, Baldwin slightly outperformed Harris in wards with younger populations. Such places voted predominantly Democratic but saw a larger shift toward Trump (about three points) compared to neighborhoods with older populations.

To generalize all of these patterns, the difference between how Baldwin did and how Harris did was larger in communities where Trump was strong or where Trump made his biggest inroads in this election.

This also seems true when you look at how these two races vary across Wisconsin’s 72 counties.

The counties where Baldwin outperformed Harris the most (and where Hovde outperformed Trump the most) were small counties like Lafayette, Crawford, and Buffalo in western Wisconsin and Ashland and Forrest and Clark in northern Wisconsin.

In those places, the Democratic margin in the Senate race was 5 to 8 points better than the Democratic margin for the presidency. For example, Democrats lost Lafayette by 20 points in the presidential election and only 12 points in the Senate election.

They lost Crawford County by 14 points for the presidency but by just 8 points for the Senate. These are also the counties where Trump will make his biggest gains in 2024. Lafayette had the largest increase among Wisconsin counties, with Trump’s point margin rising from just under 14 to just over 20 in 2020. Crawford had the third largest increase from 8. -dotted edge to 14-dotted edge. Both counties voted Democratic for president before 2016.

One possibility in these places is that Trump will attract new voters to the polls, or that Republicans will win over some traditional Democrats who aren’t as committed to downvoting. In fact, Republican congressman Derrick Van Orden, who won a close reelection fight in western Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, also fell well behind Trump in the district.

The districts where Baldwin couldn’t beat Harris and Hovde didn’t fall behind Trump look very different. Hovde’s margin was actually better than Trump’s in only four counties: the Menominee Indian Reservation and three suburban “WOW counties” outside Milwaukee: Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington.

All of the WOW counties voted for Trump, but they were among the few places in Wisconsin where Trump did slightly worse in 2024 than in 2020. These are also examples of Republican places where Trump has a worse track record than previous GOP candidates. Ozaukee and Waukesha have numerous suburban communities with large numbers of college graduates who have trended away from the GOP in the Trump Era.

It makes sense that there would be places where a slightly larger share of Republican-leaning voters supported Hovde but did not vote for Trump.

Trump, meanwhile, has outperformed Hovde the most in more rural counties in the north, west and center of the state, where he has fueled the biggest voting swings in Wisconsin over the past decade, just as he outperformed Republican Ron Johnson in places Johnson shares performed. Voting with Trump in 2016.

The end result of all this was something historically unusual in Wisconsin; different parties won the presidential and Senate elections in the same vote; This hasn’t happened in 56 years.

But there was nothing unusual in the size of the difference between these two races. It was actually relatively small in historical terms. Ticket splitting didn’t make a big comeback this election. But with the election this close, very few tickets need to be split to produce a split result.

Wisconsin wasn’t the only state this year where the party that lost the presidential election was the party that won the Senate. The same situation occurred in Michigan, where Democrats won the Senate race by less than half a point but lost the presidential race by just over a point.

This incident appears to have occurred in Nevada; Here it looks like Trump will win for the presidency and the Democrats for the Senate. The same could happen in Arizona, where hundreds of thousands of voters are still being counted.

Eva Wen of the Journal Sentinel and Yoonserk Pyun of USA TODAY contributed.

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