Why Wisconsin Votes As It Does

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Wisconsin, the badger state, constitutes a perennial battleground state. Like many of its Midwestern neighbors, the state leans Democratic but remains readily willing to vote Republican. While voting for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama by double-digit margins, the state also came within one percent – twice – of voting for Republican candidate George W. Bush.

These voting patterns have quite interesting historical roots. Indeed, they stretch back for more than a century.

To examine these roots, let’s first take a look at a map of German immigration patterns in 1890:

Wisconsin German Immigrants Flickr

More below.

This map, derived from the New York Times, graphs the percentage of German-born immigrants in each Wisconsin county from the 1890 census. There is a striking correlation between this map and Wisconsin in the 2004 presidential election:

Wisconsin 2004 Flickr

In that election, Senator John Kerry clung to Wisconsin by a razor-thin 0.4% margin, winning 49.7% of the vote to Mr. Bush’s 49.3%. As this map indicates, counties heavily settled by Germans form the Republican voting base which Mr. Bush relied upon. This pattern persists even more than a century after the height of German immigration.

It is also still quite powerful. Out of the twelve counties with greater than 20% German-born immigrants in 1890, only one (Milwaukee) voted for Mr. Kerry.

There are exceptions, of course – and German settlement patterns do not form the entire picture of Wisconsin’s electoral demography. Milwaukee, for instance, gave 61.7% of its vote to the Massachusetts senator, despite being composed of 38.9% German immigrants in 1890. This is due to its relatively high black population today and corresponding white flight, which depleted the city of its German-American population. Scandinavian settlement patterns in non-German rural Wisconsin, to use another example, account for their Democratic vote today (interestingly, rural Wisconsin constitutes one of the last Democratic bastions in rural America).

Nevertheless, the overall pattern is still quite striking. A more detailed look at Wisconsin in 2004 only strengthens the link:

Why Wisconsin Votes As It Does

As is evident, the correlation between German immigration and Wisconsin’s electoral geography finds a resemblance in both degree and strength. The most Republican-voting regions, located along the southeastern portion of the state, also counted themselves highest in German immigrants in 1890.

Finally, this type of demographic analysis can be used to explain why states vote as they do in far more than just Wisconsin. From Democratic strongholds in former cotton-growing areas of the Deep South to South Dakota’s Native-American and Democratic-voting reservations, history offers a fascinating insight into contemporary politics.

18 thoughts on “Why Wisconsin Votes As It Does”

  1. My Mother’s side of the family comes from one hour across the border in Minnesota, all descend from German Catholic immigrants, and are varying degrees of moderate to liberal Democrat. Wouldn’t the religion of these German immigrants play a factor in the voting patterns?

    Also, out of curiosity, would there be ANY sort of residual Republican voting from when Wisconsin produced such politicians as Robert LaFollette?  Or would they have all switched to the Democratic Party by now?

  2. There was an interesting piece by Michael Barone in August 2008 discussing the relative performances of John Kerry and Barack Obama in various regions of the country, in which he said:

    Obama is distinctly ahead of John Kerry in two differently settled areas. One is what once was called the Old Northwest but could be called Germano-Scandinavian America: Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska and the northern Rocky Mountain states to the west. Historically, this was a dovish, even pacifist region. It produced nearly half the 56 members of Congress who voted against declaring war in 1917, and it was the heartland of isolationism in the years before Pearl Harbor. Michael Dukakis ran well there in 1988, carrying Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota; Obama seems to be running similarly. There are also local factors at work. These states never have had very many blacks and have no history of racially divisive politics. And Bush did unusually well for a Republican in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, where farmers and ranchers bitterly opposed the environmental policies of the Clinton-Gore administration, which now have faded from memory.

    Not all of these different shifts in opinion will alter electoral votes. McCain is not going to carry Massachusetts; Obama is not going to carry Wyoming. But they do explain why Obama is targeting North Dakota and Nebraska (where he might win the electoral votes of the Omaha and Lincoln congressional districts); why Virginia, Republican since 1968, is competitive; and why McCain is running better in economically ailing Michigan than in economically thriving Minnesota.

  3. It’s these same German Catholics from central MN that give Michele Bachmann her wins.  (My entire family is from the capital of MN German Catholicism, St. Cloud and I am 75% German and born and raised Catholic.)

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