Retiring Guy's Digest: GET ME REWRITE: Rural Wisconsin counties no match for Democratic shift in once-red suburbs (Florence County edition)

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

GET ME REWRITE: Rural Wisconsin counties no match for Democratic shift in once-red suburbs (Florence County edition)

Florence County ranks 1st among Wisconsin's 72 counties in having the largest percentage of its presidential vote for Donald Trump in 2010.

Source: Wikipedia

3rd-party candidates received 27.4% of vote in 1992, 16.2% of vote in 1996, 3.5% in 2016;

(Alabama segregationist George Wallace received 9.4% of the vote in 1968)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 12/19/2022

In a word, no.

If the Democratic collapse in rural western and northern Wisconsin was the most dramatic feature of the state’s 2016 election map, then the unchecked Republican decline in suburban southern Wisconsin is the most arresting feature of the 2022 map. It is all the more striking when you consider that Republicans had reason to believe they might steady their suburban ship this year, with Donald Trump not on the ballot, with a Democrat in the White House who has poor job ratings, with crime and inflation playing prominent roles in the campaign. But that didn’t happen.

Since the 2008 presidential election, Democrats have not come close to winning a majority of the vote in Florence County.

Sources: Wikipedia (presidential, gubernatorial)

The population of Florence County has decreased slightly more than 10% since 2000. Wisconsin's population has increased 10% and Dane County;s has increased 32% during the same period, with Dane County adding 135,000 residents, nearly 30 times Florence County's current population.