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

Friday, December 30, 2022

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

Polk County ranks 19th among Wisconsin's 72 counties in having the largest percentage of its presidential vote for Donald Trump in 2010, 12 years after Barack Obama lost the county by less than 2 percentage points.

Source: Wikipedia

3rd-party candidates received 25.2% of vote in 1992, 17.7% of vote in 1996, 6% in 2016;

(Alabama segregationist George Wallace received 5.9% 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.

Democrats have not come close to winning a majority of the vote in Polk County since the 1996 presidential election,

Sources: Wikipedia (presidential, gubernatorial)

The population of Polk County has increased 39% since 1920. Wisconsin's population has increased 124% and Dane County;s has increased 560% during the same period.