The story of the 2024 election map in Wisconsin is a story of small shifts and marginal trend lines.
The red-trending small towns continued to get redder.
The blue-trending suburbs got slightly bluer.
And blue cities on average got a little less blue.
These were not head-snapping changes. This was not a “wave election” here. In fact, no Wisconsin presidential election in decades has seen smaller changes in the state’s political geography. And no battleground state saw smaller voting shifts than Wisconsin did in 2024.
More than almost anywhere else in America, Wisconsin was swing-resistant in this election, which made it the closest state in the nation.
But because this state is so evenly divided, these modest changes had a very big effect, flipping Wisconsin from blue to red and carrying Donald Trump to victory.
This is a closer look at how Wisconsin’s 72 counties and more than 1,800 communities voted this fall, and the contributions they made to a narrow Trump victory in 2024, four years after a narrow Trump defeat in 2020, and eight years after Trump’s first narrow victory in 2016.
What changed this time?
Statewide, the net shift was just about 50,000 votes, from Trump’s defeat by about 21,000 votes in 2020 to his victory by around 29,000 votes in 2024.
In percentage terms, the GOP gain was 1.5 points (the difference between losing by six-tenths of a point last time to winning by nine-tenths of a point this time).
But these shifts were not uniform across the state.
Around 1,300 of Wisconsin’s cities, towns and villages got redder in 2024, while more than 500 got bluer.Here is what those shifts looked like across the state’s urban, suburban and rural landscapes.
The rural vote
Rural voters were the biggest contributor to Trump’s win, as they were in 2016.
One good way to measure the rural vote in Wisconsin is to combine all the state’s more than 1,200 towns into one bloc. This represents about 30% of the state’s electorate. This measure leaves out some rural voters who live in villages, and it includes some suburban voters who live in towns.
But the “town vote” is overwhelmingly rural, making it an excellent gauge of the partisan transformation of rural Wisconsin over the decades. The town vote split roughly 50/50 in the Clinton elections of the 1990s. Republicans won it by 13-14 points in the Bush elections of 2000 and 2004, and by 12 points in the second Obama election of 2012. Then Trump won it by 25.2 points in 2016, 25.3 points in 2020 and 27.4 points in 2024.
In other words, Trump made huge rural inroads in 2016, consolidated those gains in 2020, and made new gains in 2024. These latest gains were far more modest than eight years earlier. But 2024 showed that Trump hadn’t “maxed out” his vote in rural Wisconsin. Instead, he had room to grow, which was a difference maker.
Translated into actual votes, Trump won Wisconsin’s towns by 281,017 votes in 2024 after winning them by 255,784 in 2020. That’s a net gain of more than 25,000 votes over 2020, which is half the entire vote shift that occurred statewide, and almost equal to Trump’s winning margin this time.
In regional terms, Trump’s biggest rural gains came in western Wisconsin, where his winning margin grew by 4 to 7 points in some counties.
And in population terms, his biggest gains came in the very smallest towns.
In communities that cast fewer than 500 votes, Trump won by more than 32 points and his winning margin increased by 3.5 points over 2020. In slightly bigger communities (that generated between 500 and 1,000 votes) Trump won by a little less (29 points) and his winning margin increased by a little less (2.5 points).
In communities a little bigger than that (that generated between 1,000 and 1,500 votes), he won by less (24 points) and his winning margin increased by less (2.1 points). In other words, among small communities, population size not only correlated with Trump’s overall margin, but with how much his margin grew compared to the last election.
The suburban vote
Wisconsin’s suburban vote is spread across the state, but the biggest concentration of suburban voters is in metropolitan Milwaukee, from the Republican-leaning “WOW counties” of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington to the Democratic-leaning inner suburbs within Milwaukee County.
These communities account for almost 20% of the statewide vote. Trump won this combined suburban region by nearly 9 points in 2024. That was 1 point less than he won it by in 2020, 7 points less than he won it by in 2016, and 13 points less than Republican Mitt Romney won it by in 2012.
The good news for Democrats is that the trend away from the GOP in suburban Milwaukee continued, even in a bad year nationally for the party. But the better news for Trump was that the shift was far more modest in 2024 than it was in 2016 or 2020.
And this was another difference-maker. For example, in 2020 Democrats saw a net gain in the metro Milwaukee suburbs of about 25,000 votes compared to 2016, enough by itself to cost Trump the state. But in 2024, the Democrats’ growth here slowed considerably. The party’s net gain over 2020 was less than 5,000 votes.
What about suburban voters in the rest of the state? The growing Madison suburbs remained very blue, but did not get any bluer in this election. The Green Bay suburbs remained modestly red, shifting very little. The much smaller Twin Cities exurbs in Wisconsin remained quite purple, though shifted slightly in a Republican direction.
All in all, the story of the suburbs is one of very little change this time. The biggest exceptions to this were some of Milwaukee’s more sizable red and blue suburbs. Among them, Wauwatosa moved 6 points in a Democratic direction, Germantown moved 5, Menomonee Falls and Elm Grove moved 4, and Brookfield and Grafton moved 3.
Unlike 2020, however, the Democrats’ suburban gains weren’t nearly big enough to offset the GOP’s rural gains.
The urban vote
This election saw some intriguing but modest urban gains for Trump. They weren’t uniform across cities, and they weren’t the biggest contributor to his statewide victory. But the shifts whittled away at the Democrats’ historic urban advantage and opened up a new avenue outside rural Wisconsin for Republican inroads.
Let’s start with the state’s biggest city, Milwaukee, where turnout increased in this election. Milwaukee generated a few thousand more votes in 2024 than 2020, despite losing population. Trump made small gains with Black voters and bigger gains with Latino voters, both a much larger share of the electorate in Milwaukee than other places in Wisconsin.
According to an analysis by Marquette Law School fellow John Johnson, the Democratic margin in the state’s majority-black wards declined slightly from 81 points in 2020 to 79 points in 2024. The Democratic margin in majority-Latino wards declined more sharply from 52 to 42 points.
These gains weren’t transformative. In the city of Milwaukee, Trump’s share of the vote rose by a very small amount, from 19.6% to 20.8%. But because his losing margin was smaller in 2024 (56 points) than 2020 (59 points), Trump lost the city by about 6,500 fewer votes than he did four years earlier. That vote shift was the equivalent of about one-fifth of Trump’s winning margin statewide.
Trump also reduced his losing margin in several other cities. He lost Madison by 68 points, down slightly from 70 in 2020. His losing margin decreased by 8 points in La Crosse, by about 4 points in Beloit and Kenosha, and by about 3 points in Janesville, Racine and Stevens Point. These were the biggest changes.
In other cities, such as Green Bay, Eau Claire, Appleton, Wausau and Oshkosh, the vote scarcely shifted at all from 2020.
On the whole, Trump’s gains in Wisconsin’s mid-sized, blue-collar cities were modest and uneven. But they were noteworthy in a state this close. If you add up the 15 cities in Wisconsin that generated the most votes after Milwaukee and Madison, there was almost a 2-point shift in the margin toward the GOP. Trump lost them collectively by 12.7 points after losing them by 14.4 points in 2020. That translated into a net vote gain of about 6,000 votes — similar to Trump’s gain in the city of Milwaukee.
So, what do all these trends and non-trends tell us about Wisconsin’s evolving political map?
First, they mostly conform to familiar Trump-era voting patterns, especially the GOP’s gains in small towns and the Democrats’ gains in bigger suburbs. The biggest “new” trend involves the small urban inroads Republicans made this time, though we saw a harbinger of that four years ago in Kenosha, Beloit and Racine.
Second, the modest size of these shifts suggests that while Wisconsin is still realigning, this realignment subsided in the third “Trump election.” The biggest rural and suburban swings of previous elections largely flattened out. The vote shifts at the county level were smaller and less wide-ranging than in any presidential election here in at least 60 years.
The vote shifts at the municipal and ward level were more modest than in any presidential election here going back at least to the 1990s, according to an analysis by Johnson of Marquette Law School.
In this election, the biggest shifts occurred in the smallest communities, reducing their impact on the statewide vote. And the biggest counties mostly saw very small shifts.
Wisconsin is now experiencing an unprecedented era of stability in its statewide vote, which coincides with a great deal of volatility in the outcome of statewide elections because it takes very small shifts to alter the result in a state this competitive.
Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that the past two Wisconsin elections featured split outcomes, with Democrats winning for governor and Republicans for Senate in 2022, and Democrats winning for Senate and Republicans for president in 2024.
Does this mean that the next set of big elections in 2026 for governor and 2028 for president and Senate are destined to be as close as these?
Nothing is guaranteed.
For one thing, those elections will take place with a Republican in the White House, not a Democrat, which will create a different political environment.
For another, the 2026 mid-terms will be a lower-turnout election than 2024, and turnout differences between the parties could play a bigger role. In 2024, both sides had a great deal of success in Wisconsin mobilizing their voters, reflected in the fact that Wisconsin had the second highest turnout in the country (a tiny fraction behind Minnesota) and one of the biggest turnout increases in the country, according to the U.S. Election Project.
And of course, the 2028 election won’t have Trump on the ballot. We don’t yet know whether the signature voting trends and patterns of the Trump era will look the same in a post-Trump political world.
Right now, however, Wisconsin’s uniquely competitive track record (presidential races decided by less than a point in 2016, 2020, 2024, Senate races decided by roughly a point in 2022 and 2024, a governor’s race decided by a point in 2018) speaks very loudly.
Even if you disregarded the polling in 2024, this state’s election history pointed to something approaching a jump-ball. And in this case, the polling was sending the very same signal.
The biggest surprise Wisconsin could have produced in 2024 was not a Republican victory for president or a Democratic victory for president, but a decisive victory by either party.
One of these days that may happen again here, but it will feel very strange when it does.
Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.
Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gilbert: Small voting shifts made Wisconsin 2024’s closest state
