– From Alma (Wisconsin)
The last time Larry Jost considered endorsing a Republican was in grade school. “I was wearing a badge ‘I like Ike’ [‘J’aime Ike’, surnom de Dwight Eisenhower, président républicain de 1953 à 1961]but it was mainly for the rhyme”, remembers this man whose family has lived in Wisconsin for six generations. The small town of Alma where he lives has two main streets and stretches along the Mississippi, between a dam and limestone cliffs.
Seven key states
American media count seven pwing states, or key states that could determine the outcome of the US presidential election on November 5. These are states that are not solidly won by either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. And which could therefore swing to one side or the other during the election.
Among these seven states are Georgia, but also Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won in six of these states, with the exception of North Carolina. Today, Donald Trump regularly leads the polls in most countries.wing states, emphasizes Political. Throughout the American election campaign, International mail publishes a series of reports in key states, of which here is the second part, in Arizona.
International mail
Every Wednesday morning, at the art gallery that his wife runs, Larry goes to his book club meeting, where he meets a former local judge, a carpenter and a farmer. At the last club meeting they discussed an anthology of short stories collected by [le poète africain-américain] Langston Hughes. “We’re the last Democrats in Buffalo County – why do you think we’re quietly here in armor?” one of them joked.
An endangered species
This is because they belong to a species that has suddenly become endangered. From 1988 to 2012, Buffalo County voted Democratic in every presidential election. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump won the county by 22 points and brutally wrested Wisconsin from Democrats in his electoral victory over his rival, Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump again won Buffalo County, and while he lost Wisconsin to Joe Biden, it was by only 20,000 votes out of the nearly 3 million in attendance.
Trump’s enduring appeal to rural white voters has been a key factor in his rise and resurgence. Rural districts have continued to shift away from Democrats.
In Wisconsin, rural white voters are, on average, more left-leaning than anywhere else in the United States. According to local polls, Joe Biden would have a short lead in the state, and his re-election may depend on his ability to further rally this segment of the electorate.
The confrontation emerging in Wisconsin is surprising, especially because it contradicts the usual image of a Trump adored by rural white voters. They actually represent a much larger share of voters in Wisconsin than in the other six states that were classified in the key states category in 2024. Paradoxically, they remain much less Republican than their peers in the other swing modes.
An old bastion of agrarianism
In 2020, Joe Biden lost with this segment of the electorate by a margin of 24 points in Wisconsin compared to 43 points nationally. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, Trump won the rural white vote by 44 and 31 points, respectively. According to a recent study by Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin, Biden may have gained slightly among the state’s rural voters compared to 2020 — except that the improvement is more than offset by his decline among voters’ residential suburbs.
Larry Jost and his book club friends are therefore not the exception we thought: The Democratic coalition in Wisconsin owes a lot to rural white voters. Why is the Democratic vote in rural Wisconsin so resilient? First, and this is the most obvious reason, this state is an ancient bastion of progressive agrarianism as embodied in the early 20th century.e 19th century Robert La Follette, re-elected three times governor and three times state senator, supporter of progressive taxes and public investment in rural areas. La Follette and his successors in Wisconsin politics, who later joined the Democratic Party, united around them “the proponents of progressive agrarianism who saw the role of the state positively as it brought electricity, public services and roads to the country”, summarizes Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A vision that has not completely disappeared.
Populist turn
The turn towards anti-state populism dates back to 2010, at the height of the wave of [mouvement ultraconservateur] Tea Party. That year, the Republicans took all three branches of government [judiciaire, législatif et exécutif] in the state of Wisconsin, and Scott Walker became governor thanks to a speech that demonized government officials and their fat pensions. Dozens of rural districts that have always voted Democratic gave him their votes. A few years later, Trump was only to reap what Scott Walker had sown.
In addition to this long-standing progressive tradition, the Trump vote faces other obstacles in Wisconsin. Several moderate-sized college campuses are scattered throughout the state (remember that Biden scores better in rural areas among young voters and high school students). Wisconsin also stands out for its fairly balanced demographics, between residential suburbs and the countryside, between educated and uneducated voters, so much so that the two parties’ scores have evolved almost symmetrically in recent years.
During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton didn’t visit Wisconsin once, and Democrats are still biting their fingers about it. This year, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have already been there, between them, eight times. Meetings are rare in rural areas, but of the forty-six branches opened by the Biden campaign team in Wisconsin (a record for a key state), nearly half are in rural areas.
On the Republican side, we bet that these efforts or that controversial issues like abortion and the attack on the Capitol [menés par des partisans de Trump le 6 janvier 2021], will be unable to do anything given the appeal that Trump has to rural voters. Before winning Wisconsin in 2016, no Republican had won in the state in thirty-two years, and Trump did so without having to commit significant resources there himself. The Wisconsin Republican Party remains well organized and “very good at mobilizing his voters”, notes Mark Graul, a conservative strategist.
“The Rage of White Campaigners”
Biden’s main problem is that his record on the economy and immigration are considered disastrous, two issues that are considered priorities by voters in general and by rural voters in particular. In rural Wisconsin, like almost everywhere in rural America, the problems are deep: demographic decline, collapse of local businesses, crisis in access to health care, closing of family farms.
Charlene, a farmer in western Wisconsin, works a second job as a housekeeper to supplement her family’s income, and will vote for Trump in November for his firmness on the economy and health. Recently, her son fell ill and was left with exorbitant medical expenses. Due to opposition from Republicans, Wisconsin is one of the last ten US states not to extend [le programme d’assurance-santé] Medicaid for patients whose income is just above the poverty line.
Democrats like to tout their commitment to big investments in rural areas. Thus the major infrastructure bill issued by President Joe Biden [en novembre 2021] planned an envelope of 1.4 billion dollars [1,3 milliard d’euros] to develop high-speed internet in poorly covered areas, especially to compensate for the delay in campaigns regarding access to the digital economy. But it will take time. Joe Biden may complain that his economic successes are not being judged at their fair value, but his technocratic measures and his talk of protecting democratic rules are unlikely to resonate with rural voters who have “the very clear sense that the political system is broken”, assures Bill Hogseth, local activist in western Wisconsin.
The common “white rural rage” may be exaggerated. But when rural voters hear Trump say that Washington, the federal capital, is a nameless mess and that they have a right to be angry, those are the words that resonate, confirms Bill Hogseth, who adds: “There is a lot of anger among us, so obviously if there is a candidate ready to talk about it, there will be people to follow him.”
