Gilbert: Donald Trump campaigning in liberal Dane County? Here's why

Republican Donald Trump’s visit to deeply blue Dane County Tuesday raises an obvious political question.

Why would Trump go to a place where the GOP not only gets routinely slaughtered but loses by even steeper landslide margins with every new election?

The simple answer is that anything Republicans can do to perform a little less horribly in Wisconsin’s second biggest — and highest-growth — county could help their chances of carrying this state in November.

For any political party, winning the statewide popular vote is not just about carrying “swing-y” purple places. And it’s not just about running up the score on friendly turf.

It’s also about losing unfriendly turf by less.

Dane County is not only increasingly unfriendly turf for Republicans, but its electoral clout keeps growing.

From 2000 to 2020, the total statewide vote for president grew by 27% in Wisconsin. But the Dane County vote increased by almost double that — 48%.

Dane County’s combination of size, high turnout, population growth, and the Democrats’ rising share of the vote makes it arguably the GOP’s single biggest headache on the Wisconsin political map.

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That was the theme of a story I wrote back in early 2018, which noted that these trends were altering the political math in Wisconsin.

Since then, the numbers have only gotten starker.

In the Clinton elections of the 1990s, Democrats were winning Dane County for president by about 50,000 votes.

In the Bush elections of the 2000s, Democrats were winning Dane by an average of about 80,000 votes.

In the Obama elections of 2008 and 2012, Democrats were winning Dane by around 130,000 votes.

With Hillary Clinton as the party’s nominee in 2016, Democrats won Dane by roughly 146,000 votes.

And with Joe Biden as the nominee in 2020, Democrats won Dane by more than 180,000 votes.

That 181,327-vote margin in 2020 had the net effect of boosting the Democrats’ statewide margin by 5.5 percentage points (in a state that was decided by 0.6 percentage points). The growth in the Democratic vote margin from 2016 to 2020 in Dane was enough by itself to flip Wisconsin from red to blue.

These trend lines have made some GOP strategists ask why their party isn’t doing more to reduce its Dane deficit (former Gov. Tommy Thompson has been outspoken on this point). In other words, are there things Republicans can do — campaign visits, get-out-the-vote efforts, time, attention, messaging — to try to lose it by a little less?

That appears to be the logic behind Trump’s visit this week to Waunakee, followed by a visit to very blue Milwaukee the same day.

As blue as it is, the village of Waunakee is actually one of the less lopsided communities in Dane. Trump lost it by 28 points in 2020 — about half his losing margin countywide.

But recent trend lines make it clear how big the challenge is for Trump in that part of the state.

Dane not only historically has a very liberal political culture, but demographic trends are reinforcing that.  It has among the highest education levels in the state, and college graduates have been trending away from the GOP nationally. Vice President Kamala Harris rallied a crowd of more than 10,000 at Madison's Alliant Energy Center less than two weeks ago.

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Trump’s brand of Republicanism has also been a poor fit for the capital city and university hub of Madison and its suburbs.

After losing Dane by 47 points in 2016, Trump lost it by almost 53 points in 2020.

And the broader trend of growing Democratic vote margins in Dane has been happening with great predictability across different election cycles and across races for different offices, a pattern that predates Trump but has been very pronounced in the Trump era.

In contests for governor, Republicans lost Dane by about 81,000 votes in 2010, by about 102,000 in 2014, by about 151,000 in 2018 and by about 174,000 in 2022.

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson lost Dane by 88,000 votes in 2010, by 140,000 in 2016 and by almost 164,000 in 2022.

Even in nonpartisan, April elections for state Supreme Court, the trend line is the same. The winning margins for liberal court candidates have grown over the past two decades from 30,000 or 40,000, to 80,000 or 90,000, to more than 150,000 votes in the last big judicial contest in 2023. That is bigger than Trump’s losing presidential margin in the county eight years ago.

Unless this trajectory suddenly changes, Trump will lose an even more populous Dane County by even more votes than he did in 2020 (and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will do even better in Dane than Biden did four years ago).

But at the same time, there will no doubt be other places in Wisconsin that Trump wins by bigger margins than he did last time.

For both sides, a vote gained in red Wisconsin is the same as a vote gained in blue Wisconsin.

That leaves Republicans with just as much incentive to curb their losses in Madison and its increasingly blue suburbs as Democrats have to slow their decline in the increasingly red small towns of rural Wisconsin.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gilbert: Donald Trump campaigning in liberal Dane County? Here's why