Craig Gilbert

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Donald Trump was propelled to victory in Wisconsin by the most volatile part of its electorate — rural voters with a long history of big election swings, almost always against the party in the White House.

That pattern could pose a special challenge to Republicans defending their power in 2018 and 2020.

Does their track record suggest these restive voters will “snap back” in the next few years?

Or do the seismic rural shifts in Wisconsin last fall signal a more lasting trend away from the Democratic Party?

You can find fodder for both theories in the roller-coaster history of Wisconsin’s rural vote that culminated in November’s election earthquake.

Trump’s colossal margins in the state’s least populated places were the key to his 2016 victory.

An examination of 50 years of Wisconsin election returns shows little precedent for the size of his rural landslide.

But it also shows that large shifts in the rural vote have been a recurring phenomenon.

The presidential swings in Wisconsin’s smaller counties have been consistently bigger than the swings in the state’s larger counties.

And they’ve been twice as large, on average, as the swings in the national popular vote.

“They’ve been continually disappointed for economic and other reasons. They have tended to react increasingly strongly against whoever seems to be in power. It is almost like a pendulum gaining force,” Democratic pollster Paul Maslin said of the state’s rural voters.

Maslin calls the rural north the “swinging gate” of Wisconsin politics.

For Democrats, the optimistic view is that these rural counties, after swinging so hard in 2016, will swing back in 2018 and 2020.

The more pessimistic view is that 2016 marked a rural pivot away from Democrats, like a “dam bursting,” said Maslin.

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The history of the rural vote contains caveats for both parties.

The red flag for Democrats is the utter collapse they suffered last fall in northern and western Wisconsin, which followed heavy rural losses in Republican Scott Walker’s three victories for governor in 2010, the 2012 attempted recall and 2014.

Democrats in Wisconsin (and Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan) have a long history of performing better with rural whites than Democrats in most other states.

If that is now changing, if the rural vote in the upper Midwest goes the way of the rural vote in the South or Great Plains or Appalachia, it will not only hobble the party in state races, but turn Wisconsin from a Democratic-leaning presidential battleground into something more like a toss-up. Regionally, it will open the upper Midwest to Republicans and multiply their paths to victory in the Electoral College.

GOP pollster Gene Ulm believes the rural leg of the Democratic coalition in the northern Midwest has become less and less reliable over time.

But he’s not quite ready to declare a realignment.

“One data point does not a trend make,” said Ulm. Republicans made rural gains in the region in 2012 and 2016 when it was the party out of the White House, he said.

“Does the trend continue as the party in power?” Ulm said.

One caveat for the GOP is that Trump’s victory was exceedingly narrow in Wisconsin. And that slender victory depended on unheard-of rural margins, boosted by opponent Hillary Clinton’s deep unpopularity with those voters. Those mammoth GOP margins may be hard to repeat, especially coming from some of the “swingiest” voters in America.

How swingy?

For this analysis, we combined the state’s 46 rural counties (the ones that lie outside any metropolitan area) into a single bloc and tracked their presidential vote over the decades.

Consider how the pendulum has swung since the 1990s:

In 1996, Wisconsin’s rural counties swung 7 points in a Democratic direction (from a 2.5-point Democratic margin in 1992 to a 9.2-point Democratic margin in '96). The national shift was just 3 points.

In 2000, these same counties saw a 14-point Republican swing, compared with an 8-point Republican swing nationally.

In 2008, these counties swung 14 points in a Democratic direction, compared with a 10-point Democratic swing nationally.

In 2012, they saw a 10-point Republican swing, compared with a 3-point GOP swing nationally.

And in 2016, Wisconsin’s rural counties shifted 18 points in a GOP direction, compared with a 2-point Republican swing in the country as a whole.

Several things stand out about this history.

Like the national vote, these swings were almost entirely against the party in the White House (the only exceptions were 2004, when there was very little swing, and President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election). And the swings in rural Wisconsin were much bigger than in the country as a whole. That was especially true last fall.

In fact, the voting patterns in 2016 were unlike anything that has happened in Wisconsin in modern times. While Trump’s statewide victory was narrow, he won these 46 rural counties by a combined 19 points — a bigger margin than any Republican in the past half-century. That includes Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1984 and Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972.

The shift from 2012 was so big — when these same rural counties split their vote 50/50 between former President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney — that it can’t be explained just by high Republican or low Democratic turnout; it's clear that large numbers of people switched from voting Democrat (for Obama in ’08 and '12) to Republican (for Trump).

What sticks out even more about 2016 is the immense divide between the state’s rural counties and its bigger metropolitan counties. Over the past half-century, that gap has remained a fairly modest one. The “non-metropolitan vote” has almost always been more Republican than the “metropolitan vote,” but not dramatically so.

Last fall, the gap became an abyss. Trump lost the metro vote by 5 points and won the rural (non-metro) vote by 19. The rural-metropolitan gap was four times bigger than its 50-year average, reflecting far bigger divisions by class (income and education) and population size.

Some of the counties that saw the biggest shifts toward Trump had been trending Republican for decades. But others had been trending Democratic for decades. Trump’s gains in rural counties bore little relationship to their long-term partisan trend, making it even trickier to predict which way they will go in the future.

What these voters do in 2018 and 2020 will depend, of course, on events, the economy, and how Trump and the GOP Congress perform and behave in power.

But the history of these voters does offer some potential clues.

The swingy, anti-Washington bent of these rural counties suggests they are much less partisan than populous Madison (blue), Milwaukee (blue) or Waukesha (red). Many of these counties voted by large margins for Obama just eight years ago. Some have swung back and forth from one party to the other. Until the 2016 race, there was no overall rural trend toward the GOP in Wisconsin, based on presidential voting. That history argues against a Republican rural realignment in the state.

“It is swingy,” House Republican Sean Duffy said of his northern Wisconsin district, which Trump won by a much wider margin than its partisan makeup would have suggested.

“But just because now Mr. Trump has a Republican Congress and is in the White House, does that mean it’s going to swing back? I would argue not. It’s about, ‘Does Mr. Trump deliver?’ ” said Duffy.

Those rural voters drawn to Trump out of economic frustration and a basic desire to shake things up may be the most likely to shift back if Trump doesn’t deliver or if Republicans overreach.

“I think 2018 is going to be a much better political environment for Democrats around the country than 2016. It’s all on them (Republicans). It’s their person in the White House,” said House Democrat Ron Kind, whose southwestern Wisconsin district was one of about a dozen Democratic seats nationally to vote for Trump.

“If they fall back on their old ideological agenda, they’re going to face an electoral revolt in two years,” Kind said of the GOP.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of the Republican swing last fall in rural and blue-collar communities, along with Walker’s recent dominance of the rural vote, could be a sign that some realignment is occurring. Those rural voters who were drawn to Trump for reasons of culture and identity may be especially unlikely to abandon him, particularly if he moves his party in the more populist direction he signaled in his blunt inaugural address Friday.

The 2018 midterms — including the races in Wisconsin for governor and U.S. Senate — will be the first major indicator of where these rural voters are headed.

And the 2020 presidential contest will be the second.

Trump’s rural appeal turned out to be the elusive formula that turned Wisconsin red after three decades of presidential misses by the GOP.

In four years, we’ll find out if the experiment can be replicated.