In the acrid and escalating clash between red and blue America, there is no battleground quite like metropolitan Milwaukee.

Key Throughout this series, click on for more information. A footnote will appear. Click the highlighted text again to close the footnote.

Spectacularly divided, remarkably mobilized, frequently fought over, its politically lopsided communities have been veering apart for more than 40 years.

Democrats and Republicans aren't just strangers to each other in their politics — they increasingly live in separate worlds. In its ultrapartisan geography, this is arguably the most polarized place in swing-state America.

Dividing Lines The growing political chasm that has turned metro Milwaukee into the most polarized place in swing-state America.

First of four parts Part 2 : A perfect brew for party line voting

With entire communities locked in their voting patterns, candidates have little incentive to reach across party lines.

: A perfect brew for party line voting With entire communities locked in their voting patterns, candidates have little incentive to reach across party lines. Part 3 : More polarized, more energized

One of the most polarized places in America also is one of the most politically active, engaged and mobilized places in America.

: More polarized, more energized One of the most polarized places in America also is one of the most politically active, engaged and mobilized places in America. Part 4: The legacy of polarization

Wisconsin’s polarized politics have left a jarring legacy. We have more partisan conflict but less partisan competition. Journal Sentinel Washington Bureau Chief Craig Gilbert produced this special report through a six-month fellowship established by the Law School

"You have people speaking different languages and they come from different planets and they have no common agenda," says Myron Orfield, an expert on metropolitan trends.

Metro Milwaukee's dividing lines are America's dividing lines, only starker: black-white, urban-suburban, married-unmarried, young-old.

"There is no sense in trying to persuade anybody in southeast Wisconsin," says Mark Graul, a Wauwatosa native who has run Republican campaigns for governor and president in the state. "It's (just) about getting them to vote."

Why is the partisan divide so deep and getting deeper? How has it changed our elections? What does it mean for governing and reaching consensus?

Voters cluster together More and more Americans are living in politically one-sided counties. In the 2012 presidential race, 51% of voters lived in a county that was “partisan” – or 10 points redder or bluer than the U.S. as a whole. One in five lived in a county that was “extreme” – or 20 points redder or bluer than the U.S. Percentage of U.S. voters living in one-sided counties Journal Sentinel analysis of election data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examined the sharp and growing partisan divisions in metropolitan Milwaukee and Wisconsin, charting the political changes over the decades, tracing the fault lines, comparing the polarized landscape to other regions of the country. We gathered, digitized, mapped and analyzed more than 50 years of voting patterns down to the precinct level. We mined a rich reservoir of local polling data amassed by Marquette Law School professor and pollster Charles Franklin, who collaborated on the research for this project.

And we looked at the consequences of rising political segregation here, from a fiercely fractured electorate to the loss of competition to almost intractable urban-suburban divisions to the evolution of two parties that attract different kinds of voters, represent different kinds of communities and win different kinds of elections.

Milwaukee isn't alone. Americans are more divided by party than they were a generation ago. So are the communities where they live. The political gap has widened (footnote 1) between more populated and less populated places. People are more clustered in red and blue states, counties and neighborhoods.

The more densely populated a place is, the more likely it is to vote Democratic, and vice versa. That correlation is about four times stronger among U.S. counties than it was 40 years ago, according to an analysis of presidential voting for this project by Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School.

But these patterns — and a host of others — are more extreme here than in most places. Metropolitan Milwaukee is the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation. It combines in one political hothouse an unusual constellation of divisive forces: deep racial segregation; an intensely engaged and sometimes enraged electorate; and the Balkanizing effects of serving over the past decade and a half as one of the most fought-over pieces of political turf in America.

"It's a confluence of factors all pointing in the same direction," Franklin says.

Polarized people, places

So how polarized is metro Milwaukee?

Chat with Craig Gilbert Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief Craig Gilbert answered reader questions about the growing partisan political divide. Read the chat transcript.

In the combined counties of Waukesha, Washington, Ozaukee and Milwaukee, Gov. Scott Walker has a 91% approval rating (footnote 2) among Republicans and a 10% approval rating among Democrats over more than two years of in-depth polling by the Marquette Law School. President Barack Obama has a 93% approval rating among Democrats and an 8% approval rating among Republicans.

The Marquette Law School has polled a combined 17,078 registered voters in Wisconsin in 20 surveys since January 2012. That includes 5,224 voters in metro Milwaukee. That metrowide sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

Acute partisan division has become a hallmark of American politics. But the partisan gaps in metro Milwaukee are bigger than they are in the rest of Wisconsin. They are bigger in Wisconsin (footnote 3) than they are in most other states. And they are massive compared to what they were in the past.

In Gallup’s 2012 state-by-state polling, only two states had a bigger gap than Wisconsin between Barack Obama’s Democratic and Republican approval ratings. Wisconsin had the biggest partisan gap over Obama among more than 40 states surveyed by another firm, Public Policy Polling, between 2011 and 2013.

"It was always a divided state but it used to be (that) you'd explain it as '40/40/20,' and 20% was the persuadable middle," says Walker. "That 20% has shrunk now to 5, 6% maybe ... or five or six people."

Video Hank Schloemer of West Bend on Act 10

Walker is the personification of this cast-in-concrete divide. After winning his 2012 recall fight, he faces Democratic challenger and political newcomer Mary Burke in his third election in five years for the same office. In a statewide Marquette Law School poll taken March 20-23, Walker's job rating was 47% approve, 47% disapprove, with — yes — 5% to 6% undecided. Republicans are in lockstep behind him; Democrats are in lockstep against him. His ratings hardly fluctuate. No other state (footnote 4) in America is as polarized over its governor.

Scott Walker has the biggest partisan approval gap — 80 points — of any governor in Public Policy Polling’s surveys in more than 40 states since 2011. In the firm’s April 17-20 survey, Walker’s approval rating was 92% among Republicans and 12% among Democrats, which was a bigger partisan approval gap than Obama’s (76 points).

"We're looking at a very small percentage of persuadable or swing voters," says Franklin. "It's not just the partisan polarization. It's that virtually everybody has an opinion."

Not only are voters here acutely divided, so are the places they live. Metropolitan Milwaukee blends one powerhouse blue county (Milwaukee) with the highest performing Republican suburbs (footnote 5) in America. It has grown more politically segregated with almost every election since the Nixon administration.

Waukesha had the highest Republican turnout in the nation in the 2012 presidential race among counties of more than 50,000 people: 83% of its voting-age citizens turned out, and 67% of them voted for Mitt Romney, meaning 55% of all eligible voters voted for Romney. By this measure, Waukesha led the nation in GOP turnout and Washington and Ozaukee counties were third and fourth, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis.

This geographic polarization — Democrats and Republicans clustered in different communities — is what truly separates Milwaukee from the rest of Wisconsin and many other large metros. Only one in eight voters here lived in a neighborhood decided by single digits in the last presidential contest. Almost six in 10 (footnote 6) lived in a neighborhood decided by 30 points or more.

Wisconsinites outside metro Milwaukee and Madison are much less clustered in one-sided neighborhoods; in metropolitan Green Bay-Appleton, only one in 15 voters lived in a ward decided by 30 points or more in 2012.

That partisan clustering extends beyond just neighborhoods to entire counties. Metro Milwaukee isn't a patchwork of red and blue communities, like some metros. It's two giant red and blue voting blocs with a spot of purple here and there. Walker got only 36% of the vote in Milwaukee County in 2012, but won 73% of the vote in the Republican counties of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee. Obama got 67% of the vote in Milwaukee County in 2012 and just 32% of the vote in the rest of the area — the biggest gap between urban and suburban counties in any top 50 metro except New Orleans.

The Urban-Suburban Divide Milwaukee’s urban-suburban divisions are much starker than most other Midwest metropolitan areas, separating not just individual neighborhoods and communities but whole counties. The borders between Democratic Milwaukee County and Republican Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties are easily visible just from voting patterns. (These maps are based on the 2008 presidential election, the most recent race for which all metro areas’ maps are available.) Click the menu on the right to compare the voting patterns of selected Midwestern metro areas with Milwaukee. 70+% Dem.

60 – 69% Dem.

50 – 59% Dem.

50 – 59% GOP

60 – 69% GOP

70+% GOP Milwaukee Metro Milwaukee is almost all dark red or dark blue: only seven of its 90 communities were decided by single digits in the 2012 presidential race. Chicago Chicago

Minneapolis-St. Paul

Cleveland

Indianapolis While Democrats and Republicans tend to be clustered in different neighborhoods, Chicago’s suburbs are much more racially and politically diverse than Milwaukee’s.

The outer suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul used to be Democratic, but have become a lot more Republican in recent decades, making the metro area much more divided along urban-suburban lines than it used to be.

Cleveland’s suburban counties haven’t changed much in their presidential voting. President Obama won the Cleveland metro area by 24 points in 2012, compared to his 5-point winning margin in metro Milwaukee.

Along with Milwaukee and Cincinnati, Indianapolis has the reddest suburbs of any top 50 metro outside the south. But it doesn’t have as many urban Democrats as Milwaukee, so the metro area is much more Republican overall. Sources: Harvard Election Data Archive, Journal Sentinel analysis Programming by Allan James Vestal of the Journal Sentinel staff.Harvard Election Data Archive, Journal Sentinel analysis

"There's certainly an attitude in the suburbs of, 'frickin' Milwaukee, that place is a disaster.' And then there are folks in Milwaukee who think the opposite — that the suburban people are rich barons who don't care about the needs of the rest of us," says Graul, the GOP consultant.

At a gathering of political scientists last year on polarization, Daniel Shea of Colby College summed up the growing distance and disconnect between red and blue with a phrase that people utter when they're puzzled, shocked or outraged: "What the hell?"

"Each side is saying to the other side: 'What the hell?' They don't understand and they don't like the other side," said Shea.

Racial divide

The yawning chasm between the red and blue halves of metropolitan Milwaukee is the product of two partisan dividing lines found in virtually all the country's most polarized places. The first is race.

Video We asked: Is your neighborhood evenly divided or has it become mostly Democratic or Republican over time?

Milwaukee is the nation's most racially segregated metropolitan area by several measures, with African-Americans overwhelmingly concentrated in the city of Milwaukee and a few inner suburbs and virtually absent everywhere else.

Among the metro area's 90 communities, only Milwaukee and Brown Deer are more than 15% black; only Milwaukee and West Milwaukee are more than 15% Latino.

The city of Milwaukee is "majority minority," with blacks and Hispanics together (56% of the city's population) outnumbering whites. But the suburban counties of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee are less than 2% African-American and less than 5% Hispanic. The decades long migration into those counties has been almost exclusively white, and that has shaped the political map. Like a lot of northern metros, Milwaukee experienced the "white flight" chapter in the evolution of the suburbs, which pushed so many outlying communities in a Republican direction. But it hasn't experienced a far more recent trend — the movement of blacks and Latinos into the suburbs — that's changing the metropolitan landscape and making the suburbs of some large metros, such as Chicago and Detroit, more Democratic.

"The most classically Republican suburbs are probably those in slower-growing northern places, where not many minorities are moving there yet. It's still older, blue-collar whites," says William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution and the University of Michigan.

When political scientist Katherine Levine Einstein looked at metro areas with the most polarized terrains, she found they all ranked high in black-white segregation. As the nation has grown more diverse, the voting gap between whites and nonwhites also has grown. Milwaukee is more politically segregated (footnote 7) than almost any other large northern metro.

This is based on the dissimilarity index, which measures how unevenly a certain group of people (in this case, Democratic or Republican voters) is distributed within an area. The most politically segregated large metros are in the South. New York, Chicago and Milwaukee led northern metros by this measure in 2008 and Milwaukee grew significantly more politically segregated in 2012.

"Racial segregation really is driving political segregation," says Einstein, a Milwaukee native and Boston University professor who is writing a book on political segregation in metropolitan America.

Segregation drives voting patterns Race and ethnicity are big reasons for the partisan divide between Democratic Milwaukee County and the Republican counties of Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee. Milwaukee- area presidential vote Milwaukee-area racial distribution (One dot = 50 residents) White

Black

Latino Source: State of Wisconsin election data Reporting by Craig Gilbert . Programming by Allan James Vestal State of Wisconsin election data

Walker got 1% of the vote in 2012 in neighborhoods with the highest share of African-Americans; Obama got 99% in his race five months later. In metro Milwaukee's whitest neighborhoods, the president won about a quarter of the vote and the governor won more than three-quarters. Obama won every ward in the metro area that was less than 70% white, every ward that was at least 30% Latino and every ward that was at least 15% black. The average metro Milwaukee ward carried by his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, was 1% black and 3% Hispanic.

All the ingredients for political segregation that Einstein identified in her research come together here: a large minority population; geographic separation between blacks and whites; and big economic disparities between blacks and whites. Metro Milwaukee frequently registers the highest racial gaps in the country in education, unemployment and poverty. In one recent study, it also led the nation's largest metros in economic segregation — the separation of poor households from other households.

Density divide

Metro Milwaukee also is a showcase for another key dividing line in American politics — the one between densely populated and less densely populated places. This "density divide" reflects racial differences between cities and suburbs and rural areas, but it also transcends race. It's not just about the partisan gap between blacks and whites, it's also about the political differences between whites "close in" and whites "farther out."

Obama's approval rating among whites since 2012 is 56% in the city of Milwaukee, (footnote 8) 45% in the inner suburbs of Milwaukee County and 35% in the outer suburban counties. Walker's job rating among white voters follows just the opposite pattern: 45% in the city of Milwaukee, 53% in the Milwaukee County suburbs and 65% in the suburban counties.

These numbers are based on the combined polling the Marquette Law School has done since January 2012, which includes 781 white voters in the city of Milwaukee, 921 white voters in the Milwaukee County suburbs and 2,121 white voters in the three suburban counties.

The extensive polling conducted by Franklin and Marquette Law School shows that whites in the less densely populated outer suburbs are more Republican than whites closer in. And Republicans in the outer suburbs are more conservative than Republicans closer in. The story is similar across the Great Lakes region, where very white counties outside large cities have almost all been trending in a Republican direction in recent decades, whether it's Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

"That's a big component of the story," says Einstein. In many metro areas, "white voters behave differently the farther out you go."

The reasons range from culture to demographics to economics to race. Milwaukee's suburban counties were always Republican. They've voted Republican for president in every election but one (1964) since World War II. But white flight made them more so. The whites who left Milwaukee County for the outer suburbs were more conservative, and often better off economically, than the people who stayed behind.

Red and blue counties diverge Compared to the state as a whole, metro Milwaukee’s communities have been growing further apart politically since the 1970s. Milwaukee County has been skewing increasingly Democratic; Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties increasingly Republican. The four-county area's growing divide State of Wisconsin presidential voting

"On average, Republican movers have more money," says political scientist James Gimpel of the University of Maryland, who has tracked the migration patterns of both Democrats and Republicans. "That means a broader array of neighborhoods is available to them."

Some of those movers brought with them negative perceptions of the city and its dominant political party. In metro areas with concentrated urban poverty and crime, racial polarization is high. "The white voters that surround those areas are incredibly radicalized," says GOP pollster Gene Ulm, who is based in northern Virginia but has polled in Wisconsin for many years.

"There is a huge correlation there," says Mandela Barnes, a first-term Democratic state lawmaker whose district includes half of Glendale and a set of mostly African-American neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Barnes says that concentration of poverty in Milwaukee feeds "this perception (outside Milwaukee) that there's a 'culture of takers.' And that can become political fodder."

Age, marital status, home

The density divide reflects other demographic factors, too. Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee are a microcosm of the national Republican base. Their population is older than Milwaukee County's. And they have almost twice the share of married households. Age and marriage have emerged nationally as key partisan dividing lines in the past two decades. In metro Milwaukee, Walker's approval rating is 39% among voters under 30, but 51% among everyone else; his approval rating is 38% among non-married voters, but 59% among married voters.

Demographic dividing lines When it comes to views of Republican Gov. Walker’s job performance, there are huge differences among different demographic groups. Combined Marquette Law School polling from January 2012 to April 2014. Based on sample of 5,224 registered voters in metro Milwaukee

"The Republican Party's base is married women at home with kids," says Republican Scott Jensen, former state Assembly speaker from Waukesha County who crafted his party's suburban strategy in the 1990s. "Other than old white men, they're our best crew."

The suburban counties also have more homeowners and fewer renters than Milwaukee County.

"When we're talking about geography, the presence of rental housing is a big part of the story," says Stanford University political scientist Jonathan Rodden, who studies political geography. "Renting is really highly correlated with being Democratic. It's a function of where you are in your life — age and income and a bunch of other stuff."

The renter/homeowner map in metro Milwaukee looks remarkably like the red-blue map. The communities with the very highest rates of homeownership — where 90% or more of the homes are occupied by their owners — were almost all won by Romney in 2012, and they're almost all in the suburban ring outside Milwaukee County. The places with lots of renters are mostly blue or purple.

The density divide has gotten bigger nationally in recent decades, especially in large metro areas. It has grown steadily bigger in metropolitan Milwaukee since the 1980s. And it is bigger in Milwaukee (footnote 9) than in any other large American metro for which data was available. The nine most densely populated municipalities in metro Milwaukee voted for Obama in 2012; the 48 least densely populated voted for Romney — by an average of more than 40 points.

Municipal voting patterns were analyzed in 30 large metros from data gathered by the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity. Of those metros, Milwaukee had the strongest correlation between the population density of its communities and how they voted for president.

"You've got this urban-suburban difference that is probably as stark as any place," says Rodden.

Neighborhoods have become more partisan People in metro Milwaukee are highly concentrated in one-sided neighborhoods. In the 2012 presidential race, about three quarters of voters lived in a ward that was 10 points redder or bluer than the nation as a whole, and 44% lived in a ward at least 20 points redder or bluer. Percentage of metro-Milwaukeeans living in one-sided voting wards Journal Sentinel analysis of election data from state of Wisconsin, Clayton Nall of Stanford University

In the Milwaukee metro area, density and distance from downtown Milwaukee are actually much better barometers of a community's politics than income or education. Well-to-do inner suburbs are trending blue (Fox Point, Whitefish Bay, Bayside), while well-to-do outer suburbs remain very red (Mequon, Delafield, Cedarburg). The GOP suburban belt includes not just affluent communities full of white-collar professionals but lots of blue-collar towns with median incomes under $70,000.

"The blue-collar, exurban 'septic tank belt' are the most Republican (places) now" in large metro areas, says Orfield, a University of Minnesota Law School professor who writes widely on metropolitan trends. They are home to "less super-affluent people and more people living out on the edge who really don't want to live in an urban setting."

On the opposite side of that divide is the predominantly white inner suburb of Shorewood, a few miles north of downtown Milwaukee, where almost 40% of the residents rent. Shorewood, not the city of Milwaukee, is the state's most densely populated place. And it has moved further in a Democratic direction in the past 40 years than any community its size in Wisconsin.

Different planets

There are few places in America where large blocs of Democratic and Republican voters converge the way they do in southeastern Wisconsin. Nowhere else do two counties as big and as far apart politically (footnote 10) as Milwaukee and Waukesha share a border.

This is based on a Journal Sentinel analysis of how U.S. counties voted in the 2012 presidential race.

Former Assembly Democrat Sheldon Wasserman encountered this schism when he ran for the Wisconsin Senate in 2008. His once-Republican North Shore district, full of upscale, culturally moderate and liberal voters, had been trending blue for decades.

Metro Milwaukee, by the numbers Metro Milwaukee’s 90 communities reflect a “density divide” in American politics that has been growing in recent decades. How these individual cities, towns and villages vote in big partisan elections is closely tied to such factors as population density and the percentage of renters. Click the menu on the right to compare selected Milwaukee area demographics with voting patterns. 2012 presidential election There are no metro areas outside the South where the political transition from urban county to suburban counties is as abrupt and pronounced as in Milwaukee. 70+% Dem.

60 – 69% Dem.

50 – 59% Dem.

50 – 59% GOP

60 – 69% GOP

70+% GOP 2012 median household income 2012 median household income

2012 people per square mile

2012 renters vs. homeowners

2012 residents w/ college degrees Outside the city of Milwaukee, income is not the best predictor of how communities vote. Wealthier areas can be red (suburban counties) and blue (the North Shore). $150,000+ $120,000 – 149,999 $90,000 – 119,999 $60,000 – 89,999 $30,000 – 59,999 $0 – 29,999

Population density is a strong predictor of how communities vote in metro Milwaukee: the more densely populated, the more Democratic places tend to be. 7,500+ people 6,000 – 7,499 4,500 – 5,999 3,000 – 4,499 1,500 – 2,999 0 – 1,499

In Milwaukee, places with more renters tend to be more Democratic. Places with more homeowners tend to be more Republican. 50+% renters 40 – 49% renters 30 – 39% renters 20 – 29% renters 10 – 19% renters 0 – 9% renters

Democrats do better with college-educated whites than whites without degrees. That pattern is especially strong in Milwaukee County's North Shore. 75+% 60 – 74% 45 – 59% 30 – 44% 15 – 29% 0 – 14%

Sources: Wis. Govt. Accountability Board, U.S. Census Bureau Programming by Allan James Vestal of the Journal Sentinel staff.Wis. Govt. Accountability Board, U.S. Census Bureau

But campaigning for a larger state Senate district took him into Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, which comprise — along with the counties outside Cincinnati and Indianapolis — the most Republican terrain of any big northern metro. In almost every other state in America, the reddest places are small rural counties. In Wisconsin, they're the outer suburbs of its biggest metropolis.

"It was like going into a different world," says Wasserman, who lives on Milwaukee's liberal east side. "All of a sudden people started talking about guns. 'What's my view on guns?' ... Then the abortion issue started coming up."

A doctor, Wasserman said he knew he was doomed when he went to the door of an emergency medical technician in the Washington County village of Richfield (where Walker won by 60 points in 2012) and got into an argument over the merits of taxpayer-funded defibrillators.

About This Series The Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert undertook an unprecedented examination of the political polarization in Wisconsin and the extreme and growing red-blue divide within metropolitan Milwaukee. Gilbert gathered, digitized and analyzed five decades of ward-by-ward election data for metro Milwaukee, building a national database of voting at the county and ward levels, mapping partisan change over time in the metro area’s 90 municipalities, charting the growth of the area’s political segregation and comparing the area’s partisan fault lines to those in the rest of Wisconsin and in other large U.S. metros. He collaborated in this research with political scientist Charles Franklin, a professor of law and public policy and director of the Marquette Law School Poll. Gilbert also examined demographic data, turnout data, market research and polling data. Those sources included a quarter-century of exit polling in Wisconsin and the extensive contemporary polling Franklin has done for Marquette, surveying more than 17,000 registered voters in the state in 20 polls since 2012. Gilbert also drew on more than 25 years of experience reporting on Wisconsin and national politics. He has reported from the Journal Sentinel’s Washington Bureau since 1997 and is the author of “The Wisconsin Voter” political blog.

"You're going to raise taxes," the man admonished him, says Wasserman.

"I knew I'd lost, if I'm going to lose a volunteer EMT," he says. "There was absolutely no way in the world I was going to win that vote out there."

Wasserman was crossing partisan, cultural and demographic lines. He was even crossing an information divide. People in the three suburban counties spend more time listening to the radio and less time watching TV than people in Milwaukee County. The talk radio audience is 40% larger. The Fox News audience is is 60% larger (footnote 11).

These figures come from 2012-’13 Scarborough Research data on media habits in the four-county Milwaukee area. The information was gathered from a survey of 1,482 residents.

Wasserman lost to incumbent Republican Alberta Darling by a single point. He won the Milwaukee County part of the district by 28 points, but lost the rest of it by 29 points. A few years later, Republicans made the seat much safer by moving the really blue parts to a separate district.

"They are complete polar opposites," Wasserman says of the area's two political worlds.

A lot of Republicans agree, though they tend to characterize the divide very differently — not as "public interest vs. private interest" but "makers vs. takers."

"Some people still value hard work and self-reliance, and other people want to take advantage and get something for nothing. That seems to be what's driving the divide," says Keith Best, a 60-year-old salesman who became active in the Waukesha Republican Party during the 2004 Bush-Kerry battle for Wisconsin, the closest state in the nation that year.

The differences between Democrats and Republicans aren't dramatic on every issue. But attitudes about the role of government (including health care) are at the core of the red-blue divide. The racial gap between the parties has fueled the philosophical gap, because African-Americans support a bigger role for government than many whites do. The partisan gaps over the Affordable Care Act are massive in metro Milwaukee: 85% of Democrats approve, 4% of Republicans approve.

Best spent the first 30 years of his life in Milwaukee.

"The city seemed broken. ... The job situation was getting worse and worse," says Best, now an officer of the county party. "It just seems the city is going downhill, and Milwaukee is turning out to be the next Detroit, and I think that's why a lot of people wanted to get out."

Video We asked: Do you feel like you have less personal contact than you used to with people who have opposing political views?

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Milwaukee's urban-suburban divide has become a defining feature of Wisconsin politics. It shapes local debates (how to finance a new downtown arena) and legislative clashes (over voting rules, transit, spending). It shapes statewide elections, which can turn on the performance of each side's metro Milwaukee base. It loomed over the last two governor's races, which pitted Walker, the former Milwaukee County executive, against Democrat Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee.

"There is no question it is a plus in a statewide campaign to run against the city of Milwaukee," says Barrett, who believes the Republican Legislature has been hostile to his city on a range of issues — from opposition to streetcars to ending Sunday voting before elections to lifting the residency requirement for city employees.

The Republican attitude toward Milwaukee is: "We know what's best for you," Barrett says.

"I think there are wonderful people who live in the suburbs. I think there are wonderful people who live in the city. ... I just don't accept the notion of moral superiority," Barrett says.

Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Assembly, says he agrees with Milwaukee officials when they say, "as goes Milwaukee, so goes the state."

"But Milwaukee never says: 'As goes the rest of the state, so goes Milwaukee.' Milwaukee is almost always Milwaukee-centric," says Vos, who represents suburban and rural voters in neighboring Racine County. "Milwaukee was used to being the dominant force. They were the economic engine, they were in many ways the ones who set the policy based on what they wanted and the rest of Wisconsin followed along. Well, as the rest of Wisconsin has grown at a much faster rate than Milwaukee, especially with the ascendancy of the rise of Republicans in the suburbs, the power (has) just naturally shifted."

Distinct political brew

Milwaukee isn't the only big metro with racial and urban-suburban divisions, but it combines those divisions with an unusual set of political attributes.

Most of the nation's large metros have either big powerful Democratic voting blocs or big powerful Republican voting blocs, but not two of roughly equal clout. Metro Milwaukee is a partisan microcosm of the nation. It has almost perfectly mirrored the national vote in recent elections, voting for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.


In many big metros, participation in elections is tepid. Metropolitan Milwaukee is a hotbed of activism in a high-turnout, perennially contested battleground state. In 2012, it voted at rates almost unmatched in America. Turnout in southeastern Wisconsin has been rising hand in hand with partisan polarization for decades.

Finally, no other major metropolitan area went through the crucible of the labor wars and recall extravaganza of 2011-'12, an upheaval without any parallel in recent American politics. Metro Milwaukee's partisan divisions long predate the civil war over Walker's first term. But they were clearly exacerbated by them.

The convergence of all these factors helps explain why metropolitan Milwaukee can feel like ground zero in the modern-day clash between red and blue.

"The politics that have been practiced is very much an 'us-versus-them' mentality," says Graul, referring to both parties. "We don't try to convince people we're right. We just try to turn out our side."

twitter.com/WisVoter cgilbert@journalsentinel.com