Craig Gilbert | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Nine years ago, in an epic judicial race inflamed by Wisconsin’s labor wars, the famously Republican “WOW counties” formed the state’s most potent and pivotal voting bloc, backing conservative state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser by 51 (Washington), 48 (Waukesha) and 43 (Ozaukee) points.

Today, that bloc is not what it used to be.

Wisconsin’s April 7 court race, won by liberal candidate Jill Karofsky, is the latest sign of cracks in the “red” suburban wall outside Milwaukee.

The WOW counties are still Republican.

But they’re becoming markedly less so in the Trump Era, especially Ozaukee and Waukesha.

In the April judicial race, conservative Justice Daniel Kelly won Ozaukee County by just 12 points — down from the 25-point margin won by conservative court candidate Brian Hagedorn in 2019.

Kelly won Waukesha County by 23 points, down from Hagedorn’s 37-point margin.

And Kelly won Washington County by 36 — down from Hagedorn’s 50.

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These declines can’t be written off as just the by-product of one spring election that attracted more Democrats than Republicans to the polls.

The drop in the conservative margin in all three counties was bigger than it was statewide.

And it echoes a recent trend in partisan races.

In the 2016 presidential race, Waukesha and Ozaukee counties delivered much smaller margins for Donald Trump than they had for Republican nominee Mitt Romney four years earlier.

In the 2018 race for governor, Waukesha and Ozaukee delivered much smaller margins for Republican Scott Walker than they did for Walker in 2014.

In both cases, Republicans lost more ground in Waukesha and Ozaukee than they did anywhere else in Wisconsin.

We’ve now seen the same pattern of GOP erosion in the southeastern Wisconsin suburbs in 2016, 2018 and 2020 — in contests for president, governor and the state’s highest court.

So, what’s with the WOW counties?

Their declining performance for Republicans parallels a national trend that has accelerated in the age of Trump: a growing gap between blue-collar voters and college-educated suburbanites, and between rural communities and metropolitan areas.

The gap itself isn’t necessarily bad for Trump in Wisconsin as long as his gains in exurbs, small towns and the countryside outweigh his slippage in cities and suburbs. That is exactly what happened when he eked out a narrow win here in 2016.

But Trump’s demonstrated weakness among suburban voters — especially women — represents one clear vulnerability for him this November as he and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden compete in one of 2020’s top battleground states.

To locate the biggest weak spots for Trump on the Wisconsin map with a little more precision, I compiled a list of communities that met three criteria.

First, they had to be places where Trump did worse in 2016 than Romney did in 2012.

Second, they had to be places where Trump did worse in 2016 than Republican Sen. Ron Johnson did that same year on the same Wisconsin ballot.

And third, they had to be places where Scott Walker not only did worse in 2018 than he did in 2014, but where his decline was bigger than his statewide decline.

There are 87 municipalities that check all three boxes (out of more than 1,850 communities in Wisconsin). These are the places where the Republican Party under Trump is seeing the greatest erosion of support (at the same time it has been gaining ground in much of central and northern Wisconsin).

These 87 cities, towns and villages accounted for close to 700,000 votes in 2016. They include the city of Madison, but the next largest communities are the much smaller cities of Waukesha, Wauwatosa, New Berlin and Brookfield.

Of these 87 communities, the largest number (24) are in Waukesha, the state’s biggest and most important Republican county.

Another nine are in Ozaukee and two are in Washington.

The other big concentrations are in the Democratic counties of Milwaukee (15) and Dane (14). Another four are in suburban St. Croix (near Minnesota’s Twin Cities), four are in Sheboygan County and three are in Door.

Overwhelmingly, these are suburban communities in the Madison and especially Milwaukee media markets with much higher than average levels of income and education:

They include:

Milwaukee suburbs like Whitefish Bay that have shifted from purple to blue. Whitefish Bay was a 50-50 community until recently. It voted for the conservative Prosser by 6 points in the bitter 2011 court race. It voted Democratic for president by just 4 points in 2012 and Democratic for governor by less than one point in 2014. Then Whitefish Bay voted against Trump by 33 points in 2016, against Walker by 20 points in 2018 and against the conservative Kelly by 38 points in April’s court race. (Other Milwaukee County examples include Wauwatosa, Fox Point and Bayside).



Madison suburbs like the city of Middleton where big Democratic and liberal margins have gotten even bigger, ballooning from the 30s and 40s to the 50s and 60s. (Other Dane County examples include Sun Prairie, Fitchburg and Verona).



Historically red, high-turnout Waukesha County suburbs like the city of Brookfield that have gotten a lot less red. Brookfield voted for conservative Prosser by 52 points in 2011, for Romney by 36 points in 2012 and for Walker by 46 points in 2014. Then it voted for Trump by 20 points in 2016, for Walker by 28 in 2018 and for the conservative Kelly in the April court race by 17 points. (Other Waukesha County examples include Elm Grove, Delafield and Pewaukee).



Suburbs like the city of Cedarburg in Ozaukee County. Once quite red, Cedarburg is now approaching purple. It voted Republican for president by 25 points in 2012 but only 8 in 2016. It voted for Walker for governor by 34 points in 2014 but just 18 in 2018. It voted for conservative Prosser by 39 points for state Supreme Court in 2011 but for conservative Kelly by just 12 votes (0.3 percentage points) this April. (Other Ozaukee County examples include Mequon and Thiensville).

Angela Peterson/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Are the shifts in these Republican suburbs occurring because Republican voters are turning away from Trump? There is not a lot of evidence in the polling for that.

Surveys by the Marquette Law School in recent years show GOP voters in the WOW counties are actually a lot more unified behind Trump than they were during the 2016 primaries, when Republicans in southeastern Wisconsin had much more negative perceptions of Trump than did Republicans in northern and western Wisconsin.

That pattern has vanished. In polling since 2019, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents is above 90% in the WOW counties, as high or higher than it is elsewhere in the state. That is a hopeful sign for Trump when it comes to November.

Other explanations for the recent voting shifts in the WOW counties could involve some combination of: independents in these counties viewing Trump more negatively than they do in other places; Democrats in these counties viewing Trump more negatively than they do in other places (there is some hint of that in the polling); liberals and Democrats in these counties growing more mobilized and voting at higher rates than before (very plausible from the election results); and the political makeup of some of these communities shifting in recent years, either because of migration patterns or because people are changing in their partisan loyalties.

I asked both state party chairs about these WOW county shifts at a post-election virtual “newsmaker” event held by Wispolitics.com Thursday.

“You’re really seeing a kind of direct rejection of Donald Trump personally,” said Democratic chair Ben Wikler, who noted that Trump had endorsed Kelly, talked about him publicly and urged Wisconsinites to vote for him. Wikler also said he thought the April turnout in the WOW counties was amplified by “a surge of Democratic voters” in those communities.

State GOP chair Andrew Hitt acknowledged the slippage in conservative margins in the WOW counties in the 2020 court race, but said he thought it was exacerbated by the fact that the Democratic presidential primary was a bigger draw for voters than an uncontested GOP primary was. Hitt did not dispute his party's overall erosion in the WOW counties, saying, “we’re very closely focused on that” and “we’re paying attention to that.”

The biggest voting shifts are in Ozaukee, which has the highest levels of income and education of the three WOW counties. The voting patterns have changed very little in more blue-collar Washington County, which still typically delivers the biggest point margins in the state for conservative court candidates and Republican statewide candidates.

But the idea of a monolithically "red" WOW-counties voting bloc is becoming dated, especially when you compare today to the not very distant past.

Ozaukee County was the most Republican county in Wisconsin in every presidential and mid-term election from 1988 to 1998.

Washington County was the most Republican county in Wisconsin in every presidential and mid-term election from 2000 to 2014.

The WOW counties ranked 1, 2 and 3 by GOP point-margin in every presidential and mid-term election over a 20-year period from 1992 to 2012.

They also ranked 1, 2 and 3 in the margins they gave to conservative Prosser in the state’s fierce 2011 Supreme Court race.

But this pattern, once the most automatic feature of Wisconsin political map, is over.

In the 2016 presidential race, Washington ranked third among 72 Wisconsin counties in the point margin it gave Trump. Waukesha ranked 17th and Ozaukee ranked 37th.

In the 2018 race for governor, Washington ranked first in the point margin it gave Walker. Waukesha ranked 5th and Ozaukee ranked 12th.

In the April 2020 court race, Washington ranked first in the point margin it gave Justice Kelly. Waukesha ranked 4th and Ozaukee ranked 21st.

As the Wisconsin political map evolves, the famously Republican WOW counties are losing an “O” and one of the W’s is looking a little shaky.

Whether Trump’s GOP can stem or reverse that erosion will help determine which way Wisconsin goes this fall.