Herb Kohl and Tommy Thompson are the most popular politicians Wisconsin has produced in more than a generation. They came to prominence in the 1980s and left politics at the end of 2012.

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

Already, they seem like figures from another age.

That's because the political world in which they thrived no longer exists, a world where ticket-splitting was common, party lines were porous and large numbers of voters were up for grabs.

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

Second of four parts Part 1: Living on different planets

There may be no more polarized place in swing-state America as national trends are amplified by fierce campaigns, an impassioned electorate, and a deep urban-suburban divide.

Living on different planets There may be no more polarized place in swing-state America as national trends are amplified by fierce campaigns, an impassioned electorate, and a deep urban-suburban divide. 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

Can you imagine a Republican candidate for governor winning Milwaukee and Dane counties — the Democratic strongholds that Gov. Scott Walker lost by 27 and 39 points, respectively, in the 2012 recall election?

Thompson did it.

Can you imagine a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate winning Waukesha County — the Republican bastion that President Barack Obama lost by 34 points in 2012?

Kohl did it.

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

Can you imagine almost 40% of the state's voters splitting their tickets for governor and senator?

It happened when Kohl and Thompson shared a ballot 20 years ago.

Maybe another politician will come along in Wisconsin and transcend political dividing lines, win on enemy turf and attract large numbers of voters from the other party. But in today's polarized times, and in one of the country's most politically divided states, it's almost unthinkable. Not even Thompson could do it when he returned to Wisconsin politics two years ago.

“ When I was running for governor, I intentionally went out in the black churches. I intentionally went into the union halls. I went to the Democratic festivities. ... I did that because I wanted to bridge the gap. That kind of politics isn’t in vogue anymore. (For me) it was, ‘How do I expand from 69 or 70 percent to 75 percent?’ People now say, ‘How do I get to 50 percent plus one?’ ” Tommy Thompson, four-term governor of Wisconsin, 1987-2001

"That model has changed," says Brian Nemoir, who helped run Thompson's failed 2012 U.S. Senate campaign.

Kohl and Thompson were special politicians with personal assets — likability, an image of pragmatism, big war chests — that scared away tough challengers and paved the way for re-election landslides.

But they also built their popularity in a less polarized world. It's hard to imagine any scenario today — no matter how freakish — that would cause 40%, 30%, even 20% of this state's voters to split their tickets for major office.

Voters moving away from splits Ticket-splitting has declined dramatically in Wisconsin since the 1980s. The share of voters who voted for different parties in major races on the same ballot (president and U.S. senator in some years, governor and U.S. senator in others) topped 20% before 2000 and sank to 6% in 2012. Analysis of Wisconsin exit polls by Journal Sentinel and Marquette Law School

"When I was running for governor, I intentionally went out in the black churches. I intentionally went into the union halls. I went to the Democratic festivities," Thompson says. "I did that because I wanted to bridge the gap. That kind of politics isn't in vogue anymore. (For me) it was, 'How do I expand from 69 or 70 percent to 75 percent?' People now say, 'How do I get to 50 percent plus one?'"

Thompson says the incentives for politicians have shifted from building broad coalitions to nurturing narrower ones, and catering to partisan media, partisan interest groups, partisan donors and partisan districts.

As he ran for Senate in 2012, Thompson says, "I was amazed just how partisan the state had become since I left (in 2001) as governor."

He carried Milwaukee County three times and Dane County once as a Republican governor in the 1990s.

"It's not there now," Thompson says. "Nobody will ever do that again."

Mobilizing the faithful

Wisconsin is just as much a swing state as it was 20 years ago. But that may be the only thing that hasn't changed. Politicians have become more polarizing; the electorate has become more polarized. As a result, candidates today have a much harder time — and a lot less interest in — attracting votes from the other party. What they can do is rack up landslide margins among their own party's voters. That has altered the way political coalitions are put together.

In the 2012 recall race, Scott Walker lost his home county, the state's largest, Milwaukee, by 27 points — more than any Republican candidate for governor in 30 years. That would have been fatal to his chances a decade or two ago. But for Walker, it was no obstacle to winning. Why? In large part, because Milwaukee's Republican suburbs gave him the biggest vote margins they had ever given any candidate for any office.

Obama got hammered in those same suburban counties, doing worse than Democrat George McGovern did in his lopsided 1972 defeat. But it didn't stop the president from winning comfortably statewide. A big reason? He won Milwaukee and Madison by margins nobody had ever seen before.

Elections have changed. Winning has more to do with mobilizing the faithful than it used to and less to do with persuading the persuadable.

"I think as campaigns overall have intensified, you've gotten to the point where you're not just making a blanket argument to the voters," Walker says. "It's more about turnout than anything else. There's a heavy concentrated turnout that both parties make. They accelerate it, the Democrats in places like Milwaukee, the Republicans in places like Waukesha and the surrounding suburbs."

The rest of the state — the more competitive "swing-y" parts — still matters, of course, and was integral to Walker's and Obama's 2012 victories. But compared to past decades, the hallmarks of Wisconsin elections these days are the staggering landslides that Republicans reap from their base counties (Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee) and Democrats reap from theirs (Milwaukee and Dane). These are the prerequisites of a successful statewide campaign, and they give Wisconsin politics its "battle of the bases" quality.

"We keep jacking up the base," says Democratic pollster Paul Maslin of Madison. "The campaigns are not even trying to appeal to the other side."

Farewell to ticket-splitting

Maybe the best gauge of the hardening of partisan lines is the dramatic long-term decline in the number of people who divide their vote between the parties.

Voting gaps widen Democrat Tammy Baldwin was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 to succeed Democrat Herb Kohl, who was first elected in 1988. Between those two elections, political dividing lines widened in Wisconsin. For example, Kohl won 55% of the urban vote and 50% of the rural vote in 1988 — a gap of 5 points. Baldwin won 68% of the urban vote and 45% of the rural vote in 2012 — a gap of 23 points. Analysis of Wisconsin exit polls by Journal Sentinel and Marquette Law School's Charles Franklin

A Journal Sentinel analysis of 25 years of exit polling in Wisconsin shows that the share of ticket-splitters for president, governor and senator has steadily dwindled to just 5% or 6% today.

When Kohl won his first election in 1988 against Republican Susan Engeleiter, one in four voters was a ticket-splitter, picking one party for Senate and the other party for president. When Democrat Tammy Baldwin defeated Thompson to succeed Kohl a quarter-century later, one in 17 was a ticket-splitter.

Revisiting that '88 race is like traveling back to a quaint and distant era in our history, when unpredictability and independence were popular and deeply-rooted stereotypes about Wisconsin's political culture.

Engeleiter, a 36-year-old state senator from suburban Brookfield, was the sort of middle-of-the-road Republican officeholder that has largely vanished today. She was against banning abortions, opposed to the death penalty and unwilling to rule out tax increases. Yet she easily defeated her conservative primary opponent, former state party chairman Steve King.

King called her "Sue-kakis" to try to link her to the Democratic presidential nominee that year, Mike Dukakis. Engeleiter called King "an ultra-right-wing zealot." Engeleiter left politics after the race. King sits on the Republican National Committee.

What would happen if someone with Engeleiter's positions ran in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in Wisconsin today?

"They would not be competitive," King says.

Two Senate races just 20 years apart In 1992, Russ Feingold beat Bob Kasten amid significant crossover voting. By 2012, when Tammy Baldwin beat Tommy Thompson, crossover voting had virtually disappeared and communities on both sides had grown more partisan. The size of the blue swath can be deceiving. Milwaukee County's population in 2012 was 954,000; the combined population of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties was 612,000. Senate voting maps are by ward State of Wisconsin

On the Democratic side of that race, Kohl was boosted by his personal fortune and the goodwill that flowed from his family's grocery chain and "saving" the Milwaukee Bucks by purchasing the team three years earlier. But he still faced more experienced Democrats with much stronger liberal credentials — including former Gov. Tony Earl. He beat Earl by nine points.

Because both parties chose their most moderate candidates, the general election wasn't the stark ideological faceoff that is now the norm. This 1988 headline from The Milwaukee Journal would be hard to imagine today: "Kohl, Engeleiter share commitment to social programs."

Some other things that are hard to imagine: A third of self-described conservatives supported Kohl on election day, even though he ran on a 10% defense cut and 10-point tax increase for people making $200,000 a year. A quarter of self-described liberals supported Engeleiter.

Those voting patterns weren't just a quirk of the Kohl-Engeleiter race. When Democrat Russ Feingold defeated Republican Sen. Bob Kasten four years later, 19% of Republicans crossed over and voted for Feingold; 19% of Democrats voted for Kasten.

Since then, the decline in crossover voting has been precipitous.

Feingold's case is striking: In his four U.S. Senate races, his share of the Republican vote went from 19% in 1992 to 14% in 1998 and 2004 to just over 6% in 2010, when he lost his seat to Ron Johnson. Feingold didn't morph into a different politician. The political culture shifted and people's voting habits changed.

Video We asked: Could you imagine yourself splitting your ticket now in a big statewide election?

Thompson's case is even more telling. The most broadly appealing Wisconsin Republican of the past half-century, he returned to state politics after a 12-year absence to experience the worst of both worlds. He wasn't conservative enough for some GOP voters, barely winning a four-way primary. And his fabled crossover appeal crumbled. Thompson started the race with the support of one in six Democrats and finished it with the support of one in 20 (footnote 1).

Tommy Thompson was drawing the support of about 15% of Democrats in the first half of 2012, according to Marquette Law School’s polling. That fell to 8% after a flood of anti-Thompson ads in August and to 5% in the election day exit poll.

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"If you only knew where the state is today, it is hard to imagine how different we were 20 or 30 years ago," says Charles Franklin of the Marquette Law School, a political scientist and pollster who collaborated on the research for this project.

Sharpening the lines

One explanation for the rise in party-line voting is that voters today are more aware of what the parties stand for, because the contrast between them is so much sharper.

"People used to vote really poorly," says political scientist Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz of the University of Rhode Island. "People are becoming better able to identify the party they are supposed to be voting for, given their ideology."

But if voters have become more politically aware, they also have become more politically rigid.

"People have gotten so hardened in their positions. They're not even open to considering somebody in the other party," says Bill Christofferson, who helped run Kohl's '88 campaign.

The intensity and sophistication of modern campaigns also is playing a role. One of the biggest effects of campaign spending is not necessarily to change minds. It's to trigger and heighten the partisan tendencies that voters already carry.

"Elections are ultimately about reminding people why they like their side and why they hate the other side." says Ken Goldstein, a former University of Wisconsin political scientist now with the University of San Francisco, and an expert on campaign advertising. "There has been lots of reminding in Wisconsin lately."

Goldstein says Wisconsin features a "perfect brew" for the polarized and party-line voting patterns seen in recent election cycles: It has highly aware and engaged voters, reflected in its soaring turnouts (footnote 2); and it has been subject to the kind of sustained, saturation-level advertising and organizing found only in perennial battleground states.

Wisconsin has ranked second in turnout behind Minnesota in each of the past three presidential elections, according to data gathered by Michael McDonald of George Mason University.

Nationally, ticket-splitting sank to 50-year lows in 2012. The partisan gaps in how Americans view the last two presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama — are the largest in the history of polling (footnote 4).

In Gallup’s national polling, the biggest partisan gaps in presidential approval are for Obama in 2012 and Bush in 2004 (both 76 points). The nine largest one-year partisan gaps in approval have all been for Bush and Obama.

These trends aren't just about the rise in party loyalty; they're about the rise in partisan enmity.

"People are stable in their (support) of their own party, but increasingly dislike the other party. That's the divide," says Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.

Dan Schauer, a Waukesha County businessman who describes himself as a Democratic-leaning independent, calls the political climate today "an exercise in frustration."

"It feels like we're at a point now where if a Republican says something is green, a Democrat is going to say it's purple. And if a Democrat says something is delicious, the Republican is going to say it's terrible, just out of principle."

Like a lot of Wisconsin voters, he says he and his wife have had to stop discussing politics within their extended family.

Schauer says the rancor in politics today reminds him of his first career, as a family therapist. "I used to say, if one spouse has to win or beat the other person, then the relationship loses."

It used to be routine in Wisconsin for large numbers of voters to express positive feelings about major figures on the other side of the political spectrum.

In 1988, two years into his first term as governor, Republican Thompson had a 57% approval rating among liberals in a Milwaukee Journal survey. In a 2002 University of Wisconsin Badger Poll, almost half of Wisconsin Republicans thought newly elected Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle would do a good or excellent job as governor.

What today's Wisconsin politicians have in common is something very different: an almost total absence of support or approval from the opposing party's voters.

A different geography

The hardening of partisan lines can be seen on the election map, too.

In 1992, the left-leaning U.S. House district anchored by the city of Madison voted Republican for Congress (Scott Klug) by 26 points and voted Democratic for president (Bill Clinton) by 18 points. Klug won Dane County three times in the 1990s. Waukesha County was home in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the Democratic State Assembly speaker (Ed Jackamonis), and helped send a liberal Democrat to the state Senate (now federal Judge Lynn Adelman) for 20 years, until he left office in 1997.

In 2010 and 2012, we saw something quite different in Wisconsin politics. More than ever before, communities were voting the same way up and down the ballot, for president, U.S. Senate, Congress and Legislature. Almost every contest on these ballots followed the same geographic pattern, right down to the ward level. They were almost cookie-cutter images of one another, as if there was only one question on the ballot: Republican or Democrat?

Nowhere was this more true than in metropolitan Milwaukee, the state's most polarized place, where 99% of all precincts voted the same way for Senate and governor in the 2010 election.

"You look at major portions of the (metropolitan Milwaukee) media market and they're spoken for," says GOP pollster Gene Ulm.

Those patterns didn't congeal overnight. They weren't just a product of the tea party wave of 2010 or the recall wars of 2011 and 2012.

Almost every city, town and village in Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties has been getting redder since the early 1970s. The city of Milwaukee has been getting bluer. And most of the Milwaukee County suburbs have followed one of two distinct patterns. The more upscale suburbs to the north of the city, once reliably Republican, have become more Democratic. The more blue-collar suburbs to the south of the city, once reliably Democratic, have become more Republican.

The political distance some communities have traveled is breathtaking. In 1960, the city of New Berlin in Waukesha County voted for Democrat John F. Kennedy by a half-dozen points. It has been marching headlong in the opposite direction ever since. Mitt Romney won New Berlin by more than 30 points in 2012.

A tale of two cities The Waukesha County community of New Berlin and the Milwaukee County community of Shorewood are a microcosm of the widening gap between more densely populated communities and less densely populated ones, and between increasingly red Waukesha County and increasingly blue Milwaukee County. Growing partisan trend, compared to state overall

(Based on presidential voting) State of Wisconsin, Journal Sentinel analysis

On a very different glide path has been the lakefront inner suburb of Shorewood in Milwaukee County, once a mainstay of the GOP. Shorewood was such an establishment enclave 50 years ago it was skewered by Milwaukee folk singer Larry Penn in a song called "Shorewood Man" ("Yes, he was a Shorewood man/marching to a Shorewood band/Watching his Shorewood style/And counting his Shorewood pile"). In 1960, Richard Nixon won Shorewood by almost 30 points. A half-century later, Barack Obama won it by more than 40 points.

Moving in, moving out

These shifts reflect a growing national split between blue-trending cities and inner suburbs, and red-trending outer suburbs.

Political scientists cite a long list of factors behind this trend: demographic change; the shifting coalitions of the parties; white flight and racial division; housing and transit policies; highway-building and sprawl; the decline of manufacturing and unions; Democrats and Republicans gravitating to different neighborhoods.

How much of a role each of these plays is the subject of debate. But many — maybe all — have been at play in southeastern Wisconsin.

More than 400,000 people moved out of Milwaukee County between 1960 and 2000, some but not all to the counties next door. Many were conservative Democrats and independents who became Republicans.

"A very large percentage of people in Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties have roots in Milwaukee County and particularly in the city," says John Gurda, who writes about the history of Milwaukee. "What fascinates me is that a lot of them come from blue-collar households that voted Democratic."

Their departure changed the racial and partisan makeup (footnote 4) of Milwaukee.

The city’s white population shrank from roughly 470,000 in 1980 to just under 300,000 in 2000; its African-American population grew from just under 150,000 in 1980 to more than 220,000 in 2000. Both trends have slowed considerably since 2000.

"It's not just who moves in, it's also who moves out," says University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel, who has tracked the migration patterns of Democrats and Republicans.

County suburbs change colors The only competitive communities in metro Milwaukee can be found in Milwaukee County’s inner suburbs. But most of these places are in political transition, based on their presidential voting in recent decades. The more upscale suburbs to the north of the city of Milwaukee, once reliably Republican, have become more Democratic. The more blue-collar suburbs to the south of the city, once reliably Democratic, have become more Republican. How blue or red Milwaukee County municipalities have become over time as measured by presidential elections Election data from the State of Wisconsin and Clayton Nall of Stanford University

The city of Milwaukee became more Democratic as its white population shrank and its black and Latino populations grew. The North Shore suburbs attracted college-educated white Democrats; they joined culturally moderate Republicans already living there who were turning away from growing social conservatism in the GOP. Brown Deer got bluer as its African-American population grew. West Milwaukee got bluer as its Latino population grew.

In contrast, the southern Milwaukee County suburbs turned redder as white working-class voters left the Democratic Party, as industrial jobs and union membership declined and as their population got older. In Greendale, the median age has gone from 24 to 45 in the past 40 years; in Franklin, from 24 to 42. The Milwaukee County communities whose populations have aged the most between 1970 and 2010 all voted for Romney in 2012, including Greendale, Franklin, Greenfield and Hales Corners. The three "youngest" communities — Shorewood, Milwaukee and West Milwaukee — are the bluest places not only in Milwaukee County, but in the entire metropolitan area.

Across the metro area, communities have been moving methodically in one partisan direction — red or blue — for decades. The typical city, town or village in Washington County was 5 to 10 points more Republican than the United States as a whole in the 1970s (based on presidential voting), 10 to 15 points more Republican in the 1980s, 15 to 20 points more Republican in the 1990s, 20 to 25 points more Republican in the 2000s and is 25 to 30 points more Republican today.

Partisan clustering

Why are these trends so persistent? Why does political segregation keep rising here, unabated? Why do so many one-sided communities keep growing more so?

There are two broad explanations for this phenomenon, dubbed " the big sort (footnote 5) " in a 2008 book by journalist Bill Bishop about the "clustering of like-minded America."

Author Bill Bishop charted the increase in the number of landslide counties in presidential contests since the 1970s, and argued it was part of broader sorting of Americans by politics, lifestyle, education, religion and other attributes.

The first is chiefly political. It's that this clustering has less to do with Democrats and Republicans moving around than with people growing more partisan where they live. As the parties have polarized nationally along left-right lines, places with lots of liberals have gotten bluer and places with lots of conservatives have gotten redder.

"This isn't so much about the movement of voters as much as the ideological clarity of the parties," says Pearson-Merkowitz.

The second is that social and psychological factors also are driving communities apart, making one-sided places even more one-sided. Ulm, the GOP pollster, calls them "reinforcement effects."

What are they?

There's the theory that people are attracted to neighborhoods full of people like them.

"Like-minded people like being around like-minded people," says Keith Gilkes, the strategist who ran campaigns for both Thompson and Walker in 2012.

There's the theory that Democrats and Republicans are attracted to different types of neighborhoods: Democrats to more urban environments and lifestyles; Republicans to suburban ones.

"Nobody is going to move to a place where the school is rotten because they want to live around more Democrats. But ... politics can definitely play a tiebreaking role," says Gimpel, who found in his own research that Democrats and, especially, Republicans tend to move to places that are politically compatible. "It's not that people are studying precinct maps (when they move). They are capable of reading from the terrain a kind of compatibility."

There's the theory that people are influenced by what their neighbors think and how they vote.

"Part of it has to be, 'I'm listening to my neighbors talk. I'm seeing things the way they see them,'" says former state Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, a Waukesha County Republican.

There's the theory that people are influenced by the type of the community they live in.

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.

"If you live in a suburb and you have a car, then you have less stake in public transportation," says U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee). "It's easy to (vote to) get rid of the regional transportation authority when you're not relying on that."

Finally, where you live affects how you experience a political campaign. One-sided communities get more attention from their own side, because they offer the parties a rich lode of votes that can be mined with great efficiency. Waukesha has long had an unusually robust GOP volunteer base and vibrant county party. If you live there, you are touched by a massive amount of Republican activity. If you live in Madison, you are not.

"When Republicans advertise in Madison, you do more harm than good," Ulm says of his own party.

If living among different neighbors can exacerbate partisan divisions, then consuming different media can, too. In metro Milwaukee, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to watch CNN or MSNBC; Republicans are almost twice as likely to watch the Fox News Channel and listen to conservative talk radio. Within both parties, conservative talk radio is widely seen as one reason Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee are the most Republican counties in the state. Democrats view it as intensely divisive. State Democratic chairman Mike Tate calls it "gasoline on the fire of polarization in the Milwaukee media market." Republicans see it as galvanizing. According to Nielsen, the news/talk/information format — a category that includes public radio but is overwhelmingly AM — accounts for about 11% of the radio audience nationally, but a much larger share, 17% (footnote 6), in the Milwaukee market.

Milwaukee’s talk radio audience is similar to Cincinnati’s but much larger as a share of all radio listeners than in Cleveland, Pittsburgh or the Twin Cities, according to Nielsen Audio.

Whether talk radio has pushed its audience in a more conservative direction or followed it there is an open question. But there is little doubt it has helped mobilize Republican voters and influenced which politicians rise and fall within the GOP. Backed by talk radio in his primary against Mark Neumann in 2010, Walker won the Milwaukee media market by 47 points and lost the rest of the state by six.

"When I'm in those counties, I get people who can quote almost verbatim what somebody said (on the radio) that day," says Walker.

Polarization circa 2014

Walker's locked-in ratings Gov. Scott Walker's approval ratings over the past two-plus years stand out in at least two ways: There are massive gaps between how Republican and Democratic voters view him, and his ratings fluctuate very little over time. Walker approval ratings by political affiliation Marquette Law School statewide polling of registered voters since January 2012

As the lightning-rod governor of a divided state, Walker personifies the costs and benefits of competing for office in polarized times.

The negatives for the governor? His opposition is sizable and highly motivated; almost a quarter of the state's eligible voters signed a recall petition. And there doesn't appear to be a lot Walker can do to significantly broaden his base of support in Wisconsin.

"His approval has varied within about three points of 49% and his disapproval within about three points of 45%," says Franklin of the Marquette Law School, referring to the polls he has done almost monthly for more than two years. "It has been remarkably stable."

But the political positives for Walker have arguably been greater. His base loves him. It is just as motivated as his opposition and maybe more so. Feelings about him are so entrenched, it's very hard for opponents to do anything to move the needle of public opinion against him. His popularity in Wisconsin has never approached the levels Thompson achieved as governor 20 years ago. But his more polarizing approach to governing has made him a hero to conservatives, given him a national fundraising network and made him a credible 2016 presidential candidate.

One poll that speaks volumes about the Wisconsin electorate was taken last fall by the Marquette Law School — its first survey pitting Walker against his Democratic opponent, political newcomer and businesswoman Mary Burke.


Walker led Burke 47% to 45%. Virtually everyone who was surveyed had an opinion about Walker. But only 30% of the voters knew enough about Burke to offer an opinion. In fact, two-thirds of the people who backed Burke in the poll had no impression of her at all, good or bad. All they knew was that she was the governor's Democratic opponent.

"I would not have gotten into it if I didn't think people want to see a candidate who wasn't so divisive," says Burke, who spent her early childhood years in Wauwatosa, where Walker makes his home, before her family moved to the Waukesha County community of Hartland.

Burke says there "does not have to be a highly partisan divide" in this state.

The governor makes no apologies for the fact that "there's like two people in this state that don't have a strong opinion of me."

"I don't think having a division amongst the electorate is a bad thing," Walker says. "I think having a healthy debate about which ideas work is good."

twitter.com/WisVoter cgilbert@journalsentinel.com