So it’s interesting to learn that a new Marquette Law School Poll of Wisconsin — the gold standard in the state’s polls — shows that voters there are actually growing more tolerant of immigration and racial and ethnic diversity, even as a plurality of voters oppose Trump’s tariffs.

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The new poll’s toplines are that former vice president Joe Biden leads Trump among Wisconsin registered voters by 51 percent to 42 percent, and Sen. Bernie Sanders leads Trump by 48 percent to 44 percent, while Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala D. Harris are both dead even with him.

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On immigration, the poll finds that 65 percent of Wisconsin voters think “having an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities in the United States makes this country a better place to live.” By contrast, 27 percent say those things make no difference (and only 4 percent say they make the United States worse).

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette poll, told me that this represents an increase of 12 points compared to 2016, when only 53 percent of Wisconsin voters said those things made the United States a better place.

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“You‘ll find a lot of evidence that the society has become more positive to immigrants and minorities in the last three years, not less positive,” Franklin told me.

In Wisconsin, Franklin said, there has been a shift in which Republicans haven’t moved much but “Democrats and some independents have moved away from the president and to a more pro-immigration and pro-minority position.”

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Franklin noted that you often see voters shifting against whatever ideology a president espouses, but “a more traditional president, with a more constrained speaking style, may not have as big an effect that Trump has had.”

On trade, the poll finds that among Wisconsin voters, only 30 percent say tariffs help the economy, while 46 percent say they hurt, and another 17 percent say they don’t make much difference — putting a solid majority in the camp that says they hurt or do nothing.

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Among pure independents, Franklin tells me, 47 percent say the tariffs hurt, while only 34 percent say they help. That’s a small slice of the Wisconsin electorate, Franklin noted, but they can be important in a “state that’s often decided by one or two percentage points.”

Franklin pointed out that in Wisconsin, “agriculture and manufacturing are both important export sectors,” which could help explain why trade has become a “challenging” issue for Trump, even in this Midwestern state he won. “These restrictions that are reducing exports are having a real impact,” Franklin noted.

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Still, there’s a nuance here, and it goes to the ways in which Trump is further polarizing the electorate along rural-versus-suburban/metropolitan lines.

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Franklin points out that the data show that Republicans are somewhat more united behind Trump now than in 2016, and that there are not signs that the rural parts of the state are edging away from Trump.

Trump’s reelection chances, Franklin argued, turn on whether he can do “even better this time” in the northern and western rural parts of the state, which have been “trending more Republican.”

“The trouble is that the Republican suburbs around Milwaukee, and to a lesser extent around Green Bay, have been trending in a more Democratic direction,” Franklin pointed out. “The trade-off battle in the state” turns on whether he can “he run up the margins in those rural areas” without losing too much support in the suburbs.

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And suburban voters, Franklin said, are more likely the people alienated by tariffs. “They’re not so thrilled on the trade issues,” he said. In other words, this is another way Trump is likely exacerbating that rural-metropolitan divide.

Regardless, this surely isn’t where Trump expected to be in a state like Wisconsin, which (we are endlessly told) Trump snatched by employing a kind of performative populist nationalism that showed he recognized latent sentiments among the electorate that elitist Democrats did not.

Now that this nationalism has collided with reality, it looks as if it isn’t playing as well as he might have hoped — right in a state that is thought of as the heart of Trump country.