Wisconsin 2016: the nuances of low-voter turnout
“As Democrats pick through the wreckage of the campaign, one lesson is clear: The election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of eligible voters did not cast ballots” (Tavernise, 2016).
There are competing explanations for Trump’s unlikely 2016 victory that each beg for an outsized measure of significance. Scapegoats include but are not limited to Russian interference through the manipulation (or just plain use) of American social media companies, an electoral system that allows for the election of candidates who don’t win the majority of votes (or even close to a majority), or an ineffective campaign run by Hillary Clinton who ignored what turned out to be critical battleground states. While all of these possible explanations likely have at least some influence on the outcome, the apparently lackluster Democratic voter turnout and its causes seem to be a common focus of those performing the extensive autopsy the 2016 election. In short, the reasoning is that the Clinton campaign not only failed to mobilize black voters in the same numbers as Obama did four years before, but that she ceded swaths of white, working-class voters to Trump.
Empirical analysis by The New York Times demonstrates that while the first assessment (that Blacks did not turnout for Clinton like they did for Obama) was true, the impact has been overstated. More critically, she also lost nearly one in four working-class, white voters to either Trump or a third-party candidate (Cohn, 2017). The Democratic party primarily campaigned, as they have done for decades, towards the middle and the undecided instead of the disaffected base of voters that they have come to take for granted. So they lost them.
This mistake behooves the Democratic party to re engage working-class voters. In 2020, the Democrats have to campaign with these voters in mind to ensure them that Democrats are, in fact, the party that is the champion for labor and the blue-collar worker. This was arguably the great failure of 2016. Democrats have to accomplish this by authentically listening and caring for these populations and their needs, because there is little doubt they feel forgotten. 2016 and Trump make that clear. Was there was some way to see it coming? What were the signs? What data sources could have been utilized for predictive models? To whom should we have been talking?
Voter Disenfranchisement in Wisconsin
This is not to say that the low Black turnout for Clinton should be ignored. It is worth examining the dramatic effect of voter oppression of urban Black voters revealed by researchers and investigative reporters. This has particular relevance too in the state of Wisconsin where the effect was felt more than in other states. After all, Wisconsin GOP appointed judges passed sweeping voter identification laws in 2014 to devastating effect. And while departing governor Scott Walker called the assertion that voter ID laws prevented people from voting “a load of crap,” Republicans failed to provide a single example of voter fraud when the law was challenged in court in 2014. The judge who then struck down the efforts by the GOP to require ID for voting pointed out that about 300,000 voters in Wisconsin, or about nine percent of the electorate, currently do not have valid identification, and that “African American voters in Wisconsin were 1.7 times as likely as white voters to lack a matching driver’s license or state ID” (as cited in Berman, 2017). Before the year was over, however, a panel of GOP-appointed judges reinstated the law. A 2016 lawsuit against this panel, while challenging the voter ID in particular, was quick to point out the vast array of other legal methods the GOP took to disenfranchise voters:
This lawsuit concerns the most fundamental of rights guaranteed citizens in our representative democracy — the right to vote. That right has been under attack in Wisconsin since Republicans gained control of the governor’s office and both houses of the State Legislature in the 2010 election. Indeed, since 2011, the State of Wisconsin has twice reduced in-person absentee (“early”) voting, introduced restrictions on voter registration, changed its residency requirements, enacted a law that encourages invasive poll monitoring, eliminated straight-ticket voting on the official ballot, eliminated for most (but not all) citizens the option toobtain an absentee ballot by fax or email, and imposed a voter identification (“voter ID”) requirement.
These measures were intended to burden, abridge, and deny, and have had and will have the effect of burdening, abridging, and denying, the voting rights of Wisconsinites generally and of African-American, Latino, young, and/or Democratic voters in Wisconsin in particular (One Wisconsin Institute, Inc., v. Judge Gerald C. Nichol, 2014).
While voter turnout may not have been a national problem, it certainly was one in Wisconsin thanks to voter disenfranchisement laws. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimated that the turnout for Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest and most Democratic counties in the state (by registered voters) could have seen overall turnout curtailed by as much as 2.2% (Mayer & DeCrescenzo, 2017). They also found a statistically significant difference in the confidence intervals between Black and White voters with regard to their self-perceptions of being deterred from voting.
The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77–18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012 (Berman, 2017).
Losing the White, Rural, Working-Class Voters in Price County, WI
The majority of voters Democrats lost to Trump that they wish to recapture (or new voters they wish to mobilize under their wing) are from different worlds than the disenfranchised, urban Black voter. While both of these groups likely feel a similar sense of betrayal from Democratic leadership, or simply left behind, only one of these groups has been thoroughly investigated, some of the results of which I summarized above.
The resources needed to trace these distinct turnout problems for the 2016 election are bifurcated in their availability. While urban regions retain local news coverage and increased attention due to population density, local newspapers that serve rural regions are dead and gone, victims of a changing landscape of media coverage. Data on the particular concerns of rural voters aren’t reported on and are to hard to come by because of low population density.
It’s important to remember, however, that these voters aren’t just refusing to participate but are in effect switching sides. While a vote deterred or prevented each count as one, a voter captured from other side is worth double. The question is, are they switching in a critical mass and are they from the covted middle? It is critical for Democrats to answer these questions regarding switches by white voters, not just the abstention and disenfranchisement of Black voters. Effects of both, not just one or the other, need to be understood in the post mortem of the 2016 election.
2018 has already evinced some course correction for the promise of 2020, with record-setting elections of women and minorities who represent a leftward shift away from the centrist party the Democrats have become. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, has emerged as one of the more visible figures in this shift due to her social media fluency and unapologetic left-of-Dem, labor-first platform.
In the above tweet, she challenges the corporate-first, bipartisan status quo that was an explicit part of her orientation into Congress. But Ocasio-Cortez represents New York’s 14th congressional district which is not exactly emblematic of the rural areas that also need attention from Democrats. So, let’s look at one Wisconsin country in particular that is emblematic of the concerns that should be at the heart of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign: Price County Wisconsin.
Why Price County? Location, Location, Location (also location)
While only 20% of the the population lives in rural regions of the country (United States Census Bureau 2016), Trump voters dominate the booths in these regions. The president continues to have a stranglehold in rural communities with a 62% approval rating according to recent polling (Rakich & Mehta, 2018).
But this national picture, does it square up with the rural and white Wisconsin and the voters Democrats are looking to recapture? First of all, how rural is Price? It turns out, extremely so. Data from WisCONTEXT’s Putting Rural Wisconsin On The Map demonstrates that it is the largest, most rural county in the state of Wisconsin with a population of less than 13,500 people in almost 1300 square miles. That’s barely 10 people per square mile.
And how does Wisconsin as a state break down with regards to the rural/urban divide identified by FiveThirtyEight staff? Again, Wisconsin is a state with which the simple explanations aren’t so simple. Looking at a longitudinal paper from UW Applied Population Lab and WisContext on the political geography of Wisconsin, we see a state that over the past fifty years has grown more democratic regardless of county density. An animation made from the graphs provided in this paper show all counties growing darker blue without tremendous change in their population density.
Despite Wisconsin overall bucking the larger national trend that there is a divide between rural and urban patterns, at least insofar as the snapshots above, we need to take a closer look at Price county. Demographically, it is a fit, as the county boasts a population that is over 95% white, and while not poor, rest on the lower half of the state income averages of over $43,000 annually and a home ownership rate of nearly 80%. “The major industries are wood and paper products, tourism and manufacturing. Additional industries include farming, transportation and health care” (Price County Wisconsin, 2018). It’s as working class as it gets.
We’ve already seen that voter disenfranchisement may have had a larger effect on voter outcomes than the rest of the country, so it’s vital to check in on the rural/urban divide with regard to voting for Trump, which checks out right as expected in line with national trends.
Tracing back election results to 2000, we can see a net decline in all voters since a high of 8,661 votes in 2004. This is despite an uptick in Republican voters since the 2008 election. In the 2008 election 56% of the county voted for Barack Obama. However, two election cycles and eight years later Trump garnered nearly 63% of the votes in the 2016 election in a dramatic reversal. This indicates, as predicted, that side-switching is probable.
I have traced two problems. First, voter suppression of largely Black, urban voters. This is a problem that is well-understood because we possess active journalistic (and academic) resources in urban areas that can draw revenues from a dense population on whom they report. It is a lesson that already exists for Democrats to learn from, with regards to combating voter disenfranchisement and the needs of urban Black voters. The second problem, of alienated white and rural working class voters that, in many cases, switched their vote from Clinton to Trump, is far less known. This is, at least in part, because local news reporting and academic resources exist in only limited capacities in these often far flung areas within which almost a fifth of the country resides.
Journalism remains a private enterprise and not a public utility. This uncertain quality of the rural voter, however, can and should be examined in preparation for the 2020 elections. An eye on demographics and partnerships with renewed news media coverage that utilizes a combination of government and academic resources can tell us a lot. The US Census, WisCONTEXT and FiveThirtyEight all figured heavy into this analysis, and are valuable resources.
However, these data are retrospective, and this analysis is largely contextual and comparative. It is by no means causal or conclusive. There is a need for academic research, but more importantly in the short term, a need for politicians who want to stay in touch with those who should be their base. Democrats are beginning to do this for working-class citizens as we have seen from the 2018 election, rediscovering old alliances. There is a demonstrable need for political reporting in these areas beyond sampling, survey, and census data. And where there is demonstrable need there is an emerging market for local news reporting that does better to take the pulse of rural, working-class America.
“The results of reporting do not come cheaply, but they are a bargain for society” (Hamilton, 2016, p. 84).
Works Cited
Berman, A. (2017). Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Mother Jones. Retrieved December 5th, 2018 from: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/
Cohn, N. (2016). A 2016 Review: Turnout Wasn’t the Driver of Clinton’s Defeat. New York Times. Retrieved December 8th, 2018 from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/upshot/a-2016-review-turnout-wasnt-the-driver-of-clintons-defeat.html
U.S. Census Bureau (2016) “U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.”
Parenthetical: (United States Census 2000)
Price County Wisconsin. (2018). Demographics. Retrieved December 3rd, 2018 from: https://co.price.wi.us/314/Demographics
Tavernise, S., (2016). Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood Didn’t Vote — and Don’t Regret It. The New York Times. Retrieved December 4th, 2018 from: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-didnt-vote-and-dont-regret-it.html
Hamilton, J., (2016) Democracies Detectives
Smith, C., (2018). Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law Has Created Confusion And Hurdles. Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. Retrieved December 2nd, 2018 from: https://www.wiscontext.org/wisconsins-voter-id-law-has-created-confusion-and-hurdles
Mayer, K. R., & DeCrescenzo, M. G. (2017). Supporting Information: Estimating the Effect of Voter ID on Nonvoters in Wisconsin in the 2016 Presidential Election.
Rakich, N., Mehta, D. (2018) Trump Is Only Popular In Rural Areas. FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved December 7th, 2018 from: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-really-popular-in-rural-areas-other-places-not-so-much/
Putting Rural Wisconsin On The Map. (2018, November 09). WisCONTEXT. Retrieved December 6th, 2018 from https://www.wiscontext.org/putting-rural-wisconsin-map
Jones, M., Knutsen, K., Bourbeau, C. (2016). The Political Geography Of Wisconsin: Partisanship And Population Density. UW Applied Population Lab and WisContext. Retrieved December 5th, 2018 from: https://www.wiscontext.org/political-geography-wisconsin-partisanship-and-population-density
