This was never MAGA country.
This was never MAGA country.
U nlike the sidewalks outside Chicago’s Subway restaurants, Wisconsin was never MAGA country. As one of NR’s Wisconsin apologists, I think this is a point worth making in light of a recent Wall Street Journal piece highlighting Trump’s faltering popularity in Washington County — the Wisconsin county with the highest statistically significant turnout for the former president.
Reporting for the Journal, John McCormick writes:
Former President Donald Trump remains hugely popular here in Washington County, where he won his largest vote share in 2020 among Wisconsin counties that recorded at least 25,000 ballots.
But interviews with more than two dozen of the county’s GOP voters suggest an openness to someone other than Mr. Trump for a 2024 presidential nominee. Many are quick to mention Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Located northwest of Milwaukee, Washington County is a mix of suburbs, small towns and rural areas. Mr. Trump won 68.4% of its vote in 2020, when President Biden won Wisconsin in the country’s third-narrowest state outcome.
But Trump was never Wisconsin’s first pick. Many years ago, in an age before space and memory, there was 2016. On April 5 of that year, Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin’s Republican primary by a margin of 13.12 percentage points, securing 36 delegates to Trump’s six. Washington County went 62–23 in favor of Cruz, and the reasons are evident when one understands Wisconsin’s mix of conservative Christianity, working-class rejection of ostentation, and communitarianism.
A helpful example would be the Lutherans of Wisconsin. Culturally and religiously conservative, with an efficacious denominational social-safety net and school network, many either stayed home or voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Trump was too vile for them to find commonality with; and given the church body’s ability to provide charitable and educational services, there was no pressing need, of a sort that more disconnected voters might feel, to elevate a Republican for a sense of personal gain or cultural dominance. Character, politeness, and civility are qualities held in high regard in such self-sufficient institutions, and Trump showed far too little of these to be entrusted with the votes of people who prize them.
McCormick’s interviewees voice this view:
“I like Trump’s policies, but not some of the extracurriculars,” said David St. Peter, a 62-year-old printing-industry salesman. “I’d love to see DeSantis run.”
Mr. St. Peter said he isn’t convinced there were “enough irregularities” in the 2020 presidential election to make a difference in the outcome, and he thinks Mr. Trump “needs to let go” of his obsession with the topic.
Angela Buesing, a 50-year-old information-technology manager who twice voted for Mr. Trump, said she would like a GOP nominee with a “better moral compass” and worries the former president wouldn’t be able to win over enough independent voters.
“A lot of people I know are against him, and they just can’t get past his demeanor and past actions,” she said. “I think there are better Republican candidates out there.”
In his eminently worthwhile book Alienated America, Tim Carney shares an account of his time in Oostburg, Wis. Located just to the south of my hometown, Sheboygan, Oostburg is a Dutch stronghold of conservative Calvinists. Carney writes:
On Sunday morning at Judi’s, I saw the truest manifestation of the town’s Dutch heritage, and it wasn’t the diner cuisine: Dozens of families streamed in to dine with their neighbors after service at one of the four Reformed churches in the village.
My dad, a 30-year sheriff’s deputy in Sheboygan County, would tell me of a long-running gag played on the new officers where they would be directed to handle a problem at the Catholic church in Oostburg — a church that doesn’t exist. The new guy would drive around for hours among the Reformed churches, ultimately abashedly calling in to report he couldn’t find the Catholic church — which would naturally be met with hoots of derisive joy from the seasoned officers. As big-city dwellers, we thought Oostburg a provincial and slightly cultish hamlet, what with their affection for windmills, penny-pinching, and knowing one another’s business.
Like the Lutherans — a comparison both would grumble into their beards about — the Oostburgers are as self-organizing as they are conservative; perhaps the most Republican-voting town in all of Wisconsin boasts a robust social fabric where the local high-school basketball team is more popular than the Green Bay Packers. In the 2016 primaries, they voted for Cruz 84–17 over Trump.
It is true that Wisconsin did vote for Trump in 2016 and that some of these communities that supported Cruz would tentatively back Trump again in 2020.
It is also true that the Dairy State as a whole punished Trump for his rhetoric and personal indiscretions in 2020 when a net 250,000 Wisconsinites vaulted cows and sprinted past Culver’s to get to the polls and vote him out, delivering the state to Biden.
When the interviewees say they want the policies of the Trump administration without the hysterics, I believe them. A candidate who can assuage the Lutheran grandmothers’ worries that the Right is getting too foul and bitter while proving monogamous with conservative social policies will continue to succeed in America’s Dairyland. Just ask us; you’ll probably get an invite to a potluck to boot.