How Wisconsin explains America

Democratic voters just won a 10-point landslide in a state that President Donald Trump won last year. How?

The answer is a defining trend of modern elections: There are two different kinds of electorates who come out to vote in the Trump era.

On Tuesday night, the liberal, Democrat-aligned Judge Susan Crawford defeated her Republican-backed opponent by nearly 300,000 votes — a 10-point margin — less than a year after Trump carried the state on his way to a battleground sweep.

She achieved that victory as more than 2.3 million people turned out to vote, about two-thirds of last year’s electorate. That’s significantly more than the last time a high-profile court seat was up for grabs and nearly matches the level of turnout in the 2022 midterms.

Crawford’s victory has been cast as symbolic for many reasons. It’s both a referendum on the months-old Trump administration and on Elon Musk for his involvement and spending in the race. It was a test of liberal organizing and Democratic enthusiasm ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as the party’s base demands their leaders do more and they look for ways to resist Trump.

But Wisconsin’s weird voting dynamics in the Trump era, combined with other national special and off-year elections, also demonstrate the role Trump has played in scrambling electoral coalitions and see-sawing the balance of power both in Washington and in the states.

Two different electorates, polarized by education, class, and political engagement, have emerged — one which benefits Democrats broadly, another which benefits solely Trump himself.

Wisconsin in the age of Trump has been a curious place to watch. As a battleground for presidential and state-level contests, it has swung wildly between barely electing a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate, and delivering comfortable margins for liberals and Democrats running in off-year or midterm cycles.

A clear story emerges when looking at overall turnout, county-specific demographics, Democratic enthusiasm, and polling in Wisconsin. And that story fits into a pattern of elections in the state. Wisconsin’s 2025 electorate was deeply Democratic: made up of not just the most informed and engaged voters, but also some lower-propensity voters who were persuaded to flip. As the data journalist Steve Kornacki pointed out ahead of the election, in off-year contests when Trump isn’t on the ballot, pro-Trump blue-collar white voters have been less motivated to vote than have anti-Trump college-educated voters.

That dynamic leads to results like Tuesday night’s, when turnout in the most highly educated, Democratic parts of the state was much higher than turnout in the more non-college-educated, pro-Trump places. An emblematic location was Dane County, home of Madison: Crawford received more net votes and a higher share of the vote than the Democrats’ 2022 Senate nominee Mandela Barnes.

Wisconsin is just the latest example of how two different electorates are determining the balance of power in America.

When Trump is on the ballot, lower-propensity, non-college-educated, and (more recently) disaffected voters of color are more likely to turn out and vote for him, even if they don’t necessarily vote for other Republicans.

That was a factor that contributed not just to Harris’s loss in 2024, but also to Senate and House Democrats’ overperformance in swing states. Democratic Senate candidates like Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, and Baldwin in Wisconsin all outran Harris’s performance and won their respective races, in part because Republican turnout for Trump didn’t trickle its way down the ballot.

When Trump is not on the ballot, highly motivated, high-information, and disaffected anti-Trump voters (some of them former Republicans) still turn out, or turn out at even higher rates for Democratic candidates — and those candidates still win over some share of Republicans who can be persuaded to vote for a Democrat. At the same time, lower-propensity Trump voters stay home.

This is a historic shift. For most of the last 30 years, it’s been the Republican Party that has had the more attuned, higher-propensity voters who would turn out in off-year elections, and so would benefit from a smaller electorate. Democrats were the ones struggling to get their voters to the polls when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot. But the Republican Party has been trading away many of those higher-propensity, college-educated, and wealthier voters to the Democrats in the Trump era, as Democrats lost more white, non-college-educated voters.

This pattern was again demonstrated in Wisconsin this week, but also in special elections across the country. In Florida’s First and Sixth Congressional Districts, a share of Republican voters who turned out voted for Democratic candidates, particularly in the First District, which has more of a college-educated electorate. This was also a factor in the 2022 midterms, when states like Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia had plurality-Republican electorates that still ended up sending Democratic Senate candidates to Congress.

Democrats are celebrating this most recent win in Wisconsin, and there are clear signs that the next year stands to see a score of Democratic victories in statewide and House elections. But the dynamic that is saving them in off years might not rescue them in the next presidential election (in which Trump will presumably not be on the ballot). They may have more lessons to learn about how to take advantage of the fundamentals that benefit them right now, and they surely have lessons to learn about how to counter Trump’s influence before the next presidential cycle.