Wisconsin is probably "Toss Up" in Presidential Elections. It really hasn't voted that differently from the country as a whole in the last 5 Presidential Elections except for 2008.
Gotta agree with Hopper on this one....
Many people simply look at the overall Win/Loss map as a zero-sum game, and neglect to delve into the county level details and beyond....
Oregon shares many similarities with Wisconsin, although also a few key differences....
Both States had large Rural components that swung heavily towards Dukakis in '88 that had suffered much under the Reagan Recession and lack of recovery in small town and rural areas...
Both states still had heavily Republican voting blocks in overwhelmingly White Middle-Class suburban areas....
Both states had a relatively high level of support for Perot in '92/'96, where if one simply were to look at a Map, neglected to show how many communities felt abandoned by both major political parties.
Both states had Gore eke out narrow wins in '00/'04, with all of the Focus on '00 being "why didn't the Nader voters toe the line" and in '04 "Why are all of these evangelicals coming out of the woodwork"....
So we hit '08 and the gap between the main Metro area(s) and Small-Town/Rural areas are swept under the rug in the largest Democratic "landslide" since.... 1964 (
?).
We hit 2012 and the numbers stand out more in Wisconsin than Oregon, simply because Metro Milwaukie and Dane County are a much lower % of the voters than Metro-Portland and Lane County (Closest equivalent to Dane in Oregon)..... Additionally the suburbs of Portland had started to shift much more heavily towards the Democratic Party starting in 2000, than the suburbs of Milwaukie.
Fast forward to 2016 and everyone is "shocked.... shocked I say to find that swings are going on in this state" (Sorry--- cheesy attempt at a Casablanca Movie quote rip-off).
I have commented on and observed similar swings in rural and small-town Oregon, especially in many communities similar to that of Wisconsin. The Paper and Pulp Mill Towns, Dairy Country, Cranberry Producing regions, etc....
Wisconsin is not becoming the "New Virginia", it simply has a much larger chunk of swing voters, that in '16 swung heavily towards Trump, predominately based on economic concerns in industries and occupations such as paper/pulp, dairy, etc.... where jobs are being cut and commodity prices have collapsed under a Democratic Administration (This is obviously not Obama's fault).
Still many Obama '08/'12 voters did NOT feel that HRC was running for the 3rd Obama term, and her campaign strategy of focusing exclusively on the personality flaws and character of Donald J. Trump, rather than hitting part on policy differences on items such as agricultural and timber policy, was the critical element in Wisconsin, regardless of what has become a mass media and Atlas cliche, that somehow lower African-American turnout compared to '12 cost her the election....
Swing voters will likely remain such for quite some time.... there are a ton of Gore/George W./Obama/Romney-Obama/Trump voters in Wisconsin, especially in rural areas, and they aren't going anywhere, and they need to feel like a Democratic candidate is talking to them.
