Many states slowly turned red election night as results rolled in. A blue wave of votes from mainly urban communities rolled in later but it wasn’t enough to overcome votes for presidential candidate Donald Trump.
This was true in Wisconsin where you could see a clear urban-rural divide in how people voted. According to Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment & the Virginia Sapiro professor of political science at UW-Madison, research shows that rural communities have an increasing resentment towards urban areas who seemingly have greater resources, respect and political power. This urban-rural divide reflects how people make their choices in the voting booth.
Vice President Kamala Harris lost Wisconsin to Trump by less than one percentage point, making it the fifth presidential election of the past seven that a presidential election in Wisconsin has been decided by less than a point. Cramer's main takeaway from this narrow margin: Wisconsinites should prepare themselves for even more politics.
"For the foreseeable future, we are going to be in the spotlight and experience all kinds of candidate visits and campaign ads," she notes. "We are a crucial state in presidential elections, for sure."
Even with the change of legislative maps, Democrats remain the minority in the state Legislature. However, there was ticket splitting where voters reelected Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin despite the state going to Trump.
Cramer believes Baldwin's win can be attributed partly to incumbency, but mainly because Baldwin has been successful in bridging the urban-rural divide. "Tammy Baldwin has proven time and time again that she resonates with people in a variety of places in the state, and I think it's partly the way she runs her campaigns but it could also be partly the way that she does her job," she explains. "She clearly spends a lot of time in a variety of places in the state and I think that does matter. Because even if you are a Republican, if you feel that the Democratic candidate understands you, and people like you and your kind of place — that goes a long way towards giving her your vote.”
While the economy was a key driving factor for voters, it wasn't specifically a Republican issue according to Cramer.
"People across the board, regardless of political leanings, are facing economic challenges these days," she notes. "But what they do with that politically really depends on the leaders that they look to and kind of the arguments that they're buying in terms of who is to blame for the challenges they're facing."
Our rural-urban divide in many ways is growing, but it's part of a more fundamental divide in our country that's partly cultural, partly about college education and partly economic as well.Kathy Cramer
When it came to the gender divide, Cramer says she was surprised to see that the gender gap in terms of the percentage of women who voted for the Democratic ticket compared to men was not significantly different compared to previous elections.
“Especially with abortion being such an important issue right now we really expected to see a larger gender gap, and you know early interpretations of what happened is that Donald Trump did a good job of distancing himself from that issue," she says.
Cramer has been studying the urban-rural divide since 2007, and she believes it has grown in terms of electoral returns in Wisconsin as well as across the country. However, more research she's been conducting to understand where our current political divides come from has revealed that the urban-rural divide is part of something much broader and in part can be characterized by the college gap.
People, especially white people, with a four year college degree increasingly lean towards the Democratic Party; and people, especially white people, without a four year college degree increasingly lean toward the Republican Party.
"Because of the nature of our economy, honestly, and where the jobs are and the types of jobs, it tends to be the case that people in a more urban community are more likely to have a college degree ... So our rural-urban divide in many ways is growing, but it's part of a more fundamental divide in our country that's partly cultural, partly about college education and partly economic as well."
This "Us v. Them" cycle can be good politics for winning elections, but Cramer notes it actually hurts people living in these communities in the long run where there is "an enormous amount of distrust in our political systems in a variety of institutions that's been growing not just in the last eight years but for a longer time."
"The level of distrust is really concerning and living in a state that is as politically divided as we are, and the way in which our political divisions line up with so many other important social characteristics in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of college education — I worry about our ability to continue to see each other as human beings in this state and treat each other with dignity. I hope that we can do that but our political system is not giving us a whole lot of guidance on how to do that these days."
