America's battleground: Wisconsin's free-thinking voters

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In the quest for 270 electoral votes, this year's presidential candidates have made countless overtures to Wisconsin's voters. Even though the battleground state offers only 10 electoral votes, pollsters and political pundits believe those votes could be enough to tip the scales in either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris's favor.

Exactly who Wisconsin might vote for is much harder to pin down.

To get a sense, 60 Minutes traveled to the Badger State, where the margins have been razor-thin for years. Wisconsin was the only state where the margin was less than 1% both times Trump has been on the ballot, and, in fact, the difference between victory and defeat was a fraction of a percent in four of the last six presidential elections.

A purple state with purple people As its presidential voting history might suggest, Wisconsin is politically purple. Its senators are split by party: Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin represent the state. But one thing that might set Wisconsin apart from other battleground states is that the voters themselves are something of a shade of plum. Many split the ticket on election day and say they vote for a person, rather than a party, ping-ponging between Republicans and Democrats over the years.

"I don't vote Republican or Democrat or anything," a Wisconsin voter named Joe Conlon told 60 Minutes. "I vote for who I like the best. And that's how it ends up."

Conlon went on to explain that he voted for George W. Bush twice, then Barack Obama twice, then Donald Trump twice. He intends to vote for Trump again this year.

For Brian Schimming, Wisconsin's Republican Party chair, this kind of cross-party voting history is not surprising.

"There's a pretty good independent streak here in Wisconsin," Schimming said. "That has been shown over and over and over again."

Schimming told 60 Minutes the Democratic and Republican Parties each have a reliable base of voters, but independents frequently vote on the issues of the moment and the concerns they feel when they go to the ballot box.

"I always tell candidates who run statewide here, 'Don't make a lot of assumptions about what the voters are going to do,'" he said.

As the candidates vie for these toss-up supporters, geography may matter. While Wisconsin often ends up being a state where the elections are decided by fewer than 25,000 votes, the individual counties themselves are not as evenly split. In 2020, more than 80% of Wisconsin's 72 counties had a double-digit margin for either Trump or President Joe Biden.

In Kewaunee County, where Barack Obama won by 11 percentage points in 2008, Trump defeated Biden by almost 33 percentage points — an almost 44-point swing in 12 years.

According to Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, this shift does not come down to the makeup of the county's residents.

"It's not demographics that are changing," Franklin told 60 Minutes. "It's how we think about our candidates, how we think about the parties. It's Trump's appeal to working class, to lower education voters, those who didn't go beyond high school or at least not beyond junior college. And his appeal there is a change for the Republican party compared to where we were 20 years ago."

Dane County tells another story. The fastest growing county in Wisconsin, Dane County is home to the capital city of Madison, the University of Wisconsin, and high-tech companies that have moved in and brought jobs. Just one of these companies, Epic Systems, employs more than 12,000 people in Wisconsin alone.

Here, the Democrats are running up the score. Biden won 50,000 more votes in 2020 than Barack Obama did in 2012.

Wisconsin's political history A look through Wisconsin's history books shows how the political pendulum has swung in the state for decades.

A one-room schoolhouse in Ripon boasts the birthplace of the Republican Party itself, a group organized in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Shortly thereafter, the state's supreme court made Wisconsin the first state to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. A faction of Wisconsin's Republicans created the Progressive movement, a group of reformers who pushed, among other things, for safer workplaces and cleaner cities.

In 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and two years later, Wisconsin passed the country's first equal rights legislation, providing women with full legal equality to men.

Wisconsin enacted the first state unemployment insurance law, Wisconsinite Wilbur Cohen was a key architect of the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson championed the very first Earth Day.

On the political flip side, Wisconsin was home to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican whose attempts to root out communists led to the nation's "Red Scare" during the early Cold War. Also headquartered in Wisconsin is the John Birch Society, a conservative advocacy group that promotes a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and has been criticized for its extremist views and conspiracy theories.

Political pollster Charles Franklin said this rich political history has played out in the state's government.

"Whereas many states have been lopsided and had all Democratic governments or all Republican governments, our history is very much a mixture of divided government," Franklin said. He also went on to explain that, after the Tea Party hit the national scene in 2010, Wisconsin began to get more and more polarized. The 2016 election magnified it.

"Trump added to that polarization," Franklin said. "And now it's a more nationalized polarization as opposed to one based mostly in state politics as it was for us early."

The sprint to the finish In the last two presidential elections, Donald Trump's support has been underestimated in Wisconsin. One complicating factor in predicting voter's opinions is that the state has same-day registration, meaning residents can register to vote on Election Day, thereby eliminating them from any preliminary estimation of registered voters. In 2020, more than 219,000 did just that — and a majority of those same-day voters swung toward Donald Trump.

For Ben Wikler, Wisconsin's state Democratic party chair, this is an anxiety-inducing proposition.

"I absolutely lose sleep at night thinking about folks who are in nobody's polls, in nobody's models who show up and cast ballots for Trump," Wikler said. "I need to find the same kinds of voters to make sure that they vote for Kamala Harris."

From Green Bay to Eau Claire to Milwaukee, the Trump and Harris campaigns have been barnstorming Wisconsin in a last-minute sprint to Election Day. As they try to make their case to voters, one thing is certain: No one knows the way this race will go in the Badger State.

"It's very, very close," Republican chair Schimming said. "And I think both sides would say that."

To watch Jon Wertheim's 60 Minutes report on Door County, Wisconsin, click here.

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Scott Rosann.

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