On Friday, immediately after nominating Representative Jim Jordan as their latest candidate for speaker, House Republicans took a second, secret-ballot vote. The question put to each lawmaker was simple: Would you support Jordan in a public vote on the House floor?
The results were not encouraging for the pugnacious Ohioan. Nearly a quarter of the House Republican conference—55 members—said they would not back Jordan. Given the GOP’s threadbare majority, he could afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the vote. Jordan’s bid seemed to be fizzling even faster than that of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, whose nomination earlier in the week lasted barely a day before he bowed out in the face of opposition from within the party.
Yet, by this afternoon, Jordan had flipped dozens of holdouts to put himself closer to winning the speakership. The 55 Republicans who said last week that they wouldn’t support him had dwindled to 20 when the House voted this afternoon. He earned a total of 200 votes on the floor; he’ll need 217 to win. Jordan will now try to replicate the strategy that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy used to capture the top House post in January: wearing down his opposition, vote by painful vote. It took McCarthy 15 ballots to secure the speakership, but Jordan may not need that many. The Republicans who voted against him on the floor have not displayed the defiance that characterized the conservatives who overthrew McCarthy. Several of them have told reporters that they could be persuaded to vote for Jordan, or would not stand in the way if he neared the threshold of 217 votes needed to win.
Should he secure those final votes, Jordan’s election would represent a major victory for the GOP hardliners who, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, toppled McCarthy with the hope of replacing him with a more combative, ideological conservative. The switch would also give Donald Trump, who endorsed Jordan, something he’s never had in his seven years as the Republican Party’s official and unofficial standard-bearer: a House speaker fully committed to his cause. Although McCarthy and the previous GOP speaker, Paul Ryan, accommodated the former president, Jordan has been his champion; as documented by the House committee on January 6, Jordan was deeply involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and urged then–Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes from states that Trump was contesting.
His election would look a lot like Trump’s, each the result of establishment Republicans falling in line with a leader many of them swore they’d never support. Throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, GOP lawmakers, aides, and even members of the Cabinet sharply criticized the president in private, either to reporters or to their own colleagues, while offering unequivocal support and praise in public. That dynamic played out for Jordan this afternoon, when the floor vote revealed that dozens of the Republicans who’d opposed him in a secret ballot were unwilling to put their names against him on the record.
Some of them had made awkward public reversals in the run-up to the vote. On Thursday, Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri was asked whether she would back Jordan in a floor vote. “HELL NO,” she told Scott Wong of NBC News. By Monday morning, she was saying that Jordan had “allayed my concerns about keeping the government open” and securing the southern border; she would vote for him. One by one, other senior Republicans who had initially said that they were determined to block Jordan’s ascent—Representatives Mike Rogers of Alabama, Ken Calvert of California, Vern Buchanan of Florida among them—declared that they, too, had come around.
By this afternoon, however, Jordan was still well short of the votes he needed. “I was surprised at the number. I think everyone was surprised,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, a Jordan supporter, told reporters after the vote. The big question now is whether Jordan can close the gap on subsequent ballots, or whether the small cadre of Republican holdouts will grow into a more formidable bloc against his candidacy. The safer assumption seemed to be that Jordan’s opposition would melt away. After all, this group of Republicans is a different breed than the recalcitrant conservatives who forced out McCarthy. The anti-Jordan contingent is, if not ideologically moderate, then far more pragmatic and committed to stable governance than the anti-McCarthy faction.
The lack of a House speaker for the past two weeks has paralyzed the chamber in the middle of ballooning domestic and international crises. The federal government will shut down a month from today if no action is taken by Congress, which has been unable to offer more assistance to either Israel or Ukraine in their respective wars with Hamas and Russia. A number of Jordan skeptics have cited the upheaval outside the Capitol as a rationale for resolving the impasse inside the dome, even if it means voting for a conservative they consider ill-suited to lead.
Democrats believed that the election of such a polarizing Republican could, along with the general collapse of governance by the GOP, help them recapture the chamber next year. But they were appalled that Republicans might elevate to the speakership a far-right ideologue many of them have labeled an insurrectionist. A former wrestler who brought a fighter’s mentality to Congress, Jordan rose to prominence as an antagonist of former Republican Speaker John Boehner a decade ago, pushing against bipartisan cooperation. “He is the worst possible choice,” Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, a 25-year veteran of the House, told me before the vote.
Jordan’s record, and the possibility that he would be an electoral vulnerability for the GOP, was clearly weighing on Republicans before the vote. As he walked into the chamber shortly after noon, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who represents a swing district on Long Island, told reporters that he still hadn’t decided how to vote. He ultimately joined 19 other GOP lawmakers in backing someone other than Jordan. Other mainstream Republicans justified their vote for Jordan on the grounds that he alone had the credibility to persuade far-right Republicans to avert a government shutdown in the coming weeks and months. “If he says it, they think it’s a strategic move. If I say it, they call me a RINO,” one Republican told me on the condition of anonymity after voting for Jordan.
By the end of the vote, as many Republicans had opposed Jordan as had initially tried to block McCarthy in January, before the former speaker embarked on a five-day period of private lobbying and dealmaking to win the gavel. It was unclear whether Jordan would be able to do the same. He appeared relaxed as he sat through the nearly hour-long roll call, showing little reaction as his defections mounted. When the vote ended, he huddled with supporters, including McCarthy, and the House, having failed once more to elect a speaker, recessed so Republicans could figure out their next move.
No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.
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The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”
But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.
Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.
All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.
It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).
And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.
Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.
But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.
Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!
Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.
The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)
But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.
Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.
Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.
The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.
In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.
Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.
However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.
And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.
The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.
After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.
Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.
This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.
None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.
Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?
The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.
This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.
Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place.
But the contest between the liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative former state-supreme-court justice Dan Kelly has also become a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.
Protasiewicz and her allies have centered her campaign on portraying Kelly as a threat to legal abortion and an accomplice in Donald Trump’s schemes to undermine democracy—the same issues that helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in last November’s elections. Kelly and his allies have centered his campaign on presenting Protasiewicz as soft on crime, the same accusation that Republicans stressed in many of their winning campaigns last year.
With the choice framed so starkly, in a state that has been so evenly balanced between the parties, Tuesday’s result will measure which of those arguments remains more potent, particularly among the suburban voters who loom as the critical swing bloc in 2024’s presidential contest.
If Kelly wins, after being significantly outspent on television, it would underscore how much risk Democrats face from rising public anxiety about crime. But a Protasiewicz win, which most political observers in Wisconsin expect, would suggest that support for legalized abortion has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP that is already evident among college-educated suburban voters. And such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections.
“The margins are still very narrow, and of course the economy and other issues will come into play next year, but if it simply becomes a test between abortion and crime, I would say yes, [abortion] is more powerful by a slight, slight margin,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who has worked in Wisconsin for decades.
Like the state itself, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is closely divided. Conservatives now hold a 4–3 majority (though Brian Hagedorn, one of the four conservative justices, has voted with the liberals on some key cases, particularly four rulings denying Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results). The retirement of a conservative justice has provided Democrats this opportunity to secure a 4–3 liberal majority.
Though Tuesday’s election is technically nonpartisan, the race has become a brawl between the two parties. The state GOP is mounting an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign for Kelly, who was appointed to the state supreme court by Republican then-Governor Scott Walker to fill an unexpired term in 2016 before losing his bid for a full term in 2020. State Democrats, meanwhile, have raised and transferred millions of dollars into the campaign for Protasiewicz, who served as an assistant county district attorney before winning election as a county-circuit-court judge . The tension between the race’s openly partisan character and traditional notions of judicial neutrality and nonpartisanship has itself become a central point of contention in the campaign.
Protasiewicz has pushed the envelope for a judicial candidate by offering voters explicit declarations of her views. She has unequivocally affirmed her support for legal abortion, described the gerrymandered state legislative maps as “rigged,” and declared that the signature legislation Walker passed to eviscerate the power of the state’s public-sector unions is unconstitutional. But in the next breath she insists that those views—which she calls her “values”—will not affect her decisions on the bench.
The juxtaposition of those two assertions can be head-spinning. At a forum this week on the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee campus, Protasiewicz declared, “I’ve been very clear with everybody that I think women should have a right to choose. Obviously, I can’t comment about what I would do on any case. That robe goes on; my personal opinions go out the door.”
After her appearance, I asked Protasiewicz why her “values” should matter to voters if they are irrelevant once she dons her judicial robe. “I truly believe that people have an absolute right to know what a candidate’s personal thoughts and personal values are,” she answered. Even if, I asked, they are irrelevant to your decisions? “I put them aside,” she said.
Kelly and other Republicans have argued that Protasiewicz’s candid expression of her “values” renders her too partisan for a judicial position. (At the Milwaukee forum, the conservative state-supreme-court justice Rebecca Bradley, appearing for Kelly, maintained that Protasiewicz would be forced to recuse herself from cases involving abortion, redistricting, and other issues because she has expressed such clear positions on them—a view that other legal experts reject.) But Kelly is, to say the least, an imperfect messenger for the argument that anyone else is too biased. He has been far more involved than Protasiewicz in direct partisan activities: Kelly has served as a paid legal adviser to the state’s leading anti-abortion group as well as to the state Republican Party.
Andrew Hitt, the former state GOP chairman, testified to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he had “pretty extensive conversations” with Kelly and another lawyer about the fake-electors scheme that Trump supporters developed after the 2020 election in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Kelly says his involvement was limited to a single 30-minute conversation in which he explained he was not “in the loop” on the plans. But at the sole debate between the candidates earlier this month, Protasiewicz described Kelly as “a true threat to our democracy.”
In the past, local observers say, Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have more narrowly centered on debates about crime and criminal justice (even though the court isn’t directly involved in handing down sentences). “Law-and-order candidates have traditionally done very well,” Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, told me.
Kelly is running in that tradition. Ads from his campaign’s final days are focused almost exclusively on lashing Protasiewicz over rulings she made to sentence a rapist and other violent offenders to limited or no jail time. So many sheriffs are appearing in Kelly ads that it’s reasonable to wonder who is still patrolling the state’s highways this week.
Protasiewicz has responded with ads defending her record on crime, and also jabbing Kelly over his work as a criminal-defense attorney. But mostly her advertising has insisted that Kelly would uphold the 1849 state abortion ban that snapped back into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. (Both sides agree that the state supreme court will eventually need to decide whether to sustain or strike down that law, which prohibits abortions in almost all cases, and is now being challenged in a lower state court.) Protasiewicz and the groups supporting her are heavily stressing abortion in their ads and have aired nearly four times as many ads across all subjects as Kelly and his backers, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks ad purchases. (That disparity exists largely because Democrats have raised enough money to allow her to buy the ads directly through her campaign, which receives lower rates, while Kelly’s relying mostly on outside groups that must pay higher rates.)
That huge tactical advantage for her is one reason some observers are cautious about drawing too many conclusions from next week’s outcome. Conversely, Trump’s indictment yesterday might inspire enough Republican turnout to lift Kelly, especially because far fewer people vote in these off-year contests than on a typical November Election Day.
Yet a Protasiewicz win could put an exclamation point on a subtle but discernible shift in the state’s political direction.
Though close elections are usually the rule in Wisconsin, early in this century it often leaned Democratic. The state was part of what I termed the “blue wall”: the 18 states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. (Democrats actually started their Wisconsin presidential winning streak in 1988.) Democrats also controlled both U.S. Senate seats throughout most of that same period, and the governorship for two terms after 2002.
But the tide began to shift around 2010, with the election of Republican Governor Walker and a GOP sweep of the state legislature. In 2016, two years after Walker won reelection, Trump dislodged Wisconsin from the blue wall, carrying it by 22,748 votes. Like Trump’s 2016 victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which had also been part of the “blue wall,” the former president’s Wisconsin breakthrough symbolized his success at forging a winning coalition that revolved around massive margins among non-college-educated and non-urban white voters.
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in the state, says Wisconsin today remains divided almost evenly between the parties: 45 percent of voters identify as Republicans, 44 percent as Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated. Yet since Trump’s initial victory, Democrats have won most of the state’s key contests. The Democrat Tony Evers beat Walker for governor by about 30,000 votes in 2018 and won reelection by triple that amount last year. In 2018, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won a landslide reelection. Democrats also won big in state-supreme-court elections in 2018 and 2020. Biden carried the state by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The major Republican victories over this period have been narrow ones: Hagedorn’s 6,000-vote 2019 win for the state supreme court and the roughly 27,000-vote win last November by GOP Senator Ron Johnson over the Democrat Mandela Barnes.
Those results suggest that Democrats have come out slightly ahead from the demographic and geographic re-sorting of the electorate that Trump accelerated here. As in states across the country, Republicans have grown stronger in heavily blue-collar and white rural areas, primarily across Wisconsin’s northern and western counties where Democrats once competed effectively. But Democrats have been boosted by offsetting gains in the state’s most populous cities and towns, many of them relatively more racially diverse or better educated. (About 90 percent of Wisconsin voters are white.)
Craig Gilbert, a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, calculated that from the 2018–22 governor races, Evers improved his performance in all 30 communities that cast the most votes except for Kenosha (where he was hurt by a backlash against the 2020 riots over the police shooting of a Black man in the city). The places where Republicans are winning “simply aren’t growing,” while Democrats are generally improving in the places that are adding population, Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up with that trend.”
Democrats have benefited from improved showings mostly in two areas. One is the so-called WOW suburban counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) around Milwaukee. Though the GOP still comfortably wins all three, Democrats have noticeably narrowed its margins. As Gilbert calculated, in Waukesha, which he described as “the most important Republican county in Wisconsin,” 21 communities have shifted at least 20 points toward the Democrats in gubernatorial races since 2014.
Even more significant has been the explosive Democratic gains in Dane County, the highly educated hub for biotech, insurance, and government jobs centered on the city of Madison, home to both the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital. The Democratic share of the vote in Dane County has increased from about 70 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 75 percent for Biden in 2020 to 79 percent for Evers in 2022; Dane actually provided Evers a larger net vote margin than Milwaukee County did, something that would have been almost unimaginable even a decade ago. Franklin says Dane has become a triple threat for Democrats: “It is growing fast, the turnout keeps rising, and the lopsided partisan margins keep growing.”
The flip side of the Democrats’ improving performance in Dane and the Milwaukee suburbs is rising concern in the party about lackluster turnout among Black voters, especially in Milwaukee. Some local leaders fear that a political competition between the parties focusing more on social issues such as abortion simply doesn’t engage enough lower-income Black voters, who are focused more on material needs such as jobs and health care. “If people feel like their issues are not going to be reflected, they are going to sit out,” Angela Lang, the executive director of the group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, told me.
Lagging Milwaukee turnout next week would be another signal that Democrats, as in 2020, continue to face challenges not only with non-college-educated whites, but also with blue-collar voters of color. But if abortion rights, in effect, trump crime and allow Protasiewicz to extend the Democrats’ gains in white-collar suburbs, that could signal trouble for anti-abortion Republican presidential candidates in 2024—not only in Wisconsin but in the suburbs of any swing state. The Democrats’ rural and inner-city troubles in Wisconsin, which still might allow Kelly to eke out an upset win, testify to the fragility of a modern Democratic coalition bonded less by economic interests than by cultural values. But a Protasiewicz win, in a state that Republicans probably must recapture to regain the White House in 2024, would demonstrate again that there’s formidable power in that new coalition too.
