Donald Trump prevails in a red-wave election, Tammy Baldwin survives, the WOW shift slows, State Senate Dems shine, Republicans keep the legislature, and much more.

This column is from The Recombobulation Area, a weekly opinion column and online publication from Dan Shafer, now part of the Civic Media network. Learn more about The Recombobulation Area and subscribe here.

Well, shit.

It happened again. Donald Trump won the presidential election, and it was his victory in Wisconsin that put him over the top. It’s not great. Trump was a bad president in his first term, and he’ll be a bad and potentially even more dangerous president in his next term. We’re going to have to steel ourselves for the four years ahead, and find the best way to rebuild, to fight back, and to create a better future for our families, our communities, our nation, our world.

But I’m a firm believer that democracy is built from the ground up. That’s part of why we spend so much time around here focusing on things like the Wisconsin State Legislature, or mayoral elections, or other state and local issues. The box for president is just one of many on the election ballot. Tammy Baldwin also won on Nov. 5, as did many other terrific Democratic candidates in the State Senate and Assembly.

Still, Trump’s victory is a tough and potentially extremely dire outcome. The implications of this election are going to be felt for most of our lifetimes. The threat a Trump presidency poses to women, to marginalized communities, and yes, to democracy itself, at home and abroad, is genuinely frightening. Trump will likely be making at least two more lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court — a catastrophic prospect for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and so much more. He has promised mass deportations. As much as he tried to run from “Project 2025” during the campaign, we can all acknowledge that much of it is baked into any kind of right-wing agenda he’d seek to implement, and with a potential trifecta if Republicans maintain control of the House — still in question, at the moment, but Republicans have a more clear path to the majority — there would be little stopping him from going forward full throttle to implement even a version of this abominable plan. The naked corruption of his first term is undoubtedly going to ascend to unseemly new heights. The authoritarian and fascist leanings of Trump and his administration are beyond problematic. There’s a lot to be worried about. We’re all going to have to remain extraordinarily vigilant in the years ahead.

But part of being in this fight is accepting and understanding our new reality. Inauguration Day for Donald Trump will be Jan. 20, 2025. It seems now like he will be the most influential American politician from the first quarter of the 21st Century. This is a different country now. We need to face that fact. But what happens next — still, despite everything — is up to all of us.

Before we chart a new course forward, though, let’s take a closer look at what just happened. There’s a lot we can learn from, and a lot we still don’t understand.

So, let’s recombobulate.

1. Wisconsin nearly defied a national red-wave election

Heading into Election Day, seven states polled as near toss-up contests. And while every state shifting in favor of Donald Trump and the Republican Party did not seem like the most likely outcome in the final stretch of the race, it was certainly one of the potential outcomes, and was indeed what happened. Typically, you don’t see diverging trends from state to state. They move in concert, and voters moved toward Republicans this year.

This was a national red-wave election. Perhaps Democrats’ better-than-expected 2022 midterm election performance obscured a larger rightward lurch of the nation’s electorate, but it came through in full force here in 2024. This outcome is also part of an international trend of voters going against the incumbent party, regardless of ideology, in these post-pandemic years.

But as clear and as overwhelming as this red-wave trend was, Wisconsin nearly defied it. Of those seven swing states, Kamala Harris performed best in Wisconsin. She actually won more votes in Wisconsin in 2024 than Joe Biden did in his victory in the state in 2020. Wisconsin even voted to the left of Michigan and Pennsylvania in this election, which hasn’t happened since 1988.

While it’s tough to process a loss like this, there are encouraging signs here for Wisconsin Democrats in the long-run. They proved to be more resilient than many other states in the face of international trends and other underlying fundamentals about this race. There’s a glimmer of hope here.

And we know Wisconsin’s statewide elections are going to continue to be close. Throughout the campaign, when someone would ask me what to expect this year, the statistic I would return to is that four of the last six presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by a less than 1% margin. The other two had Barack Obama on the ballot, and with Barack Obama not on the ballot, we should expect an election to be just as close.

Sure enough, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by a margin of 0.86%.

Nevertheless, a respectable, resilient loss is still a loss. Donald Trump was the only Republican to win Wisconsin since Ronald Reagan, and now he’s done it twice.

2. Trump dominated in rural areas, especially in southwestern Wisconsin

Even as Wisconsin in many ways felt the red-wave effects less than every other swing state, there were still 68 of 72 Wisconsin counties that shifted to the right. The only four to move toward Harris were Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington and Door counties.

While some of these shifts were more muted, others were especially dramatic. The biggest shifts came in southwestern Wisconsin. Four of the five counties that shifted most toward Trump from 2020 to 2024 were all clustered in the southwest corner of the state — Lafayette (6.5-point shift), Iowa (6.1-point shift), Crawford (5.9-point shift) and Grant (5.9-point shift). While Harris actually won a majority in Iowa County, these were all counties that were won by Janet Protasiewicz in the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

Grant County, for example, voted for Barack Obama by double-digit margins in both 2008 and 2012. That shifted dramatically to a near 10-point margin for Trump in 2016, and now, an 18-point margin for Trump in 2024, with no sign of slowing down.

Drilling down further, in John D. Johnson of Marquette University’s map that shows shifts at the ward level, you can see how pronounced this shift — one that began in earnest in 2016 with those “Obama-Trump” voters — really is, and how it is continuing to accelerate in not just the most red, rural areas, but also in places like La Crosse County, which moved in the Republican direction by more than four points.

The problem for Democrats is that there is still room for Republicans to climb in these regions. Trump may have the unique ability to turn out voters who might not otherwise head to the polls — he now has the record in Wisconsin for most votes ever in a single election, eclipsing Obama in ‘08, much to my millennial liberal chagrin — but some of these Trump+10-15 counties from a few years ago are becoming Trump+20-25 counties, and if Democrats can’t stop the bleeding here, these could be places headed toward 30-point GOP margins in the coming years. .

And this is not just an issue of a red-wave year or something indicative of President Joe Biden’s unpopularity. Voters in this region are not buying what the Democrats are selling, and the Trump-era Republican Party is reaping the benefits.

3. A light in the darkness: Tammy Baldwin wins

The biggest bright spot for Democrats in Wisconsin from this election is that Tammy Baldwin was re-elected. It was by an extraordinarily slim margin, but she won, defeating Republican challenger Eric Hovde. This was far and away the closest race she’s run in her three victories in the U.S. Senate.

Trump won Wisconsin by an 0.86% margin. Baldwin won Wisconsin by an 0.86% margin.

Just incredibly Wisconsin results, aren’t they?

Two years ago, Ron Johnson won the closest Senate race in Wisconsin in more than a century, defeating Mandela Barnes by just over 1%. By percentage margin between the top two candidates, this race between Baldwin and Hovde was even closer.

There was also the presence of multiple third-party candidates, who amounted to a combined total of more than 2% of the vote. The Hovde camp will certainly be griping about the presence of “America First” party candidate Thomas Leager, who won nearly 29,000 votes, very close to the margin of victory for Baldwin, who was propped up by a Democratic donor. But the Libertarian-leaning “Disrupt the Corruption” candidate Phil Anderson gained more than 42,000 votes, or 1.3%, too.

So where did the divergence between Trump and Baldwin’s narrow victories come from? It’s not like there was all that much airspace between Trump and Hovde or Harris and Baldwin, but there was enough for it to be decisive for the soon-to-be third-term Wisconsin Senator.

Baldwin did 1% better in Milwaukee County than Harris. Hovde did slightly better in the WOW counties than Trump. Baldwin also did slightly better in Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago counties, though she did not win the majority in any of those counties, as she did in all three in her 10-point re-election victory in 2018.

Overall, in almost all of Wisconsin’s 20 biggest counties, Baldwin ran between 1 and 3 percentage points ahead of Harris. That proved to be enough for her to squeak out a narrow victory.

In her victory speech on Thursday in Madison, she talked about listening to people and delivering for them as keys to her victory.

It’s a line much like what she said to me when I interviewed her this past summer.

I’ve thought about that interview a lot this week, in the wake of her victory, wondering if there was something there that said something about why she was able to win in a swing state in a red-wave year. And one of the things that stood out to me, thinking back to that interview, was just how unmanaged Baldwin was. Sometimes, when you sit down for an extended conversation with a public official, their PR team will sit right with them or request questions in advance or try to dictate topics to touch on (this is actually even more the case in the business community, if you interview a president or CEO of a company). But for this, Baldwin’s spokesperson was in the next room, they never asked me for questions, and it was just a pretty normal half-hour interview. Outside of some more rehearsed-sounding lines about her opponent, the conversation came across as Tammy Baldwin just being herself. I think more candidates can drop the over-managed consultant-ification of these messages and just let people be people.

Ultimately, I really do think it’s wonderful that, despite a red-wave election, Tammy Baldwin still won. She is a terrific public servant, and we are lucky to have her representing Wisconsin for another six years.

4. The WOW county shift slowed down

Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties have been at the center of what’s been changing in Wisconsin’s politics in recent years. As Trump and Republicans have increased margins in rural areas, Democrats have cut into margins in suburban ones, and these former Republican strongholds have been the prime examples, as GOP margins of victory went from the 75-25 range to closer to 60-40. Well, Waukesha and Ozaukee have, at least, with Washington now having perhaps more in common with its neighbors in Dodge or Fond du Lac counties.

While these three counties were among the only ones to shift toward Democrats in this election, it just wasn’t enough to put Harris over the top. She clearly courted these votes — holding events in Waukesha County with Liz Cheney and Charlie Sykes, as the most obvious local example.

Before the election, a New York Times story on the WOW counties pondered if Harris would get more than 40% of the vote in Waukesha County. She ended up with 39.3%. And while that was an improvement, it was just barely better than Biden’s 38.8% in 2020. And it was almost identical to the results in the 2022 gubernatorial race that saw Tony Evers win 39.4% in Waukesha County.

Harris needed to push past that 40% number in order to win the state. For all of the overtures made to the “Never Trump” Republicans who may reside in this area, not enough of them actually voted for Democrats to make a difference in the end.

You have to question whether or not this is going to be a truly durable coalition for Democrats to build upon in the years ahead, or if some of their success here is coming at the expense of greater losses elsewhere.

The Fox River in Appleton, at Vulcan Heritage State Park. Photo by Dan Shafer.

5. Democrats held serve in the Fox Valley and Green Bay

In a red-wave year, you might expect an area like the Fox Valley and Green Bay to shift significantly toward Republicans the way communities in western Wisconsin did, much as it did from 2012 to 2016.

But that didn’t exactly happen in the BOW counties in 2024. Here’s how the results played out there, compared to the last few presidential elections.

Brown:

2012: Romney + 2%
2016: Trump + 11%
2020: Trump + 7%
2024: Trump + 8%

Outagamie:

2012: Romney + 2%
2016: Trump + 13%
2020: Trump + 10%
2024: Trump + 10%

Winnebago:

2012: Obama + 4%
2016: Trump + 7%
2020: Trump + 4%
2024: Trump + 5%

From 2020 to 2024, Democrats mostly held serve in this region of the state. I do, of course, think Democrats can and should be doing better here — take a look at the extended feature I wrote on what’s happening politically in the region, published days before the election. But Democrats’ relative success in the Fox Valley and Green Bay compared to other regions in the state that zoomed right, like western Wisconsin, should be an indicator that a path to long-term Democratic victory in the state needs to make this area a higher priority.

And there were significant Democratic wins there in the Senate and Assembly. Kristin Alfheim won the new Fox Valley State Senate seat, and Jamie Wall won the toss-up Senate race in Brown County, both by more than 5% margins. Democrats Lori Palmeri (in Oshkosh) and Lee Snodgrass (in Appleton) were each re-elected by comfortable margins, too, and Ryan Spaude won in the 89th in Brown County, a major bright spot for Assembly Democrats amid an uneven night.

The two narrowest losses for Assembly Democrats also came in this region. Political newcomer Duane Shukoski lost to Dean Kaufert, former mayor of Neenah who also served in the Assembly for more than a decade, by less than 400 votes. Brown County Dems chair Christy Welch lost to Republican Ben Franklin by less than 250 votes. Those were each closer races than the two toss-up districts in southern Milwaukee County, each won by the Republican incumbent by about 1,000 votes. These two seats, the 53rd and 88th, should be at the top of the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee’s list to look to flip in 2026.

The Fox Valley and Green Bay are going to remain part of a crucial battleground for Wisconsin in the years ahead, and Democrats would do well to recognize the opportunities for victories that are ripe for the picking.

6. State Senate Democrats were the biggest bright spot in the legislature

There were five targeted races in the State Senate. Democrats swept them all. Going five-for-five in these races is an unqualified success.

The biggest victory was with Democrat Jodi Habush Sinykin defeating longtime Republican incumbent Duey Stroebelin the most Republican-leaning district of the five. This is a district that, while shifting toward Democrats in recent years, was one that both Ron Johnson and Tony Evers won two years ago. In a red-wave year, you’d expect the Republican to win out. But that was not the case.

Stroebel ended his campaign with the same prickly, insulting demeanor that he brought to his years in the Wisconsin State Legislature, complaining in his statement on the results that part of the district includes “an area whose constituents have elected Congresswoman Gwen Moore.” Subtle! Yeah, he will not be missed in the State Senate. His loss and Habush Sinykin’s victory is one of the biggest silver linings of the election in Wisconsin. That is a massive upgrade in representation.

With these five victories, Democrats ended the supermajority, narrowed the gap to 18-15, and are now in position to compete for the Senate majority in 2026. Republican incumbents who will be on the ballot in two years will include Rob Hutton in District 5, Howard Marklein in District 17, and Van Wanggaard in District 21 — each of which were districts won by Tony Evers in 2022.

The last remnants of The Gerrymander will be gone by 2026, and then, Democrats will have the opportunity to win the majority in both chambers in the Wisconsin State Legislature.

7. Results were mixed for Assembly Democrats

Under new maps in the State Assembly, Democrats had the opportunity to win the majority for the first time in more than a decade. They made significant gains, adding 10 seats to their total, but lost several key toss-up races, ultimately landing at a 54-45 Republican majority.

Of the nine most closely-contested races, Republicans won six. In my preview series, I cautioned against a Democratic majority based on several of the incumbents and recruits for many of these seats, and many of those candidates ended up winning. Recruiting Kaufert in the 53rd was pivotal to a Republican victory there. I thought Jessie Rodriguez was a strong incumbent who could defy the math in the 21st, and she did. Other Republican incumbents did even better than I expected. In the 61st, Bob Donovan again defeated LuAnn Bird, Patrick Snyder won by a comfortable margin in the 85th, and Todd Novak proved resilient once more, winning in a far more Democratic-leaning district in the 51st.

Democrats losing both races in southern Milwaukee County is not a great sign. There was a lot of money pumped into both of those races, only to come up short in both contests.

The three victories for Democrats in these toss-up races came from Steve Doyle (the incumbent from the La Crosse area), Ryan Spaude (western Green Bay and Ashwaubenon), and Joe Sheehan (Sheboygan).

Sheboygan had stood out for years as a prime example of how Republicans gerrymandered the state, drawing a line down the middle of the city to divide it into two red districts. Now, Sheehan will be the first Democrat to represent the community in more than a decade with new maps. A similar story played out in District 43, a pickup for Democrats where Brienne Brown defeated incumbent Republican Scott Johnson. There, previous maps drew a line right through the UW-Whitewater campus, and now, all of the city of Whitewater is in one district, and the Democratic candidate prevailed.

This is the starting point now for Assembly Democrats. Going from 35 to 45 representatives is a big deal, but in order to make a meaningful change for Wisconsin, they’re going to have to do better in 2026.

8. What do Democrats actually stand for on immigration and border security?

An issue for Democrats that has bothered me throughout the campaign has been their position on immigration and border security. The issue rose to prominence over the past few years, rating as among the top three or four issues in the campaign, but Democrats failed to craft much of a position countering the Trump Republican Party’s policies advocating for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, limits to legal immigration and hard-line policies on the border.

One of the major mistakes for Democrats in recent years and in this campaign has been their complete inability to even articulate a position on immigration. What do they actually stand for here? Instead of standing for something, they’ve ceded the issue entirely to Trump and the GOP and got completely rolled. Even the attempts to moderate on the issue were done in the shadow of Trump’s rhetoric. And the argument that Democrats compromised to pass a tough border bill, but Trump blocked it, may be accurate, but as a policy platform, comes across as an insufficient position of weakness.

The answer for Democrats here is not clear, but I would caution against a full-fledged adoption of policies like a border wall or mass deportation because that would not give voters an actual alternative. There needs to be a greater reckoning among Democrats not just on why their messages here have not resonated with voters, but what they stand for to begin with.

9. The question of the success of anti-trans messaging

I’ll take a bit of an L on this one. I’d been saying throughout the campaign that Republicans’ transphobic messaging was not going to resonate, and that it was not a top issue for voters, and that it would ultimately fall flat. Trump and Republicans leaned into this so heavily in the final stretch of the race, that it seemed to suggest they were going away from their strongest issue — the economy — and that voters would not ultimately care all that much and make their choice on other more resonant topics.

Some of the early data seems to suggest these messages did, in fact, resonate with certain voters. One study suggests that one of the top reasons voters gave not to vote for Harris was that she “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

I will again caution against taking this as a reason to adopt Republican messaging or policies on the matter. The expansion of LGBTQ rights is one of the biggest achievements in freedom and liberty in this country in the early part of the 21st Century, and it would be a grave mistake to roll back any of those rights, and people in the LGBTQ community are an essential part of any Democratic coalition going forward.

There are many comparisons to be made between the 2004 and 2024 elections, the last two Republican popular vote victories. In 2004, Republicans campaigned hard against gay marriage, but that issue quickly shifted in the minds of the American electorate, and by 2014, was the law of the land. Abandoning transgender rights because some especially misleading and hateful ads moved some swing voters would be the wrong choice now, in 2024. Those types of ads might not be as effective two or four years from now, and it is the right thing to do to stand with people who are being unfairly targeted for being who they are.

10. Joe Biden was especially unpopular, and that may have doomed Democrats

In the final Marquette University Law School Poll of the 2024 campaign, Charles Franklin talked about some of the “fundamentals” of the race. Among those was the approval rating of the incumbent president, Joe Biden. Here’s how that has looked for the past year.

And compared with that, here’s how Donald Trump’s “retrospective job approval” has looked.

Put simply, voters in Wisconsin disliked Joe Biden more than they disliked Donald Trump. They did not approve of either candidate, but the overall disapproval of Biden was greater than that of Trump. In a change election year, which this has proved to be not just in the United States but around the globe, that level of disapproval of the incumbent president makes for a difficult path to re-election for his party, regardless of whether or not he is the candidate.

Joe Biden’s choice to run for re-election is perhaps the biggest decision to doom Democrats in 2024. He was unpopular, voters were clamoring for another option, and while he did eventually step aside, it was too late. Kamala Harris ran an impressive 107-day campaign, putting Democrats in position to compete in ways Biden never could, but it wasn’t enough. There are criticisms you could make of Harris and her campaign — and there will be plenty of time for finger-pointing (and reasons to do so) — but perhaps a short campaign in a red-wave year is a tough hand to win with. Her inability to distance herself from Biden in any meaningful way only made matters worse.

Being at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, in the immediate wake of Biden’s disastrous debate performance, it felt like the GOP was already spiking the football and celebrating its victory. That seemed premature. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this election was lost on that debate stage, and despite the energy and enthusiasm and relentless campaign pace that followed once Harris became the nominee, the fundamentals of the race and voters’ appetite for change suggested a win from the party out of power.

One of my favorite quotes about the legacies of leaders is that “People are remembered by the sum of their accomplishments, but defined by their singular failure.” Joe Biden will be remembered by the sum of his accomplishments, including the many unheralded ones he achieved as president. But he will be defined by his singular failure, his choice to run for office instead of passing the torch.

Joe Biden said he could be a bridge to a new generation of leaders. Under his leadership, many bridges have been built and will be built. But not this one. He did not build the bridge that mattered for the 2024 election, and now because of that fateful decision, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House for four more years.

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