DANE COUNTY, WI — For the last three election cycles, Republicans have struggled in Wisconsin’s statewide races. This year, they’re hoping a new focus on a Democratic stronghold can help them turn it around.
Wisconsin’s second-largest county, Dane, is home to the state capital of Madison, the flagship University of Wisconsin campus and hundreds of thousands of blue votes that have driven recent Democratic statewide successes. It has the fastest-growing population in Wisconsin, with turnout that also continues to increase. And it’s served as the source for so many Democratic votes that a strategist last year told Politico, “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”
Republicans don’t expect to flip Dane. Far from it. But there’s a concerted effort to try to “lose better,” as one strategist put it. After all, it was that exact “lose better” strategy for Democrats that made them so much harder to beat.
Former President Donald Trump’s visit to Dane County in early October marked the first time a GOP presidential candidate has campaigned there since Bob Dole visited in 1996. While Dole lost, he netted just under 31% in Dane County.
A GOP margin like that today is almost unthinkable. Over 75% of the county’s ballots cast went to Joe Biden in 2020 — a staggering 260,000 votes — and there’s wide recognition that Dane is crucial for Democratic success now. Not only did the county’s 2020 voter turnout surpass the previous presidential cycle, hitting about 80%, Biden did 5 points better there than Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden’s margin of victory in Dane against Trump was about 35,000 more votes than Clinton’s, in a state where the election was decided by about 20,000 votes.
Republicans are under no illusions that they’re going to suddenly win the county. But they’ve increasingly acknowledged that they’ve erred in ignoring it.
“The Madison problem for Republicans has been a problem hiding in plain sight, and I’m glad that some folks have again started to pay attention to it,” Republican Party of Wisconsin Chairman Brian Schimming told NOTUS. “You spend money where you’re going to get the most votes. That is not in Madison. And what happens is, year after year after year, you do that, the base breaks down and people don’t put up the yard signs, they don’t vote. So in a way, I’m not surprised by it at all.”
Schimming is no stranger to Dane; he grew up in Madison. His father worked at the University of Wisconsin as an administrator, his mother was a longtime usher at a performance arts venue on the city’s State Street, and their old house is a close walk to college football’s famed Camp Randall. He was ecstatic that, weeks before the election, Trump came to town.
“I was thrilled to death that Trump came here,” Schimming said. “Not only is it a story about how he came and campaigned in the Dem base of the state, but that, as a Republican, he made the commitment to come in here and try.”
He’s also pleased with Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who was raised in Madison as the son of a prominent businessman, attended UW, and he maintains the family business downtown and has a home there. Schimming sees it as a real opportunity.
He said Hovde was “one of the biggest names in town when I was a kid.”
“If he takes a point or two out of Tammy Baldwin just because he’s from Madison and she loses the election, I mean, that’s as practical an example as there is,” Schimming said.
Hovde has held a number of events in Madison and Dane County more broadly, and he’s highlighted his goal to do better than other GOP candidates here. In a statement to NOTUS, he said he would “not cede any ground to my opponent and plan on outperforming previous Republicans in my hometown of Dane County.”
Even with their losing margins, Dane is the state’s third-largest producer of Republican votes. With so many potential voters up for grabs, the GOP knows it has no choice but to try here.
“It’s not as if we have no Republican voters here. They’re just outweighed,” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said.
The realistic goal for Republicans right now is to shave off a few thousand votes for Democrats this election. “You don’t make progress without trying,” Franklin said. “And so Republicans are trying.”
The Trump visit was part of a broader GOP effort. The party is knocking on doors, providing more resources, and the university’s campus arm is trying to encourage voter registration among conservative students.
An overarching theme of all the “trying” is to combat what Republicans said was a polarized culture that made being openly conservative in Dane County difficult. Add that to the huge margins Democrats run up every election, and it can leave the county’s GOP voters feeling disliked and distrustful — like their vote doesn’t matter.
The theory is that, just by making an appearance in the area as a Republican candidate, you illustrate that the GOP is working for your vote and that it’s OK to be a Republican.
Schimming said people have come up to him after events in the county and told him to “keep going.”
After one local pints and politics event, one person came up to him and said, according to Schimming, “‘Geez, I’ve been looking for this.’”
The message is: There’s more of us out there.
Thomas Pyle, the chair of UW-Madison’s GOP Badgers, grew up in a suburb of the area. When Trump came to Dane County, he rallied less than two miles from Pyle’s childhood home.
“My parents still live there. They were going crazy about how Waunakee is totally different with Trump there,” he said. “There’s Trump signs, and everybody’s in the know about it and active. Like, just him being there meant a lot.”
The previous GOP Badgers chair, William Blathras, now works on the reelection campaign for a congressman in a solidly red Wisconsin district. He said the underlying strategy there isn’t all that different from what’s happening in Madison, where “you’re still doing the same voter-outreach things.”
“It really is just getting out there, having a presence, talking about the issues that matter and figuring out people who that can resonate with,” Blathras said.
Of course, Republicans aren’t just looking to turn out their most reliable voters.
“I honestly believe this. There are a lot of people out there, doesn’t mean they’re Republicans, but they’re center-right voters,” Schimming said. “Given the choices, they will vote for a Republican, and I think there are tens of thousands of those people in this county, I really believe that. But sometimes they need some leadership.”
Another message of priority is making sure to remind voters that even if their local offices go blue, they can turn the tide for the state ones.
“I’ve had friends who aren’t nearly as involved in politics as me or conservative being like, ‘Do I even bother voting? Democrats are going to win Dane County by so much.’ But your vote matters to the state,” Pyle said. “I think that’s just an important message that we’re looking at. Yes, the county is going to get lost, but the overall state is still very much in play, and your vote matters more in Wisconsin than almost anywhere else in the nation right now.”
Even a marginal gain in Dane County could swing the state and, potentially, the presidential election.
“For Republicans, I would say getting their share of the vote up to 30%, and thus lose the county by only 40 points, instead of by 52 or 53, that’s maybe not an unattainable goal. But what I’m trying to say is that it requires a long-term political strategy,” Franklin said.
That prior lack of a long-term political strategy with Dane is what’s coming around to haunt Republicans now. In prior statewide elections, “People just sort of ignored it. It was truly just kind of less of a discussion for Republicans,” one GOP strategist in the state said. “It was probably a tactical mistake.”
But it’s probably an understandable one. For a long time, the strategist said, “there was still sort of a rural, suburban coalition of Republican voters that was a winning formula.”
“There isn’t that as much anymore,” the strategist continued. “Like the suburban area and the Trump area have slipped so much that even the once strong, conservative WOW counties that were part of the base have begun to slide. So the reality is that Republicans do need to find a place to make up those votes.”
The slipping of the conservative “WOW counties” — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — is ironically the effort Franklin pointed to as one Republicans are arguably trying to recreate with Dane now.
“It’s kind of the reverse of what we’ve seen for Democrats in the WOW counties, which have been hugely Republican through 2012 and are still very Republican, but their margins are smaller there,” Franklin said.
The WOW counties have lost about 36,000 net Republican votes since 2012. In a state with such thin margins between winning and losing, that’s a lot, Franklin said. “So I think Republicans look at Dane as a possibility of having that in reverse,” he added.
For now, Democrats aren’t too worried that Dane is moving toward Republicans.
“I have not seen that Trump is more popular in Dane County than he was in 2016 or 2020,” Alexia Sabor, chair of the Democratic Party of Dane County, told NOTUS.
“I mean, look, it’s Wisconsin,” a Democratic strategist in the state said. “This thing’s gonna come down to one or two votes per precinct. So I’m not gonna completely dismiss the idea that they can go out and find one or two or three people, and it makes a difference.”
“That said,” the strategist continued, “I’ve not seen the kind of effort on the ground that I would say would lead to making this a robust success for them. I think there’s a lot of bluster there.”
Even the Republican strategist cast some doubts: “Madison is so liberal and is so opposed, sort of in principle, to a lot of what Trump and Hovde stand for that you kind of really have to — if you want to actually win Dane County or really shave off the result in a meaningful way — you have to appeal to them in a different way. And I don’t know that these guys are doing that now.”
But Sabor suggested that Dane’s status as a Democratic stronghold cuts the other way too — in that Democrats need to make sure they turn out the vote and make their supporters feel valued too.
“People don’t like to feel like they’re being taken for granted, either because you’re writing them off because you’ve got them, or you’re writing them off because you can’t possibly win that county,” she said. “And so I think, as a strategy, it’s not a bad strategy.”
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.