Photo by Greg Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin’s sizable rural electorate played a decisive role in flipping Wisconsin into the win column for Donald Trump this week.

Trump won Wisconsin’s rural vote by a margin of about 22.3 percentage points, a 2.4 point improvement over his 2020 performance.

That amounted to a gain of about 29,000 net votes for Trump, compared to 2020. That accounts for nearly all of Trump’s statewide victory of 30,000 votes.

Trump also improved on his 2020 turnout across the state in all of the Daily Yonder county categories, from major metropolitan areas to small metro areas. But his largest turnout gain was in rural counties. In Wisconsin, where rural voters make up 26% of the electorate, compared to about 15% nationally, the rural gains were decisive.

(This article uses the Office of Management and Budget 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural. Counties that are not in a 2013 metro area are considered rural.)

Unlike in Pennsylvania, where Trump won because Harris hemorrhaged votes in urban areas compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, in Wisconsin Trump won the state in a battle of turnout.

Both candidates got more votes in 2024 than presidential candidates in 2020 in Wisconsin. But Trump attracted more of that increased turnout to his camp, improving his percentage of the two-party vote in all but four counties.

Three of the counties where Trump did not improve his margins were in the Milwaukee metro area, but one was rural. Door County, which flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020, remained in the Democratic column this year, with a slight increase for Harris over Biden’s performance.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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