When Wisconsin Shows Us The Future - 4/13/26
My home state of Wisconsin is a wonderful place—at least during the months when there is not snow on the ground—but it is often overlooked by the rest of the country. Its largest city, Milwaukee, represents the 41st largest metropolitan area in the United States. The Green Bay Packers have had their glory years, and the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team has won a couple of championships. (However, Wisconsin is still the nation’s foremost cheese-making state.)
But politically, the state has emerged in recent years as one of a handful of key swing states that select the nation’s president every four years, and political strategists now analyze even minute shifts in voting patterns there to attempt to learn about what Americans are thinking and how they might be casting their ballots in upcoming elections.
The hammerlock that the Wisconsin GOP achieved in the early 2010s presaged a national political realignment that led to Donald Trump’s two victories. The growing ideological divide between urban and rural communities allowed Republicans to pile up huge majorities in small towns and farming communities to offset traditionally lopsided Democratic margins in Milwaukee and Madison. The movement of non-college-educated voters to the GOP tipped traditional union constituencies in areas that rely on manufacturing as their economic base. And Republicans also began to win culturally conservative suburban swing voters to win elections for governor and the state supreme court while achieving safe majorities in the state legislature.
But the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction. Wisconsin currently has a two-term Democratic governor, the Republican legislative majorities are shrinking, and last week’s election cemented a Democratic Supreme Court majority for the foreseeable future. But dig deeper into those results, and a couple of potentially impactful trends may be emerging that could provide important clues as to the national mood of the electorate for this November and beyond.
The clues worth noting come out of a pair of local elections in the battleground suburbs outside of Milwaukee. The so-called “WOW” counties of Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha were a reliable Republican support base for many years, but in recent years, many of the wealthy, white, fiscally conservative, and socially moderate voters who populate this area began moving away from the GOP, turning the region into one of the state’s most competitive battlegrounds. After the January 6 riots of 2021, the city of Waukesha’s Republican mayor changed his party registration to Independent. Last week, Waukesha elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in 20 years.
This election might not carry the same symbolic weight of a Democrat winning a Florida legislative seat to represent Mar-a-Lago. It definitely does not have the same impact as Democratic wins in last year’s governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia. But it does provide some insight into the mood of suburban voters who have alternately voted for Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump over the last generation.
About 40 miles northeast of Waukesha is an even smaller municipality ensconced in the WOW counties. The village of Port Washington has voted reliably for Republican candidates for decades, although in gradually diminishing numbers in recent years. Last October, a consortium of OpenAI, Oracle, and Vantage announced plans to build a $15 million artificial intelligence center in the tiny hamlet. After months of construction that many Port Washington residents complained was overly disruptive (including a debate on whether the work would be limited to 12 hours a day or be able to continue around the clock), the city passed the first referendum in the nation to limit further AI data center development without formal voter approval.
Americans worried about job loss, the vulnerability of their children, and broader societal upheaval are markedly uneasy about what AI’s growth means to them. The more immediate impact of electricity costs, air and water quality, and other difficulties caused by the rapid spread of data centers has created a flashpoint for this voter unhappiness. Politicians of both parties, who originally welcomed these facilities as job creators, are now scrambling to get on the right side of this issue before being swallowed by a wave of populist resentment. AI-related issues will be the sleeping giant of the 2028 presidential election—and possibly even this November.
No one has ever said that as Waukesha and Ozaukee go, so goes America. But we would be wise to keep these Midwestern warning flares in mind as the midterms draw closer.