While Trump enjoyed 54 percent of the white vote in 2016, not all white enclaves were buying what he was selling. Case in point: Dane County, Wisconsin — a region where four in five residents are non-Hispanic white. According to Francis Wilkerson of Bloomberg News, Hillary Clinton defeated Trump in Dane County by a margin of three to one.
“The population in Dane County displays many of the hallmarks of contemporary progressivism,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist, Barry Burden. “It is highly educated and secular. It is young and upwardly mobile. Large numbers of people work in the public sector for state or local government.”
But it’s not just the demographics of the county that make its disdain for Trump interesting. According to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel political reporter Craig Gilbert, the region’s progressive values grew as its economic prospects improved, and that’s not just a phenomenon that played out in Dane County. Throughout the nation, counties that went for Hillary Clinton generated almost twice the total economic output of counties that favored Trump.
Despite Democratic policies of higher taxes on the affluent, prosperity appears to drive Democratic votes. All in all, the affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, like others around the country, are trending less Republican.
“Even the surrounding suburbs and surrounding counties – which are a mix of bedroom and rural/small town – are getting more Democratic,” said pollster Paul Maslin..”Never seen anything like it.”
As economic growth continues, Trump’s “politics of resentment” becomes more and more double-barreled.
“To sustain it, Republicans must sustain white rural America, a task for which Trump’s chaotic trade war and plutocratic policies are ill-suited,” Wilkerson writes. “He has done little to reverse the economic forces that draw the most adventurous children of conservative rural voters into the high-density, more liberal, political cultures of cities and suburbs.”