The myth of ‘clock’ counties in presidential elections

On By Littum

Craig Gilbert
| Special to the Journal Sentinel

game

If you follow the fierce battle for Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes, you may have heard that there is one county in this state that has voted for the presidential winner seven times in a row (Door).

And another who has done it four times in a row (Sauk).

Door and Sauk are getting a lot of attention these days as election “bell ringers.”

And they are interesting, revealing places.

But I doubt they tell us more about who wins Wisconsin than many other counties, and they’re not the ones I’m looking for as barometers for the November vote.

Why not?

The answer has to do with what makes a place a caucus in a 50/50 state like Wisconsin in the year 2024.

Is it its voice history?

Is it equally distributed, like the state as a whole?

Is it demographically representative of the state’s electorate?

Is it representative of the state’s most decisive voting trends?

Is it so big that it is the place most likely to affect the outcome?

The classic notion is that of the tiny counties of Door in the northeast and Sauk in the southwest: swinging, purple places riding a presidential streak.

These happen to be only two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties that voted for the last two presidential winners, Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

That’s right. No other county in Wisconsin has voted for the winner more than twice in a row.

But does that really mean that when Door and Sauk go, so goes Wisconsin?

Neither county is a demographic microcosm of the state. They have no cities of any real size. They have no metropolitan suburbs.

Rural Sauk County, northwest of Madison, has a population that is whiter and more blue-collar than that of the state as a whole (which is whiter and more blue-collar than other battleground states).

Door County, which occupies the peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan, is economically diverse, but its electorate is whiter and significantly older than the statewide electorate. It is also a popular vacation destination known to attract a lot of people from Illinois. It’s a beautiful part of Wisconsin, but not a “representative” part.

Even the difference these two counties have in voting for so many presidential winners is somewhat arbitrary. Door’s streak of endorsing the winner seven times in a row shrinks to four if you define a Wisconsin “bell ringer” as voting for the candidate who wins Wisconsin, rather than the nation.

And that shrinks to just one election if you define a bellwether county as voting for the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the Electoral College vote.

Sauk has voted for the Wisconsin winner eight consecutive elections. But these bell lines rest on the tiniest of margins. Sauk voted for Trump in 2016 by 109 votes. Door voted for Biden in 2020 by just 292 votes.

Finally, let’s consider how Wisconsin’s “clock counties” fared four years ago.

Going into that election, seven Wisconsin counties had voted for the presidential winner in each of the seven previous elections dating back to 1992: Marquette, Forest, Lincoln, Racine, Sawyer, Juneau and Richland.

How much predictive value did these counties have in 2020? Zero. All seven voted for the state and national loser, Trump. There has been enough realignment in the last decade to make a county’s pre-2016 voting history a highly questionable prediction.

I think many journalists who flock to these places understand that the bell brand is a bit flimsy. We visit them because these places illustrate what it’s like for voters to live in a 50/50 political environment. And because their voting stories give our “battleground” stories more resonance. (I’ll admit I’ve done my share of clockwork stories over the years, making repeated trips to Richland, Juneau and Sauk).

But are there places that have more compelling claims to be educational?

My list would start with the counties that embody the critical voting trends that shape our elections. And these places also get a lot of attention.

In 2020, the main voting trend in Wisconsin was a Democratic surge in the suburbs, which turned the state from red to blue.

The decisive vote shifts occurred in the blue suburbs of Madison (Dane County) and the red, blue and purple suburbs of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, Waukesha and Ozaukee counties).

These counties were the truest election barometers in 2020.

On the other hand, they weren’t the best barometers in 2016. Democrats made gains in Dane, Waukesha and Ozaukee that year. But it didn’t matter, because the state’s smaller, more rural counties in western, northern and central Wisconsin swung so hard for Trump that he became the first Republican to win the state since 1984.

In short, the most important electoral signals in the last two presidential elections came from completely different parts of Wisconsin.

And that is the obvious conundrum in 2024. This state, like many other states, has not moved politically. Some parts of Wisconsin have turned redder. Some have become more blue.

If you are focused on the first group of counties, you might think that former President Trump will win this state.

If you’re focused on the second, you might think Vice President Kamala Harris will win.

Although we can trace the political trend lines in these places, we do not know which trend lines and which places will prove decisive.

So my head will be on a swivel election night.

I want to see the state’s most purple metro area, Green Bay-Appleton.

But I also want to see a lot of very red and very blue places to see if they get redder or bluer. It’s not about who wins these one-sided counties, but how big the margins are.

I want to see if the Democrats stop their erosion in the rural west and north.

I want to see if the Republicans stop their erosion in the Milwaukee suburbs.

I’ll be watching to see if the Democratic margin in the state’s second-largest and fastest-growing county, Dane, increases by another 20,000 or 30,000 votes, as it has in nearly every presidential election for decades.

I’ll be watching to see if Republicans make inroads in Democratic cities with voters of color and working-class whites, from Milwaukee to Racine to Janesville.

I will be particularly interested in whether Trump’s performance improves or declines in populous counties, which were a big problem for him in 2020. Of the 15 Wisconsin counties that generated the most votes, Trump’s point margin worsened in 13 compared to 2016, it remained same in one and improved in one (Kenosha).

Finally, because I’m a fan of election trivia, I’ll also look at Door and Sauk, the only two counties that have voted for the winner of Wisconsin and the Electoral College in every Trump election so far.

It will fit in our 50/50 era if no Wisconsin counties can make that claim when this election is over.

Then we might have to bury the whole bell ride.