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On April 4, 2023, Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Democrat, won a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court after trouncing her conservative opponent, Daniel Kelly, in the most expensive state judicial race in American history. Her double digit win made national headlines and was seen as a referendum on abortion rights, a centerpiece of her campaign. As expected, Protasiewicz handily won in Milwaukee but she also made some headway in the predominantly red suburban counties.
As Straight Arrow News contributor Matthew Continetti explains, winning the suburban vote is going to be key in the 2024 elections.
If Republicans dominate in rural precincts, and Democrats in urban enclaves, then the suburbs are majority makers. Yet the suburbs had been receding from the GOP since the dawn of the Trump era. For example, in 2014, the last election before Trump descended on his escalator, Republicans won the suburban vote 55% to 45%. They won both the white non-college vote and the white college vote by double digits. They won voters making between $50,000 per year and $100,000 per year by 10 points. By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, majorities among suburban white voters near the middle of the income distribution fueled the GOP’s greatest electoral strength in close to a century.
Unease over Donald Trump shrank this coalition in 2016. Republicans won suburbs by five points, white non-college voters by 39 points, white college voters by four points, and middle-income voters by four points. That gave Trump the electoral college but not a popular vote majority.
Then Trump entered office. He retained his support among white voters without college degrees in 2018. But the remaining pillars of Republican rule crumbled beneath him. White voters with college degrees voted for Democrats by four points. Middle-income voters went for Democrats by two points, and the suburbs turned against Republicans, voting Democratic by 11 points.
The same pattern was visible in the 2020 results. Trump won non-college white votes, though by a smaller margin than four years earlier. White college voters went for Joe Biden by seven points. Middle-income voters split evenly between the parties, and the suburbs voted for Biden by 10 points.
