Why Wisconsin is always so close
For decades, Wisconsin was a key brick in Democrats' "blue wall": It voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1992 to 2012. But in 2016, that streak snapped: Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8 percentage points, helping propel him to the presidency.
Democrats flipped Wisconsin back in 2020, but Biden won it by only 0.6 points. And polls suggest 2024 could be the third consecutive presidential election in which Wisconsin is decided by less than 1 point. According to 538's final polling average of the state, Harris leads Trump by just 1.0 points.
If you dig into the crosstabs of those polls, it looks like Wisconsin is experiencing the same demographic trends as the rest of the country: White voters are getting more Democratic, while voters of color are getting more Republican. According to an average of crosstabs of Wisconsin polls conducted Sept. 18-Oct. 18, white Wisconsinites were supporting Trump by 1 point. But according to exit polls, they supported Trump in the 2020 election by 6 points. By contrast, according to crosstabs of Black and Hispanic Wisconsinites, those two groups had shifted toward Trump by more than 20 points each!
But there are two big caveats to this. The first is that Wisconsin's nonwhite population is pretty small. The state's citizen voting-age population is 86% white, 5% Black and 4% Hispanic. This makes it the whitest of the seven main swing states — meaning that any racial voting shifts in the 2024 election will have a muted impact here.
The second caveat is that, with such small Black and Hispanic populations, it's hard for pollsters to get a big enough sample of these voters in Wisconsin. That makes their Black and Hispanic crosstabs subject to a high amount of error.
More important in Wisconsin is the education gap. About one-third of Wisconsinites over age 25 have at least a bachelor's degree, while the remaining two-thirds do not. In 2020, Trump won non-college-educated voters in Wisconsin by 6 points, but Biden won college-educated Wisconsinites by 16 points.