Wisconsin decided the 2020 election. How will it vote in 2024?

The entire nation will vote on the next president of the United States this fall, but the election will likely come down to seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. With the outsized importance of these states, it's worth taking a closer look at the data we have in each of them — not just where the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stands today, but also each candidate's path to victory and what issues could tip the election. Next up in our series is the state that decided the 2020 election: Wisconsin.

The history

For decades, Wisconsin was a key brick in Democrats' "blue wall": As long as they won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, they had a pretty good shot at winning the Electoral College too. Wisconsin, along with the other two states, 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. That ensured Wisconsin would be fiercely contested in the 2020 election, and when the dust settled, President Joe Biden prevailed. In fact, Wisconsin ended up being the "tipping-point state" in that election. If you take all the states and put them in order from most Democratic in the 2020 election to most Republican, then count up their electoral votes, Wisconsin was the state that provided Biden with his 270th electoral vote.

But Biden won Wisconsin by only 0.6 points, even as he was winning the national popular vote by 4.5 points. That meant Wisconsin was still more Republican than the nation as a whole, which resembles 2016 more than 2012 or 2008, when Wisconsin was more comfortably Democratic. So the Badger State remains firmly in play in this election.

The 2024 polls

Wisconsin’s importance in this election should be obvious to anyone who looks at polls in the state. As of Oct. 17 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, Harris leads Trump 48.1 percent to 47.5 percent in 538’s polling average of the state — virtually the same margin Democrats won the state by in 2020.

If polls are accurate, that means Wisconsin remains redder than the nation, by about 2 points. At the same time, Harris leads Trump in 538’s national polling average by 2.4 points.

The demographics

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.

For example, according to a straight average of crosstabs of Wisconsin polls conducted over the past month,* white Wisconsinites are currently 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 have 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 percent white, 5 percent Black and 4 percent 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, which, according to the polls, appears to be widening. Four years after Trump won non-college-educated voters in Wisconsin by 6 points, crosstabs indicate he is leading Harris by 10 points among them. But Biden won college-educated Wisconsinites by 16 points, and here in 2024, Harris is currently winning these voters by 20 points. (About one-third of Wisconsinites over age 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while the remaining two-thirds do not. That’s comparable to most of the other major swing states.)

And even if Wisconsin as a whole votes the same way in 2024 that it did in 2020, there could be some changes to its underlying electoral map. Polls also suggest that voters in Wisconsin’s rural areas have shifted toward Democrats by 5 points between 2020 and 2024 (although they are still heavily Republican). Meanwhile, they suggest voters in the state’s urban areas have shifted toward Republicans by 3 points (although they are still heavily Democratic).

But the biggest shifts have been in Wisconsin’s suburbs. According to exit polls, Trump won suburban Wisconsinites by 12 points in 2020; according to 2024 crosstabs, Harris is currently winning them by 9 points.

On election night, keep an eye on Wisconsin’s famed "WOW" counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — to see if this comes to pass. These suburban Milwaukee counties have historically been the heart of Republican support in Wisconsin; in 2012, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won them by 35 points. But in 2020, Trump won them by only 23 points. If the WOW counties become competitive, it would be a big deal for Wisconsin politics.

The issues

Like in the rest of the country, the most important issue to Wisconsin voters is the economy. According to an average of three recent polls (from Fabrizio, Lee & Associates/GBAO/The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times/Siena College and Marquette University Law School), 31 percent of Wisconsinites named the economy as their top issue. This was virtually identical to the share of voters nationally who prioritized the economy, according to the same pollsters.

Immigration is another important issue in Wisconsin; an average of 17 percent named it as their top issue, and it ranked second to the economy in the Wall Street Journal and Marquette polls. According to the Wall Street Journal poll, immigration is an even bigger issue in Wisconsin than it is nationally, but the other two pollsters found that the share of Wisconsinites who prioritized immigration was basically the same as it was nationally.

However, in what is potentially good news for Democrats, all three pollsters agreed that abortion is a more important issue in Wisconsin than it is nationally. In the Badger State, 18 percent, on average, chose abortion as their most important issue; nationally, it was just 13 percent. This makes sense considering that abortion’s legal status in Wisconsin has been hotly contested since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. That led to a 15-month period in which no legal abortions were performed in the state under an 1849 law that criminalized abortion. A limited number of clinics started performing abortions again in late 2023 after a local court limited the scope of that law.

The downballot races

Of course, the presidential race isn’t the only competitive election in Wisconsin. Control of the U.S. Senate runs through the state as well, as Republican businessman Eric Hovde is hoping to unseat Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. As of Oct. 17 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 538’s polling average of this race gave Baldwin a 4.2-point lead.

Luckily for Republicans, the race has slowly been tightening over the past few weeks, and Hovde is still running about 2 points behind Trump in the average poll, implying he has even more room to grow. However, crucially for Democrats, Baldwin is also running 2 points ahead of Harris, putting Baldwin just over 50 percent in our average. That means either she needs to lose support or the polls need to be wrong for her to lose. (Of course, either of those things is very possible!)

Finally, real nerds will want to pay attention to the elections for the Wisconsin Assembly — the lower chamber of its state legislature — on election night. The Assembly has been in Republican hands since 2011, thanks in large part to gerrymandered district lines that gave Republicans a big advantage. However, last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state’s legislative maps were unconstitutional, and they were redrawn to be much more evenly divided between the parties. As a result, there is a very real chance that Democrats will win a majority in the Assembly this year. (They will probably have to wait until 2026 to have a shot at flipping the state Senate because only half of Senate districts are on the ballot this year.)

Footnotes

*Based on polls of likely and registered voters only (if a poll included results among both populations, we used likely voters). If a poll included both a head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump and a version including third parties, we used the head-to-head version. Finally, if a polling organization (defined as a partnership between a pollster and sponsor, or a pollster alone if their work was not sponsored by an outside group) had more than one survey in the relevant time frame, only the most recent version was included. All polls conducted and released between Sept. 17 and Oct. 17 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern are included.