Series: Wisconsin In The 2016 Presidential Election

Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes played a key role in Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump became the first Republican candidate to win the state since 1984. The outcome suggests a re-alignment in the American electorate, especially in more rural areas of the state that have previously been more supportive of Democratic candidates. Conventional political wisdom went out the window in the election, as did the accuracy of public-opinion polls.
 
Poll responses from self-identified rural voters about the economy and Donald Trump poke holes in the narrative of his victory as an uprising in so-called flyover country.
Political discontent in rural areas of the U.S. is regularly cited as a major factor in Donald Trump’s victory and Congressional and statehouse gains by other Republican candidates in the 2016 elections.
Thirteen counties across the state of Wisconsin have flip-flopped over the last eight years and played a key role in securing Donald Trump's victory in the state.
In the rural Wisconsin city of Abbotsford, on the border of Marathon and Clark counties in the middle of the state, about 500 of 2,300 residents are Latino, drawn there to work on the dairy farms, in the factories, and at one of the region's big employers, the Abbyland Foods meat processing company.
Immigration and diversity are very much rural issues in Wisconsin. Some of Wisconsin's ethnic and racial minority groups are clustered in specific geographic areaa, but Hispanic people are widely distributed across much of the state.
Donald Trump's presidential victory in Wisconsin, the first time a Republican candidate has won the state's electoral votes since 1984, was the result of a complex shift in voting patterns in counties both large and small.
In the world of political polling, the Marquette University Law School Poll is considered the best in Wisconsin. When a new poll is released with a new round of results, political journalists across the state avidly follow it and tweet it out point-by-point.
UW-Madison professor Kathy Cramer studies rural perspectives on politics in Wisconsin, and has received attention for her book The Politics of Resentment . She discusses how the outcome of the 2016 presidential election reflects ongoing political trends in the state.
The 2016 presidential election results took many people of all political stripes by surprise. It will be a while before it is fully understood why figures released by many reputable state and national polls were off, some by a wide margin. Until then, history may offer some potential explanations.
In 1948, four national polling firms infamously predicted that Thomas Dewey would win the presidential election by a comfortable 5 to 15 percentage points rather than the 4.4 percentage point victory won by President Harry Truman. This error brought the young polling industry to its knees.