In Wisconsin and countrywide, Democrats look to the suburbs to save them

Waukesha County is Wisconsin’s third biggest store of votes, a Republican stronghold that’s been less susceptible to Democratic charms than other suburban counties after 2016 even as it has moved in their direction. Twenty years ago, the last time polling in a presidential race here was so close, George W. Bush netted 81,000 votes from the county; John Kerry netted nearly 91,000 from Madison’s Dane County. That, and Democratic resilience in the “Driftless Region” of western Wisconsin, carried the state for Kerry.

Republicans have gained massively in western Wisconsin since then, while losing ground in Waukesha and getting pummeled in Dane. Joe Biden lost Waukesha by around 56,000 votes; he won Dane by more than 181,000. The new Republican math, which relies on weaker Democratic margins in Milwaukee and a red shift in most rural counties, still doesn’t work without a landslide in its traditionally red suburbs.

“It’s going from blood red to pink, and heading into purple territory,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, as he spent Saturday catching up with party volunteers and candidates in the central part of the state. “If Harris gets close to 40% in Waukesha County, that’s probably the ball game. The Democratic parties in these places are just exploding in size and energy.”

Matt Mareno, the chairman of the Waukesha County Democrats, described an operation that had grown as the party saw more opportunities to cut the local GOP margin. For the first time in a presidential election, the party had a full-time paid staffer; ten volunteers from the statewide coordinated campaign were assigned to the county, up from one in 2016.

“Kamala has now done two events in the county itself, we had the cast of ‘The West Wing’ here — we are getting recognized now as a key part of infrastructure by Democratic decision makers,” he said.

That happened, said Mareno, even as Harris made more explicit appeals to Republicans and downplayed her progressivism. Some progressive activists had reached out with concerns about Waukesha County outreach like Harris’s stop with Cheney. One conversation usually was enough to calm them.

“What did Kamala give up to get that endorsement? The answer is nothing,” he said. “We haven’t had to moderate our positions. Trump and the GOP have moved so far off the cliff in terms of democracy and fair elections that these moderates and Republicans feel compelled to come over.”

That’s what the frustrated non-Democrats are saying. Karl Buschhaus, a 59-year old electrical engineering professor, told Semafor that he donated to Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP primary, and voted for Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson in 2016. In 2020, he supported Biden; in 2024, he began canvassing with the Waukesha Democrats every weekend. He ruled out supporting Trump without making any demand on Harris.

“We cannot have him in power again. His own people have said it,” said Buschhaus. “He can’t be trusted. I seriously worry we’ll head into another world war with him.”

We can see the Democrats’ wrap-up strategy right now: Warnings of existential disaster for democracy if Donald Trump wins, and a suite of policy promises that are unlikely to offend non-Democrats.

If that works, it would work in the Republican suburbs that have continued to vote for Trump Republicans, but with crucial and growing defections. Last year, the Democratic-backed candidate for Wisconsin’s state supreme court candidate got 42% of the vote in Waukesha County, and nearly won Ozaukee, the least Republican of the “WOW” counties. Democrats doubt they can repeat those levels in an election with spending parity and the usual partisan lock-in. But it’s fueled their thinking that they could keep cutting GOP margins here and negate their losses elsewhere.

We know what those losses would look like. Harris is running weaker than Joe Biden with non-white voters and young men in polls. The story of frustrated Arab-Americans in southeast Michigan has been told well from a hundred angles — Harris obviously needs to add some voters to her pile to make up for tens of thousands of votes ceded to Trump, third parties, or blank ballots. Democrats are panicking about voters they used to count on.

If they eke out the election, it’ll be thanks to voters they never thought they could compete for before Trump, but who have nonetheless drifted their way across multiple cycles. It may be a less-discussed factor than, say, a dramatic shift in Gen Z that’s more novel and counterintuitive — we have a well-established cultural image of the suburban “Resistance” convert by now — but it is potentially decisive. The caveat: Many of them had stopped voting Republican before this election.

There are Republicans who think that Harris’s outreach to the right can cost her. Oubai Shahbandar, the founder of Arab Americans for a Better America (ABE-PAC), said that Harris’s decision to campaign with Cheney was a “gift from God,” making it easier for the pro-Trump group to campaign for Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. This week, the PAC rented a billboard truck with images of Harris and Cheney, mirroring what it was putting on 25 standing billboards around Wayne County.

“There is an image of Cheney looking directly into the eyes of Kamala from her town hall, and we are plastering that everywhere across the Detroit area,” he said. And Shabandar did not see the “democracy” issue that moved some Republicans moving any critics of Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. “I haven’t seen one person talk about Jan. 6 in the community. It has never come up in any of my discussions, whether it’s a hookah bar, a Yemeni restaurant — nobody brings up Jan. 6.”