Wisconsin - Final 2024 Prediction

Topic: 2024 Election Forecast

November 4, 2024

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My seventh final prediction for the eight battleground states of 2024 is for Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is where already flawed polling goes to die.  No one can get it right, even people who are honest enough to realize that four of the last six presidential elections have been decided within a point and should know better than to publish any of these nonsensical four- or five-point polls.

The Badger State comes into play most prominently in a race in which Trump holds North Carolina but doesn’t secure both Pennsylvania and Georgia.  Winning one would give space for Trump to win the election by carrying Arizona and Wisconsin, or Nevada and Wisconsin if Trump’s win was in Pennsylvania.

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Party Registration

Wisconsin does not register voters by party.  For more on the best comparison I could infer for party registration, please read my analysis of Iowa as registration indicator for Wisconsin.  The two states are very similar and have shifted together in six of seven elections since 1996, and would have in 2004 had the large third party vote share in 2000 returning back mostly to two parties didn’t distort the results as much as it did.

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What Harris Must Do to Win

The map is extremely tough for her, given that potentially 69 of 72 counties have an organic trend against the Democrats, especially if Trump reverses the atrophy of soft-Republican counties like Ozaukee.  Now that Democrats have lost the working-class southwest, which used to vote like Iowa did in the Obama days, statewide candidates must get crushing margins in Dane and Milwaukee Counties to win.  I have little doubt she will have a massive margin in Dane County, but turnout in core Madison appears to be lagging the outlying areas of the county, and we can always hope the college kids don’t care as much (or sell their ballots at the same rates).  Milwaukee, however, is substantially down in terms of registered voters (by over 35,000 from 2020), which directly impacts how many ballots can be harvested and dumped for late counting.

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What Trump Must Do to Win