← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Season 3 Episode 6: Polarization and deindustrialization in the Badger State
00:35:37
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:01]
A
One, two.
- [00:11]
B
Hello, and welcome to the Ballpark, a podcast from the US center here at the London School of Economics. I'm Denise Barron, and on this episode of the Ballpark, my co host Chris and I are talking about the fascinating state politics of Wisconsin. Wisconsin has been in the news a lot in recent years. In 2016, it helped Donald Trump get over the line in the Electoral College to win the presidency in what many saw as a Rust Belt revolt. And in only the last couple of months, it's attracted a great deal of interest because of its state politics.
- [00:45]
A
I'm Chris Gilson, and that's all exactly right. There are a number of interesting characters in Wisconsin politics that catch a lot of national media attention. Outgoing Governor Scott Walker for one, and outgoing speaker of the House Paul Ryan for another. And we learned a lot about them and their roles in Wisconsin's politics. But America's Dairyland is also useful to understand because it's been hit particularly hard by deindustrialization and the decline of once plentiful manufacturing jobs, making it part of a so called Rust Belt. It's a process that has affected not only the US but cities throughout the UK and Europe too.
- [01:18]
B
So like much of the US Wisconsin's politics have become incredibly polarized, which was especially evident during its recent midterm election and the aftermath.
- [01:29]
A
So we wanted to explore whether or not deindustrialization and polarization are related, at least in Wisconsin. And we'll share what we learned about its state politics too. But first, of course, we'll provide you a bit of context about the Badger State.
- [01:51]
B
So wait a second, did you say America's Dairyland? Where does that come from?
- [01:58]
A
I certainly did say that, but I didn't just make it up. I actually learned it from one of our new LSE students who's actually from Wisconsin at the LSE Freshers Fair last fall.
- [02:08]
C
Hi, my name is Briana Buck and I am coming to the LSE from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I'm studying international social and public policy.
- [02:17]
A
Fantastic. Thank you. And can you tell me a bit about the state of Wisconsin, what it's like, and if you were to drive across it, what kind of things would you see and what would you encounter?
- [02:25]
C
So one of the things about the different US States is that each one has a license plate where it tells you a tagline about the state. And most people don't know, but Wisconsin's tagline is America's Dairyland. Wisconsin is the producer of the most dairy in the United States. So with dairy comes cows. A lot of cow fields. Wisconsin's a really interesting state because it has two main cities that have the majority of the population in Wisconsin. It has Madison, which is the capital, and it has Milwaukee, which is about, I believe it's four times bigger. And those are the two main states. Milwaukee's on the border of Lake Michigan, and otherwise you're going to see mostly farms and fields. So between those, there's a couple towns. There's Janesville, which some people know Congressman Paul Ryan is from there. But otherwise it's a lot of dairy fields, a lot of pastures, a lot of agriculture. Madison and Milwaukee tend to be quite liberal where the rest of the state is quite conservative.
- [03:24]
A
Our state politics expert, Sarah Scofidi also wanted to share some interesting facts about Wisconsin beyond its dairy producing and manufacturing past. So, Sarah, what can you tell us about the Badger State?
- [03:35]
D
Well, Chris, as you mentioned earlier, Wisconsin is the Badger State, but. But you might be surprised to learn why in the 1820s and 1830s, the state was settled by miners. Without shelter in the winter, they often slept in the tunnels they had burrowed into the hillside, much like a badger would.
- [03:52]
B
Oh, come on.
- [03:53]
E
Really?
- [03:54]
D
Yeah. Isn't that wild?
- [03:55]
B
That's amazing.
- [03:57]
D
So it's not really because of the animal, but it's kind of because of the animal.
- [04:01]
B
It's because of Wisconsinites acting like badgers.
- [04:05]
D
Yeah, exactly.
- [04:06]
B
I love it.
- [04:07]
D
And Wisconsin's mining origins set the scene for the state's evolution into an industrial hub. As you'll hear on this podcast, this has changed in recent years, but it's not the only thing that's changed. Wisconsin just became one of seven states in the 2018 midterm elections where a Democrat took control of a previously Republican governor seat, with Democrat Tony Evers unseating Republican Governor Scott Walker.
- [04:32]
A
To find out more about the Badger State, head over to our brand new online platform, the State of the states@thestateofthestates.org that's thestateofthestates.org to get a better understanding.
- [04:44]
B
Of Wisconsin's history, culture, and broader political landscape, we spoke with Wendy Scattergood, a political science professor and longtime contributor to the US Center's USAP blog.
- [04:56]
F
Wendy Scattergood and I'm a political science professor at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, which is in the Green Bay area.
- [05:04]
B
Wendy shared some crucial insights into Wisconsin's political geography, its history as a fairly purple state with a strong union presence, and how deindustrialization has affected the state's politics overall.
- [05:17]
F
We actually asked in a Question in one of our surveys several years ago, what they thought the best thing about Wisconsin is, and what came out as the number one was actually four seasons. So we have absolutely gorgeous falls here with the leaves turning, and love spring, and we're pretty hardy up here. People like their winter outdoor sports as well as summer, fall, and spring.
- [05:40]
A
And moving from the physical landscape to the political landscape. So what is the political landscape of Wisconsin? And if we're looking for Democrats and Republicans, where might we find them? And are there any places that have shifted demographically or changed their composition markedly in the last couple of elections?
- [05:56]
F
Mostly what we find is we have big blue areas, big Democratic supports in our primary cities of Milwaukee and Madison, and kind of some of the close suburbs around there. Really, where the Democratic strongholds are for the state, we find some other pockets. Way up in the northwest by Duluth, Minnesota, we have a little peninsula that sticks out into Lake Superior, and they tend to be Democratic as well. Some of the pockets along the Mississippi river, which is our western border, can also be some parts of Democratic strongholds for the Republicans. We call them the wow Counties, and those are the wealthy suburbs around Milwaukee, and that's Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties, hence the wow. And they tend to be very, very red. Although what's interesting there is in this last election, and Even in the 2016 election, we've seen them be just slightly less red. And I think that's pretty probably one of the interesting things that sort of came out of that election. In general, the partisan identification in the public is very, very close over time between Democrats and Republicans. And we haven't seen a lot of shifting there. The population in Wisconsin has small amounts of population growth and very small relative to particularly the Southern states. And even some of the rural areas have seen losses in their populations. What we've seen amongst a lot, we have 72 counties in Wisconsin. So some of them are pretty small and pretty rural. And that's really where we've seen kind of the uptick in the 2016 election in the Trump vote. We've seen an increase in Republican voting in those rural counties. And what's happening there is we're seeing, as I said, population losses even in an aging population that's. That's fairly white. And I think that's where we're seeing some of the Trump voters going in those areas. So for us, I mean, I think people call us a purple state. And in part that's because we do have such close numbers between Democrats and Republicans that even a relatively Small number of people who actually do swing between Democrat and Republican offices. And over time, it's not that many people, but when you have such a close division between Democrats and Republicans, they can actually make the difference. And then turnout is always key. And I think that was kind of one of the major factors in the 2018 election.
- [08:32]
A
From this side of the pond, it looks like a lot's changed in terms of Wisconsin's politics in recent years. Could you give us a brief sketch about how politics have shifted there in the past decade or so?
- [08:42]
F
Starting in sort of the 1980s and the 1990s, we had a governor, Tommy Thompson, Republican, who was elected to a fourth term. And then he was the Secretary of Health and Human Services in second Bush administration. And so he was relatively moderate and he was pretty popular across kind of all. A non polarizing kind of figure, a kind of guy of the people. And then it was sort of after that that we saw Scott McCallum, who took over for him after he went to D.C. a little bit more polarizing. And then the Democrat who was elected after that, Jim Doyle, a little bit more polarizing. But we really, really saw a big shift when Scott walker was elect 2010, and he started the administration with what's called Act 10, which was trying to curb some of the collective bargaining rights for public employees. And that set off a firestorm of protests. There was weeks and weeks of protests in the Capitol building itself. People from all over the country were donating money to a pizza company to go bring it to the Capitol to feed people there. And I think that in Wisconsin started a lot of the polarization that happened. And then we went through a recall election in 2012, which Walker won. He was reelected actually by a slightly higher margin than he was elected originally in 2010. But it caused a lot of consternation amongst the Democratic voters. And then moving from there, of course, to the Trump administration, increasing the amount of polarization that we see here. Wisconsin.
- [10:23]
A
That's really interesting, talking about when Scott Walker came to power. Just thinking back to 2010, what sort of a mandate did he have? Was it just sort of. It was his turn as a Republican, as so often happens. It sounds like a lot of people were very surprised at the direction he went in. Or was he seen to be kind of a union buster or a sort of center or far right candidate at the time?
- [10:43]
F
So he didn't campaign on that. I mean, I think he definitely was campaigning on jobs and trying to figure out how to bring more businesses to Wisconsin. He said he was going to create 250,000 new jobs. But there wasn't really a sense that he was going to go after the unions. A little bit after that, there was a documentary that was being made and he was actually caught on tape talking to one of his supporters of basically saying divide and conquer and that he was going to kind of go after the union. So not only did they start off with the public employee unions, but then in 2015, the legislature passed and he signed us as a right to work state so that non union employees are not forced to pay union dues, even if they benefit from the contract negotiations.
- [11:33]
A
We were also really curious about the effects of the recent midterm elections, which saw Republican Governor Scott Walker lose his seat. And with the national trends of high turnout held true in Wisconsin too. And I of course, had to ask about Paul Ryan, likely Wisconsin's best known politician in recent years. So thinking more recently to the midterm elections, so Scott Walker lost his gubernatorial race. Can you talk a little bit about how that unfolded and how surprising or not that it was that he lost?
- [12:04]
F
Well, first of all, I think people were thinking it was going to be very close. And it was, it was just under 30,000 votes. That was the difference between, it was 1.1% difference between. So I think everybody predicted it was going to be close and it was. And I think one of the key things that we saw was turnout when we had a record turnout of almost 60%, which for a midterm election was quite a bit higher than usual, even in recent years when we've seen increasing turnout rates in Wisconsin. So I think that was a major impact. Particularly we saw really big increases in midterm election turnouts in the Milwaukee area and in the Madison area. And the younger voters in particular voted very, very heavily for Tony Evers.
- [12:56]
A
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, Wisconsin voted for Trump in 2016. So does that make Tony Evers victory even more surprising?
- [13:02]
F
Well, again, that was another one that was really, really close. It was less than 1% difference between Clinton and Trump in and typically what we would see in a midterm is that Republicans tend to have better turnout rates. And so it was a little bit surprising to see that because there was that slight edge in 2016 to then see it go back. But I think that's the galvanizing that went on. We also had a Senate race in the 2018 election. And pretty clearly, at least from our surveys, we're looking at the importance of Donald Trump was to people's vote. So definitely for the Tammy Baldwin for senator or race. That was in part driving the turnout, as well as the governor's race being very A lot of people were concerned about healthcare and education were big issues that came up.
- [13:53]
A
And of course, we're talking about Wisconsin. So we have to talk about Paul Ryan. Could you maybe outline a little bit about who he is and how he fits into Wisconsin politics and the links between Congress as well?
- [14:05]
F
Yeah. So he's retiring, and so a Republican was elected in his first Congressional district to take his place, and he was one of his former aides. But he's, of course, going to have to start at the bottom again on the seniority list when he gets to the House. It'll be interesting to see what Paul Ryan does in his political future, as it will be to see what Scott Walker I mean, they both are fairly young men and have had long careers in politics. So will they go the lobbying route or will they continue to try to perhaps run for other offices? So he's Paul Ryan has a kind of an interesting relationship. He comes from the Janesville area, which is one of our kind of southeastern county areas, and has had a lot of issues with losing manufacturing jobs. It was a huge GM plant, another parts plant for them, that closed down and lost hundreds of jobs there. And, you know, he at that time really tried to work across the aisles on a local level to try to, first of all to get GM not to close it down and then to try to figure out other solutions for it. But then, you know, as speaker of the House, he's been, you know, more of a polarizing figure than I think what you would see him more on the local level do.
- [15:34]
B
As Wendy pointed out, deindustrialization is often associated with Wisconsin because of its reputation as a manufacturing hub. But she highlighted that Wisconsin has also diversified its economy quite a bit, especially since the closure of some major factories in the state. None of that is to say, however, that the transition hasn't been pretty difficult for many people.
- [15:57]
A
So you talked a little bit about deindustrialization. Wisconsin, I think, is considered by a lot of people as being part of the Rust Belt. So how has deindustrialization really affected Wisconsin's economy and politics in the last couple of decades?
- [16:11]
F
So right now, manufacturing is about 16% of the overall economy. And what's interesting, the larger according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who puts these into categories and does the estimations that trade, transportation and utilities is actually a larger sector of the economy at 17% than manufacturing is, and right behind that is education and health at 15%, then government and professional business services at 10%. It's pretty diverse, but I think in a lot of ways it has a lot more to do with kind of thinking about the culture of Wisconsin and that we have been traditionally a manufacturing state. And actually, I mean, we took some huge hits in 2000-2004, manufacturing, both in the United States and Wisconsin, they both had 17% drops in manufacturing employment over that four year, five year period. So that was actually the first kind of major hit that they took. And then when the latest recession, but in just one year, 2009-2010, Wisconsin saw another 17% drop. And what happened there was after the first drop in 2000, 2004, it stayed flat. After that, there wasn't really a recovery in manufacturing jobs. And then when the recession hit, the Great Recession as they're calling it, hit then it dropped another 17% below that. But what we're seeing now is to some extent, we're seeing some amount of increase. Unemployment here right now is hovering about 3% and that we have seen a growth in manufacturing jobs themselves. But overall job growth rate, I think one of the latest rankings I saw, we are 42nd in terms of growth in overall jobs. So there's definitely been a hit to the economy. And I think people haven't adjusted to the fact that this is kind of the growing nature of what's happening in the state and trying all different kinds of solutions to figure out how to solve these problems. But when you're looking at the data, on the face of it, yeah, it is a big sector of our economy, but at the same time, we're pretty diverse in terms of employment as well.
- [18:37]
A
To get a better feel for what's changed at the local level in Wisconsin, I spoke to someone who spent a lot of time in one of its best known towns, Janesville, in order to better understand how deindustrialization affects communities.
- [18:49]
E
Amy Goldstein, I'm a reporter at the Washington Post and the author of the book An American Story.
- [18:55]
A
Amy Goldstein is the author of Janesville, which talks about what happens to one factory town and its people when its main source of jobs and income closes down. Why did you decide to write about Janesville?
- [19:07]
E
Well, I was very interested several years ago, just after what we in the United States call the Great Recession and other people call the global financial crisis in finding way to take a close up glimpse at what really happens when good jobs go away. And I thought it'd be interesting to focus on one community that could serve as a microcosm or a metaphor for what was happening in many places around the United States as a result of this worst time in the country's economy since the Great depression of the 1930s. And Janesville turned out to be a very appropriate place to take this look. It had what had been the oldest operating General Motors plant in the entire company until it shut down two days before Christmas of 2008. And it was a place that had never before been part of the Rust Belt. And that was important to me because I wanted to look at what this one bad economic period did to people and to the texture of a community, not at the accumulation of decay, economic decay over a period of years. The county of which Janesville is the county seat, lost about 9,000 jobs in 2008 and 2009. That was a lot of people losing work, and a lot of this had been good work. The General Motors jobs paid wages of $28 an hour at the end. So these were working class jobs that propped up good middle class lives until all this work went away.
- [20:31]
A
You sort of alluded to this a bit. So how important was the GM plant in Janesville and what did its closure really mean for the town?
- [20:38]
E
Well, this General Motors plant had started out making tractors in 1919, just after the end of World War I, and it began churning out Chevrolets on Valentine's Day of 1923. So if you think about how many generations of workers that was between then and when the plant closed, it was grandfathers and fathers and sons and daughters. And it really was the best working class kind of job you could imagine. Good wages, good benefits. People even had days off in the fall to go hunting if they wanted to. And because this big assembly plant was there, other supplier companies had sprung up in the area. So when the plant closed, thousands of those jobs went away. And if you think about a small city, Janesville has about 60,000 people living in it. Small restaurants closed, bowling alleys closed because not enough people could afford to bowl in leagues once a week. So there was really a cascade of lost jobs through this community when this auto plant shut down.
- [21:41]
A
Amy Goldstein's investigation of Janesville also provided some useful context on what deindustrialization really looks like on a community scale and how difficult it can be to respond adequately and quickly enough to these changes. Following the plant's closure in 2009, how much help did the town have from the state and from the federal government? And to what extent would you say the town tried to help itself in the aftermath?
- [22:05]
E
Well, there were both outside efforts to help the community, and community efforts to help the community. As the plant was shutting down, it was announced by General Motors that this plant was going to close In June of 2008, several months into the Great Recession. And the closing happened that December. So in between that period of months, there was a big effort that began by the then governor of Wisconsin, who was a Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, the entire congressional delegation from Wisconsin, including Paul Ryan, whose hometown is Janesville. He wasn't yet the speaker of the House, which he is now for another few months, but he was Janesville's congressman, Democratic senator from Janesville. So it's a really bipartisan effort of state and federal people, plus the United auto Workers Local 95, which is based in Janesville, the city itself, another town just to the south of Janesville. All these parties came together to put together what was the biggest package of economic incentives that Wisconsin had ever offered any company. They offered this package to General Motors to try to persuade the company to choose Janesville as the site of a new little car that was going to be the first small car GM was going to manufacture domestically in some time. And these people who were part of this rescue effort were just certain that they were going to prevail because of the huge effort that they put together. What they hadn't anticipated was that Michigan, which had a higher unemployment rate at the time, put together a much larger package of incentives. So Janesville didn't get this car that would have to manufacture, that would have kept the plant open. So that's one way of thinking about the considerable effort that was spent externally. There's also, as there is in a lot of communities that lose work, a lot of federal retraining money that came into the community. I looked with a few labor economists at how well retraining was working, at least in this economic context of a few years after the recession had ended, to see whether people who had retrained were more or less likely to have jobs than people who had not gone back to school. And the results were pretty sobering. Some of your listeners may know this recession was much slower to start producing jobs again than the previous few recessions the United States. And people very good intentions had encouraged all these laid off workers, a couple thousands of them, to go back to school, which they did, only to find that there weren't always jobs waiting for them at the far end, and certainly not always jobs which they retrained. So those are two ways of thinking about substantial outside efforts that poured into this community. It's a hard thing, though. To recreate jobs when the heart of your economy locally goes away.
- [24:52]
B
And Wendy Scattergood also had some commentary about how deindustrialization has been associated with the opioid crisis.
- [25:00]
A
Now, again, for our listeners who aren't American, my understanding is that the reason that the opioid crisis is linked to states that have de industrialized is a lot of the manual or factory workers who've worked in these factories and these jobs, they're not office workers. So they've had a lifetime of heavy labor, difficult labor, and that sort of causes the problems with their bodies, with their backs, with their legs, with their arms. And so therefore they need sort of opioid style pain relief. Is that about right?
- [25:27]
F
Yeah, I think a lot of people argue that's true and that there are a lot of, particularly as you said, back injuries and that's causing in the earlier days where doctors were prescribing the opioids as, you know, prescription medication. And then when that ran out, then they had to resort to other methods. And I think there are a lot of people talking about that link between these folks. And there's also the emotional aspect of it, of people losing jobs and kind of losing hope that they can't find other good paying jobs. They can find other jobs, but they're not the kind of, you know, $28 an hour that they were used to, no sort of guaranteed employment for generations that some of these factories had, I think. So there is definitely a psychological, emotional aspect to the opioid crisis as well.
- [26:17]
B
So I'm pretty curious about how the story ends or at least updates. How is Janesville doing now? Has it recovered at all?
- [26:25]
A
I asked Amy that myself and she and others have seen mixed results. So unemployment levels have actually recently been falling in Janesville. So would you say the town has recovered from the GM plant's closure?
- [26:37]
E
Well, I think that there are different ways of looking at what recovery means. The unemployment rate shot up to over 13% a couple of months after the assembly plant closed. So this would have been the first part of 2009 is now below 4%. That looks pretty good. On the other hand, if you look not at just the unemployment rate, but at what kinds of jobs people are working in and what they're paying. Recovery is not exactly the word you'd be inclined to use. Manufacturing jobs have not particularly come back to this part of southern Wisconsin. And the wages are, for the most part, Nothing like the $28 an hour wages that General Motors had paid.
- [27:18]
A
And one thing we try and do on the ballpark is to put listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the US and what it's actually like that. Can you try and put us in Janesville? And just what's Janesville like? If I was to walk down the main street, sort of, what would it feel like to be in Janesville?
- [27:34]
E
Well, Janesville is a county seat in southern Wisconsin. It's surrounded by farmland, a lot of corn fields, other kinds of crops. And it kind of started developing in the first half of the 19th century. So the downtown has some nice Victorian buildings. It's a small downtown. It's built right along the Rock River. And the downtown is a little bit faded. It's true of a lot of small cities, downtowns. I mean, a mall opened in the 1970s. And so for several decades they've been pulling business away from the heart of the town. It's a place where people really feel a sense of attachment. I think that one of the effects of this assembly plant having been around for so many decades is that extended families worked there and stayed in town. One thing that surprised me when I arrived is that, I mean, I knew there had been this enormous job loss, but the town looked pretty good when I got there. And I still remember some of the first interviews I was conducting asking people what do I need to be looking at to see the economic pain that I knew from statistics I had looked at had to be in this community. And I learned something from that experience. First of all, I was told to look at gardens that people have been proud of their gardens outside their houses. And many people couldn't afford to buy the flowers that they had always been planting in front of their homes. But another thing that I learned is that, and this is a generalization that obviously is not true of everybody, but I think there's a fair amount of truth to it, that when middle class people fall out of the middle class, they take great care to hide it as best they can. So they tried to keep up appearances in town, both in public streets and individual property. I follow in the five year chronology that my book tells three main families in which somebody had been an auto worker and lost the jobs. And in one of the families, there were twin girls who were high school seniors when I met them. And I remember them telling me that they were buying their clothes at Goodwill, but they really hunted through the clothes until they could find designer jeans used but so that their classmates couldn't tell that they were buying used clothes now, let alone the fact that a lot of their classmates, moms and dads, had lost work as well. But, you know, people were really trying to keep up the surface appearances.
- [30:01]
B
So it sounds like things are turning around in some ways, but it might take longer to recover in others. So as we're looking forward to 2020, we know that Wisconsin is going to be really fascinating, especially since in 2016, they just barely voted for Trump, and then in 2018, just barely elected a Democratic governor, Tony Evers. His margin of victory was only 29,000 votes, and that's out of 2.6 million people who voted. So Wisconsin in the past two elections has been a purple state that has tipped over on either side of the aisle, just barely.
- [30:36]
A
I also asked Wendy Scattergood about what she expects of the future of Wisconsin's politics in the next couple of years. What are some political trends you'll be following in Wisconsin between now and just say, the 2020 elections?
- [30:48]
F
So I think the first thing, we already have elections coming up again.
- [30:52]
A
Oh, really?
- [30:53]
F
Yeah. So we have our Supreme Court, some of the rotating seats. They don't all come up at the same time, as well as our local elections that happen in the so this is called off off years, and that is in the odd years. So we've got in February already, we have primaries for these coming up. And then in April, we actually elections for these local, some of these local offices, as well as one of the Supreme Court seats. So for me in particular, in looking at the Supreme Court, really important there because of course, they're going to be looking at doing judicial interpretation as well as judicial review of some of these state statutes that will get passed in this next session. And so right now it's still there's three liberals and four conservatives on the court. So it's pretty evenly divided with a slight edge for conservatives at this point. So the person who is retiring, Shirley Abraham, is one of the liberals. And that's the 2019 election. So it'll be an open primary. It's a nonpartisan, so it's whoever runs, runs. And then the top two go into the general election in April. So I think for reasons of looking at that as a bellwether, but also because it could change the makeup of the court, I think is a really important thing to be watching there.
- [32:26]
A
And I'd just like to quickly revisit an earlier point you made, because it is a specific question about whether or not Wisconsin is a purple state. I think you said that it was is it going to stay that way or is it sort of pushing a bit more blue, or will it go back to red. What would you say?
- [32:41]
F
I think one thing we've seen is a very long trend of being fairly equal. So if you define sort of purple state being very equal between Democrats and Republicans, I really don't see that changing. And I think that's why turnout for us is such a big issue is I think that's going to continue. One of the interesting things about potential changes is those rural counties are losing population. They're getting older, they're white, and the younger people are moving away. So I think that doesn't bode well for these latest trends for the Republicans. Also, the wow counties, those counties that are right around Wisconsin have been reliably Republican and very, very, very deep red, as we say, but they've actually lost a little bit of their redness. And when I looked at the suburban mom vote, because that was one of the things that we had talked about as being kind of a big factor in the 2018 election, find them pretty heavily favoring Tony Evers and education being their number one issue there. So I think that was a change and that will be interesting to see where those suburban moms go in their vote going into the future.
- [33:57]
B
And that is it for this episode of the Ballpark. Thank you to Amy Goldstein, Wendy Scattergood and Brianna Buck, the student from the beginning of the episode. This episode of the Ballpark was produced by Mikayla Herman with contributions from Sarah Scafidi, Denise Barron, that's me, and Chris Gilson and with help from the LSE's annual fund. Our theme tune is by Ranger and the Rearrangers, a Seattle based gypsy jazz band. You can find them@rangerswings.com we still love them and we'd love to hear from you. Let us let us know what you think about the show by emailing us@uscenter sc.ac.uk or send us a tweet. Scus. You can catch up on all of our other ad free episodes of the Ballpark by searching for us in your search engine of choice. And tell your friends the content and opinions expressed in this podcast not reflect those of the US center or the London School of Economics. For our next episode in the State of the State series, we're taking a look at New Jersey. Chris is very happy.
- [35:06]
A
I am very happy. I love the Garden State. It's my favorite state.
- [35:10]
B
Thank you for listening.
- [35:22]
E
Sam.