Will Trump's Wisconsin be Too Big to Rig?

Topic: 2024 Election Forecast

President Trump has been fond of saying he expects the 2024 election to be “too big to rig.”

What does that mean?  Technically, it means that President Trump will have a total of votes equal to half the number of a state’s registered voters, or more.  In practice, it means he will get so many damn votes that the result is irreversible.

For example: President Trump will tally more than 200,000 votes in Wyoming this year, with fewer than 300,000 registered voters.  Wyoming is too big to rig.

Michigan, however, is not too big to rig with more than 8 million registrations and no presidential candidate in state history ever receiving more than 3 million votes in any election there.  That doesn’t mean President Trump won’t carry the Great Lakes State, but Automatic Voter Registration has made a disaster of the state’s election infrastructure and places it as the most difficult of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and itself for President Trump to carry this fall.

Since Pennsylvania has only recently begun automatically registering voters, I am hopeful it hasn’t had enough time to really get rolling and will leave a window of opportunity for Trump to carry the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes; however, the Badger State, Wisconsin, does not operate Automatic Voter Registration, and as such, has a much smaller voter pool that may wind up making the state too big to rig, and the easiest of the “big three” to carry.

Is Wisconsin Too Big to Rig?

The map above captures the disposition of each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties:

Crimson – 53 counties – characterized by almost all declining Democrat vote totals beginning in 2012, continuing through 2016, and ticking up slightly in 2020 through a combination of likely ballot stuffing and returners from the large third-party column in 2016.  I believe Biden’s vote tally in 2020 will be Harris’s cap in 2024 due to Wisconsin’s voter registration stagnation and the heavy Trump pull and begin my assessment there.  My gains for Trump typically match the gains in margin seen from 2012 through 2020 and take population and voter registration into consideration using past data.

Republican – 5 counties – characterized by withdrawal from Trump in Waukesha and Ozaukee Counties and variance from Crimson trenders in Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago Counties in the northeast.

Competitive – 11 counties – all losses for Trump in 2020, but all with an inherent Trump or working-class trend spotted in 2016 and evident for the 2024 cycle.

Democrat – 3 counties - Trump vote shares under 30%.  Milwaukee and Dane Counties are crucial for Harris or any statewide Democrat to win the state given the disposition of the other 69 counties.

The Exercise

·      Given that Wisconsin does not register voters automatically, the registration numbers in most counties are down from where they were at Election time in 2020.  Keep in mind that Wisconsin allows same day voter registration, so none of these numbers can be counted on to be 100% precise come November 5; I measured the growth from August to November 2020 in the voter roll for each county and applied it to where each county sits today to come up with an estimate for how many registered voters will appear on the rolls in November 2024.