Former Wisconsin presidential candidate Donald Trump is losing the support of rural males, a demographic that had heavily backed him.
19% of registered voters in Wisconsin, a crucial battleground state, are males from rural areas. But according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of polls from 2020 to 2024, Donald Trump is losing the support of this base. Marquette University Law School analyzes the polls using “net favorability,” a calculation that subtracts the percentage of registered voters who view a candidate negatively from the number who view them positively.
In Wisconsin, rural males favored him by +29 in 2020, but by 2024, just +2, a decline of 27 percentage points, held his support. Another important Trump constituency, white males without college degrees, dropped from +15 favorability to -5. Support for white males with college degrees has decreased from -5 to -28.
Additionally, the state’s Republican electorate is not as unanimously supportive of Trump as it previously was. The data aligns his decline in party support with a trend in Republican primaries, where Nikki Haley, a previous presidential candidate, garners between 10% and 20% of the vote. Trump’s favorability rating was +71 in 2020, but it fell to +51 in 2024—a 20-point decline.
In the Trump era, support for the Republican Party is declining in the once-GOP stronghold “WOW” counties, which are the suburban counties of Waukesha, Washington, and Ozaukee, that border the DNC stronghold of Milwaukee County. In these suburbs, support has fallen from +7 favorability to a neutral position since 2020.
Young voters, or those under 30, were the demographic from which Trump lost the greatest support in the state. In that group, his disfavor increased from -28 to -43.
Trump’s popularity among non-white voters may have grown in the last four years. Despite the general dislike of Trump, 84% of Wisconsin voters, who are white, hold a more positive opinion of him. His favorability rating was -43 in 2020, but it is currently -18 in 2024.
Given the likelihood of a tight presidential race in Wisconsin, even little adjustments can have a significant impact. Trump turned the state red by just over 27,000 votes in 2016. With just 20,000 votes, President Joe Biden was able to turn the state back to blue in 2020.
