Almanac of American Politics: Excerpts from chapters on Wisconsin and Gov. Tony Evers

For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.

Below are excerpts from the new chapters in the 2026 Almanac on the state of Wisconsin and Gov. Tony Evers, written by Louis Jacobson. Jacobson — a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, a senior columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and a contributor of political coverage for U.S. News & World Report — has written for eight editions of the Almanac since 2000. For the 2026 edition, he served as chief author.

Readers can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code WISPOL2026 at checkout. 

State of Wisconsin

Wisconsin has attracted the national political spotlight in recent years for its delicate partisan balance. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes, securing his path to the White House. Four years later, Joe Biden reversed the script, winning the state by just less than 21,000 votes. Then, in 2024, Trump won back Wisconsin by 29,000 votes, and the presidency along with it.

Wisconsin has long been one of America’s premier “laboratories of reform,” in Justice Louis Brandeis’ phrase—a state developing new public policies, debating them vigorously, or even tumultuously, observing whether they worked, and serving as an example for other states. North of the dominant westward paths of migration, the state was at first sparsely settled, first by New England Yankees and then by waves of immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. The German language is seldom heard now, but German place names and surnames are common in Wisconsin and, like the once plainly German beer and brat brands, now seem quintessentially American. On the rolling dairy land of rural Wisconsin and the orderly streets of urban Milwaukee, they built their own churches, kept their own language, and maintained old customs, from country weddings to Christmas trees to beer gardens—a source of friction in the era of temperance-minded America. About 46 percent of Wisconsin residents who reported an ethnicity in the 2020 Census cited German ancestry, more than any other state.

Wisconsin has been home to high-skill, precision instrument production at companies like Johnson Controls and Rockwell Automation. Harley-Davidson’s headquarters have been in Milwaukee since 1903. Madison, powered by the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus, has become a technology hub. Wisconsin is also the nation’s leading paper producer, though the inexorable shift from printed to digital media has hobbled the industry. Agriculture remains a significant sector, particularly dairy, for which Wisconsin ranks second to the nation in production after California. However, improved productivity and competition from foreign countries and giant agribusinesses, have had an impact, forcing generations-old family dairy farms to consolidate or close. Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, account for an estimated 80 percent of western Wisconsin’s dairy farmworkers, journalist Ruth Conniff has written.

Wisconsin is one of the two states that gave birth to the Republican Party in 1854 (the other is Michigan); Germans, then arriving in America in vast numbers (many of them left-leaning liberals and socialists who came after the failed revolutions of 1848), heavily favored the GOP. They opposed slavery and welcomed the free lands Republicans delivered in the Homestead Act, the educational opportunities provided by land grant colleges and the transportation routes that subsidized railroad builders constructed. Wisconsin has also had a long history of labor activism. Milwaukee saw bloodshed on May 5, 1886, when 1,500 tradespeople and Polish immigrants demanding an eight-hour workday marched on the Rolling Mills iron plant in the city’s Bay View neighborhood. Seven people, including a young boy, were killed.

Wisconsin’s reputation for innovative public policy was established during the Progressive Era that began around 1900 and which owes its development to an extraordinary governor, Robert La Follette Sr. La Follette had University of Wisconsin professors help develop the state worker’s compensation system and income tax. He became a national figure; he was one of the few senators to oppose World War I, a war against Germany that wasn’t nearly as popular with his German-American constituents as elsewhere. After he died in 1925, liberal Democrats carried on his tradition—progressive at home and isolationist abroad. Milwaukee developed its own distinct strain of governance on the left—the “sewer socialists” who occupied the Milwaukee mayor’s office for much of the time from 1910 to 1960. Touting spending on public health, infrastructure, and parks, these officials “were known for their integrity, their tactical ingenuity and their relentless organizing,” including “a volunteer army that could deliver the party’s literature, in any of 12 languages, to every house in Milwaukee within 48 hours,” Dan Kaufman wrote in the New York Times. Wisconsin became the first state to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees, in 1959.

Starting in the 1990s, Wisconsin became a laboratory for conservative reforms driven by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, who defeated a liberal Democrat in 1986 and won reelection three times. He cut taxes, sponsored a school choice program and passed the nation’s most sweeping welfare reforms, cutting caseloads by equipping recipients to work. After a Democratic interregnum, the 2010 election produced another experiment in conservative reform as Republican Scott Walker, a former Milwaukee County executive, won the governorship and set off a firestorm with proposals to limit public-sector unions’ power. The effort succeeded, and Walker turned back an energetic, labor-driven effort to recall him in 2012 before winning reelection in 2014.

Wisconsin’s population has grown, but at a modest rate, rising by an estimated 4.8 percent since 2010; both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County have shrunk since 2010 (though visitors were impressed with the efficiency of the 2024 Republican convention and with the city itself). The surrounding suburban counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, known as the “WOW” counties, have all grown between 5 and 8 percent during the same period. The state’s fastest growth has occurred in Dane County (Madison), which has expanded by 18 percent since 2010, pushing population gains to rural areas to the south and northeast. Other growth areas have included Outagamie County (Appleton) and Eau Claire County (Eau Claire), both of which have expanded by 9 percent since 2010, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of St. Croix County, which has grown by almost 15 percent. The state remains 80 percent white, with a small, if expanding, foreign-born population. Overall, Wisconsin is 7 percent Black, 8 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian. But the state has significant racial disparities: In Milwaukee, Black households are half as likely to own homes as white households, and the gaps are wider in Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Racial tensions in Kenosha drew national attention in 2020, when police shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back, paralyzing him. Daytime protests spiraled into clashes and arson at night, and Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager from Illinois aligned with right-wing militia members, was arrested for shooting three people, killing two of them. A jury found him not guilty after he testified that he had acted in self-defense.

The state’s historical patterns for voting trace back to ethnic differences. Eastern Wisconsin outside of Milwaukee is more German, and thus Republican; western Wisconsin is more Scandinavian, making it more Democratic. But these leanings have been in flux in recent elections. The Fox River Valley, including the “BOW” counties of Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago, have historically been Republican turf, though the midsized industrial cities they contain (Green Bay, Appleton, and Oshkosh, respectively) have become a bit bluer recently. Western Wisconsin—areas along the Mississippi River, the small inland cities such as Wausau and Eau Claire and the counties along Lake Superior—has historically been more Democratic. But a portion of southwest Wisconsin known as the Driftless Area (for its geology) “boasts the nation’s greatest concentration of Obama-Trump counties—places that voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016,” Craig Gilbert, a former political journalist now at Marquette Law School, wrote. Many of those counties backed Democrat Tony Evers for governor in 2018, then flipped back to Trump in 2020 and 2024.

“Demographically speaking, you would expect this to be a red state, not an almost perfectly purple one,” Gilbert wrote after the 2024 election. “Why? Because it’s overwhelmingly white, heavily blue-collar and disproportionately rural.” Although such voters have become more Republican, “they are still considerably less Republican than they are nationally.” All but a few of Wisconsin’s counties are “bluer” than their demographics would suggest, Gilbert wrote.

Wisconsin’s most heavily Democratic region by far is around Madison. It has become ever more important for the party’s electoral math: Dane County is both growing in population and becoming more Democratic. Other pockets of historical Democratic strength include a belt of college towns—La Crosse and Eau Claire, each with University of Wisconsin campuses, and Rock County (Janesville), the home of Beloit College. Meanwhile, the historically solid Republican support in the “WOW” counties and suburban Milwaukee County has sagged; Wauwatosa, a city in Milwaukee County, backed hometown politician Walker in 2014 by five points, but eight years later, Republican gubernatorial nominee Tim Michels lost it by 40. With statewide races in Wisconsin often decided narrowly, swing voters can be decisive; Wisconsin has elected and reelected both conservative Republican Ron Johnson and liberal Democrat Tammy Baldwin to the Senate.

Heading into the 2016 presidential election, some people considered Wisconsin one of the Democrats’ “blue wall” states—a supposed bulwark against Republicans in the Electoral College, because the state had not voted Republican for president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide. But 23 of the state’s 72 counties flipped in 2016, all from blue to red; a state Obama had won by seven points in 2012 voted for Trump by less than a point. 

The state remained swingy during Trump’s first term. Walker lost a tough battle for a third term to Evers in 2018. In an April 2019 judicial election, Wisconsin voters swung back to the right, but one year later, a liberal justice won a surprisingly strong victory. In 2020, both presidential campaigns focused intently on Wisconsin; Biden won narrowly, by about six-tenths of a percentage point, but large swaths of nonmetropolitan Wisconsin posted results that showed their moves toward the GOP were long-lasting. In April 2021, the candidate Democrats favored won Wisconsin’s nominally nonpartisan race for superintendent of public instruction with 58 percent. The 2022 elections produced slightly Democratic-leaning results, possibly because of concerns among Democrats that a Republican governor, combined with the gerrymandered GOP legislature, would enshrine an 1849 ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape and incest; Evers won by just more than 90,000 votes. But in that same election, Johnson won a third Senate term by his smallest margin yet—less than 27,000 votes—after faring a few points better than Michels in the WOW and BOW counties and in rural areas, and winning two Driftless counties that Evers won that year. In 2023, a Democratic-aligned candidate easily prevailed in a closely watched state Supreme Court race, flipping the court’s ideological lean. In a crucial redistricting case, the justices overturned the GOP-drawn lines for the Legislature (though not for the U.S. House).

In 2024, Trump won Wisconsin. Kamala Harris fared better than she did in the other six battleground states, and she made modest gains in the WOW counties. But Trump gained in Milwaukee and did “just a little bit better across the board in 2024 than he did in 2020,” Sabato’s Crystal Ball wrote. The GOP also maintained its 6-2 edge in the House delegation. But Democrats cheered Baldwin’s reelection; she ran about half a point ahead of Harris as the Republican nominee, Eric Hovde, ran about a point behind Trump. The new legislative maps also enabled Democrats to narrow both chambers to single-digit margins, though the GOP retained its majorities, making further partisan combat with Evers likely.

Gov. Tony Evers

Wisconsin’s Tony Evers, low-key educator and administrator, ousted Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018, then spent much of the next six years at loggerheads with the Republican-held Legislature. Running for reelection in 2022, Evers emphasized the need to keep GOP legislators in check on such issues as abortion; his call resonated and Evers won a second term by an expanded, but still modest, margin.

Evers (it rhymes with “weavers”) was born in Plymouth and met his wife, Kathy, there in kindergarten. His father practiced medicine at Rocky Knoll, a state tuberculosis sanitarium that also treated patients with silicosis, a disease often contracted by inhaling factory dust. His father would often testify on his patients’ behalf. “It was about social justice,” Evers told the New Yorker magazine. Evers earned a bachelor’s, a master’s and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began his career in education as a science teacher in Baraboo, later becoming a principal in Tomah and running school districts in Oakfield and Verona. Eventually, Evers became deputy state superintendent of public instruction; meanwhile, he fought and beat esophageal cancer. In 2009 Evers was elected state superintendent, a nominally nonpartisan post, and was easily reelected in 2013 and 2017. After he won his third term, Evers began considering a run for governor.

Walker had spent two terms executing a muscular conservative agenda, making him both a political celebrity and a target. He notched a 53%-46% victory in a 2012 recall, becoming the first governor anywhere to survive such a vote, then won a second term in 2014. By 2018, however, Democrats were energized against President Donald Trump, and Walker’s bid for a third term became a titanic battle in a politically engaged, narrowly divided state. The Democratic primary field was the largest in state history and Evers wasn’t a lock to prevail. But he portrayed himself as a steady pragmatist, and he won 42 percent and the nomination.

A Madison-based newspaper, the Capital Times, called the general election “bland vs. bland.” But Walker and Evers differed sharply on policy. Walker portrayed himself as the “education governor” based on his efforts to expand school choice, but Evers painted the incumbent’s record on school funding as a negative. A major issue in the contest was a deal Walker had negotiated in 2017, with Trump’s backing, to subsidize the building of a factory complex in Mount Pleasant for Foxconn Technology Group, the Taiwan-based manufacturing partner for such tech giants as Apple. As time went on—and as Foxconn failed to deliver its promised jobs—the state’s voters became less enamored with the $4.5 billion in tax incentives that Walker had advocated. The race’s winner was in doubt until late absentee returns from Milwaukee County sealed the contest for Evers, 49.5%-48.4%, a margin of about 29,000 votes. The skirmishing didn’t end on Election Day: To the victorious Democrats’ outrage, Republicans in a lame-duck session sought to tie Evers’ hands by stripping some powers from the executive and giving them to the Legislature.

In 2019, the GOP-controlled Legislature blocked Evers’ proposed expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and continued to do so for the next six years. The GOP also kept Evers from reversing part or all of Walker’s restrictions on labor unions, and they steamrolled his efforts to tighten gun laws, taking just one minute to dispense with a special session the governor had called to address the issue. Evers wasn’t shy about vetoing the Legislature’s priorities. A few notable bills did make it into law with bipartisan support, including changes to drug prescribing rules, a measure on hemp regulation and an expansion of student loan forgiveness for minority teachers.

In 2020, three sometimes overlapping issues dominated the year: the coronavirus, race and elections. Evers repeatedly clashed with the Legislature over stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, and at some points, the state Supreme Court, then in Republican hands, overruled him. One heated battle occurred in April, during the early weeks of the pandemic, as the state was preparing to hold a primary election. After some waffling about whether to hold the election as planned, Evers called the Legislature into special session, seeking to delay the election and conduct it by mail, a course some other states had taken by then. But legislators rebuffed him. Eventually, the court blocked Evers’ effort to institute the delay by executive order. On Election Day, voters complained of long lines at the polls. But the Republicans’ victory on the rules may have been Pyrrhic; the battle seemed to energize Democrats, enabling them to flip a Supreme Court seat that was the ballot’s most important contest.

In August 2020, when police shot a Black Kenosha resident and protests turned violent, Evers called in the National Guard, but critics deemed his leadership ineffectual. Evers again called the Legislature into special session, this time to address policing and criminal justice, and again GOP leaders gaveled it in and out almost instantaneously. On the right, the events in Kenosha, and Evers’ policies on the coronavirus, sharpened calls for a recall election, but the effort fizzled.

In the 2021-22 legislative session, Evers vetoed a record 126 bills, exceeding the previous record of 90 set nearly a century earlier. He vetoed measures that would have shielded gun manufacturers from lawsuits, rejected any federal attempt to ban assault weapons, cut unemployment benefits by up to 12 weeks, expanded private-school vouchers to households of any income level, and made it harder to vote absentee. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an 1849 state law banning abortion without exceptions for rape and incest poised to take effect. Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to stop the law, and Evers called two special sessions to repeal the law directly or through a referendum. In both cases, Republicans thwarted those efforts. (In November 2024, the state Supreme Court, by then with a Democratic majority, heard oral arguments on the case.)

Evers’ support for abortion rights likely helped him win a second term. In the GOP primary, voters nominated construction executive Tim Michels, who, with Trump’s backing Trump and the ability to self-fund his campaign, defeated former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and state Rep. Tim Ramthun. Initially, Michels supported the 1849 law before softening to accept carve-outs for rape and incest. Former President Barack Obama joked at a rally for Evers that the governor’s “got more of a Clark Kent vibe than a Superman vibe,” but voters seemed to prefer that to unified Republican control. Evers won, 51.2%-47.8%, a margin of about 90,000 votes, or three times larger than his 2018 victory. In exit polls, more voters chose abortion as their top issue than any issue save the economy, and more than 4 in 5 abortion-focused voters chose Evers.

In April 2023, Evers got a big boost when a Democratic-aligned candidate won a Supreme Court seat, flipping the court in his direction. Among the most important decisions was one to overturn the heavily Republican-leaning legislative maps; Evers signed a new map approved by GOP legislators, even though it was not as tilted towards the Democrats as a map drawn by the justices might have been. (In 2024, the new map produced gains for Democrats in both chambers, though the GOP retained single-digit seat majorities.) Meanwhile, Evers and the Legislature clashed over a wide variety of issues; he vetoed measures to cut taxes, ease school licensing requirements, set a goal for the statewide wolf population and bar transgender students from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. (The sports veto became moot after Trump issued an executive order in 2025 and the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association moved to follow Trump’s guidance.) Evers and legislators did agree on a few measures, including support for Holocaust education, a requirement to teach Asian American and Hmong history and an increase in the number of mental health crisis centers. In the August primary election, voters rejected two GOP-backed ballot measures that would have limited gubernatorial spending power.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Evers promised to challenge such policies as mass deportation. “Everybody knows that, in Wisconsin, undocumented folks are a really important part of our economy, whether it’s dairy, whether it’s agriculture,” Evers told reporters. Evers also warned legislative Republicans that he wouldn’t sign a state budget if it included a provision to force state employees back to the office. Evers is eligible to run for a third term in 2026 but has not said whether he will.