Across America, suburbs are tilting for Biden. Except Milwaukee’s.
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Version 0 of 1. CEDARBURG, Wis. — As many suburban Americans reject President Trump, threatening his re-election like no other bloc of voters, the suburbs outside Milwaukee, among the most racially segregated in the country, remain a bulwark of support. The well-educated, affluent counties north and west of the city have for decades delivered Republican landslides, defying a Democratic shift in suburbia in other Northern states. And voters in these neighborhoods seem to be cleaving to the president even more tightly as he has stoked fears of “anarchists” and “looters” imperiling the suburbs, including after the unrest in nearby Kenosha. Their enduring support is one reason Wisconsin offers Mr. Trump a still-open path to re-election, even as his opportunities in other battlegrounds have dwindled. For at least two decades, demographic changes in most American suburbs — an influx of nonwhite, well-educated and younger voters moving out of cities or immigrating from abroad — have pushed former Republican strongholds to become Democratic-trending regions. In Pennsylvania, the president is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. by double digits in the vote-rich suburbs of Philadelphia. In Michigan, the decisive swing to Democrats by suburbanites in Oakland County, outside Detroit, gives Mr. Biden a statewide edge. In Arizona, the Phoenix suburbs helped Democrats win a Senate seat in 2018 and are the knife edge on which the state is balanced. But in the region outside Milwaukee, including both inner suburbs and exurbs, Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden by 48 percent to 38 percent in a recent Marquette Law School Poll. “The WOW counties are key,” said Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, using the nickname for the three Milwaukee suburban counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. |