Advoken's Blog

Consider Wisconsin’s Adams County, a largely rural county of some 20,000 residents.  Voters there in 2012 favored the reelection of Democratic President Barack Obama by 54%, a surprising total given that the county (over 96% white) voted to re-elect a black man.

Now, come to 2020 Presidential election; despite carrying Wisconsin, Democrat Joe Biden got only 36.6% of the vote in Adams County – a drop of nearly 18%. 

That’s a surprising shift in political attitudes, but the results Adams County voters were replicated in county after county in Wisconsin in 2020.  How are we to understand such changes?  Why have voters in rural counties and small-town Wisconsin moved from favoring an articulate, intelligent man like Democrat Obama to supporting a know-nothing creature like Donald Trump?

Going back to 2008, we find that President Obama carried 59 of Wisconsin’s 72 Counties, winning over Republican John McCain by nearly 14 percentage points.  And this was in a state that had an African-American population of 6.7%[i]  When the results of that election were finalized, it was easy to believe that finally the nation had progressed so that race and color were no longer an issue to the American voter. 

Remember the joy and enthusiasm many of us felt when Barack Obama and Michelle mounted the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night to claim victory.  It truly was an overwhelming win, with Obama winning overall by 9.5 million votes. 

Our joy, sadly, was soon to turn.  The realization is that this nation – and Wisconsin, in particular – is tragically still a racist society, and that racism is clouding the minds of far too many of our citizens.  There have been lots of explanations as to why 58 of Wisconsin counties, nearly all rural or small town-oriented, voted for Trump in 2016.  Some has been attributed to the popularity of the right-wing media such as Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Newsmax that many have chosen as their sole source of news information.  Others call attention to the overwhelming numbers of lies perpetrated by Trump and his followers, perhaps proving the theory that if you say a lie often enough it soon becomes accepted as fact.

This misinformation has so clouded the mind of citizens, mainly in rural and small-town America, that they blame their gripes and ills upon liberals, so-called elitists, city politicians, immigrants, the poor and unemployed, civil rights groups and labor unions.   To be sure, rural and small-town Wisconsinites have cause to feel they’re being crapped upon.  Too many jobs in those areas are poorly paid, the family farm can rarely survive in today’s corporate farm economy, small town stores went away with the rise of our Walmart-Amazon based shopping system, and other issues. 

Having been fed a pack of lies for the last five years, these hard-working Wisconsin citizens have come to believe that people on welfare (in their minds, black people) are feasting off their tax payments.  Nonetheless, far too many of our non-urban Wisconsinites find it easy to believe that the average person of color is a lazy, good-for-nothing sucking away at the public trough. 

Meanwhile, Democratic politicians champion – rightfully – a host of causes that would seem to reward only people of color.  Such policies include seeking to bring pay equity to workers, to reform the justice system, including the “defunding of the police,” to regulate discrimination in the workplace and in the public market, and on and on.  Indeed, the Democratic politician is seen as favoring “those people,” while turning his/her back on the hard-working white citizens who struggle to make a living on their farms or in low-paying small-town jobs.

If you look closely at many of the lies and claims being championed in the last five years by Donald Trump, his followers and his puppets at Fox News et al, you can see the ugly snake of racism slithering along underneath. 

This nation with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 appeared to have turned the corner and had begun to repair our racial divides.  That progress all ended with the election of Donald Trump eight years later, and racism is flourishing once again.  Shame, shame, shame, Trump!

We find hope in the fact that most Americans – including huge numbers of rural and small-town Wisconsinites – are of good faith and are working to reverse this trend and revive the progress toward a color-blind society.  Ken Germanson, Jan. 11, 2022.

[i] U.S. Census Quick Facts. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WI