Wisconsin was front and center in the world of politics for the majority of this year.
WPR Capitol Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson joined “Morning Edition” host Alex Crowe to help us sum up the political whirlwind of 2024.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Alex Crowe: President-elect Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin, where President Joe Biden won in 2020. Can you help us break down where we saw some of these shifts that helped Trump get the state?
Shawn Johnson: So when it comes to Trump’s numbers, I wouldn’t say that you would look at it there were major shifts where a certain pocket of the state that hadn’t supported him before did, or vice versa.
I think what happened is that he just outperformed what he had done in the past. It was still the same Trump model, where he had huge turnout in rural counties. He just ratcheted that up.
Kamala Harris actually got better numbers than Joe Biden did in 46 counties. It’s just that Trump did better than his 2020 numbers in all 72 counties. He outperformed his own 2020 numbers by more than 87,000 votes, and that was enough to carry him over the finish line.