Rust belt sends warning signal to Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s road to the White House went through Kenosha, Wisconsin.

In 2016 Mr Trump won Kenosha county by a margin of only 238 votes, or 0.3 per cent, mirroring his success across the rust belt, which made up for his loss of once reliably Republican states elsewhere.

Now this county on the shores of Lake Michigan has flipped from Republican to Democrat, making clear that Mr Trump cannot be sure of the continued support of the electoral coalition that took him to the presidency.

“These states can swing either way,” said Barry Burden, political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Centre, referring to the industrial midwest. “It’s not all over for Trump, but these states need constant tending.”

Indeed, Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s two-term Republican governor, was defeated in Tuesday’s midterm elections — an alarm signal for Mr Trump, who edged out Hillary Clinton by less than 30,000 votes in the state in the 2016 presidential contest.

That surprise victory, together with Mr Trump’s success in the other rust belt states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, provided him with a route to the presidency that few had predicted.

But Mr Burden said that it was far from guaranteed that Mr Trump would repeat his success in the industrial midwest in 2020: “He did win the state narrowly in 2016 but against an unpopular candidate from the other side who didn’t give a lot of attention to the state. Wisconsin will be an ongoing challenge for Trump”.

The returns in Kenosha — one of the few Wisconsin counties to change from Republican to Democrat this week — indicates a shift in mood but also the precarious margins in the region’s contests.

Tony Evers, the Democratic contender for Wisconsin governor, won 50.7 per cent of the vote in the county on Tuesday, against 46.3 per cent for Mr Walker, the incumbent. In 2014, it was Mr Walker who just topped 50 per cent in the county, with 50.3 per cent against 48.5 per cent for his Democratic challenger.

But in Kenosha, residents said it was local issues, more than national ones, that changed their minds.

“It’s the roads,” said Ardella Boucher, 83, a retired small businesswoman standing outside her neatly tended bungalow on a road of cracked concrete pockmarked with tarmac patches in Kenosha.

“Oh and the casino,” she hastily added, referring to the fact that Mr Walker turned down a project to turn a local dog racing track into a casino. And after eight years of Mr Walker in the governor’s mansion, “maybe people were just a little bit tired of him”.

Ms Boucher’s spouse of 63 years, Gilbert Boucher, 81, was tinkering in the detached garage of their home, but stopped to express his outrage at the fact that Mr Walker denied the economically depressed area the jobs that would have come with the casino project. “It almost makes me hate him,” he said.

Just across the lake, in Michigan, potholes were electorally significant too: the campaign slogan of Gretchen Whitmer, the Democrat who won the race for governor of the state on Tuesday, was “fix the damn roads”.

“The biggest issues in the race were roads and infrastructure, pocketbook issues,” said Susan Demas, a Democratic campaign strategist and expert on Michigan politics.

“But even so, you have to consider what happened in Michigan a repudiation of Trump,” she added, noting that the president won Michigan by only about 10,000 votes in 2016, while Ms Whitmer won by “a margin of 350,000 votes and counting”.

“Michigan saw a lot more of a blue [Democratic] wave than a lot of the country,” Ms Demas said. “But we are still a long way from 2020.”

The Midwest is far from monolithic. In Michigan and Kansas, an anti-Trump tide seemed to be a primary factor carrying Democrats into the governor’s mansions. But in Missouri and Indiana, the opposite happened: Mr Trump helped his party pick up seats in the Senate by campaigning personally for Republican candidates. And in Ohio, Republicans held on to an important governorship in a state that will be vital for Republicans to keep in the next presidential poll, as it was in the last one.

“The Midwest is diverse, and it wasn’t a completely even result,” Ms Demas said. “Anybody who thinks that 2020 was shored up in the Midwest on November 6 — either for the Democrats or the Republicans — is probably in for a very painful few years.”