How dire is the state of the Democratic Party right now?
Let’s take Wisconsin, the nation’s closest state, as a case in point.
Democrats today are uncompetitive across vast swaths of rural and blue-collar Wisconsin. Over the past 14 years, a nearly 5-point statewide advantage in party identification has turned into a 4-point disadvantage. About 60% of voters here view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Democrats hold just two of the state’s eight U.S. House seats. And they haven’t held either chamber of the Wisconsin Legislature in 15 years.
When it comes to the party’s capacity to win elections, that’s pretty grim.
It would be even grimmer if it weren’t for the fact that Republicans have such big problems of their own.
In fact, their short-term election prospects in Wisconsin are probably worse because midterms usually don’t go well for the president’s party.
Longer-term, Republicans have been losing ground with suburban voters in Wisconsin for years. They have all but lost the capacity to win big spring elections, costing conservatives control of the state’s highest court for years to come.
There’s a good chance the GOP’s decade and half of total legislative control will end next year. And there’s a plausible chance that Republicans and conservatives could lose all three branches of state government by next fall — something that has no recent precedent.
It turns out that the uber-battleground of Wisconsin is a great window into the electoral deficiencies of both major parties.
I thought it would be a good moment, in the upheaval of Donald Trump’s presidency, to take stock of the election challenges facing each party in the place where Trump won his narrowest victory last fall. Trump has unified both parties in one sense: Republican voters overwhelmingly back him, and Democratic voters almost uniformly oppose him.
He has also fueled internal divisions in each party and exposed them both to huge political risks. Republicans face potential voter backlash against his governance. Democrats are twisted in knots over how to counter his policies, sweeping power grabs and vendettas.
More broadly, Trump has reinforced an ongoing realignment that has created deep electoral problems on each side. And these have become especially clear in Wisconsin in the last few years, as the two parties have gotten very good — or very bad — at winning particular types of elections.
This has a lot to do with how the Democratic and Republican coalitions have changed, with Democrats emerging as the party of the college-educated and metropolitan voter, and the Republicans emerging as the party of the rural and blue-collar voter.
Realignment hasn’t left one party significantly stronger than the other, but it has altered the playing field in different ways for different elective offices.
The Republicans’ Achilles’ heel
The new Achilles’ heel for the GOP is spring court elections, which have become highly partisan and politically consequential. Conservatives and their Republican allies are very bad right now at winning spring elections for the state Supreme Court, losing four of the past five, and losing those four by double digits — an exceptional margin in purple Wisconsin.
How did the right lose its edge in court campaigns? Contributing factors include poor candidates, poor fundraising, poor campaigns, and an election backlash against the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning a constitutional right to an abortion.
But the deeper problem for Republicans is that their new, more blue-collar coalition includes a lot of infrequent voters who don’t reliably participate in lower-turnout spring elections. College-educated voters turn out to vote more regularly, and they’ve been shifting in a Democratic direction.
Liberals gained a majority of the court in 2023. They are assured a majority until at least 2028, and their control of the court could last years longer unless these turnout patterns change.
The GOP’s problems have been compounded by the fact that most of the recent court elections have taken place during Trump’s two terms, which have mobilized angry Democratic voters. The resulting shift in the court has huge consequences for the parties, including the end of a Republican gerrymander that locked in lopsided GOP majorities in the Legislature.
The Democrats’ Achilles’ heel
Which brings us to the Achilles’ heel for Democrats.
Realignment has left them fundamentally disadvantaged in district-based elections for the U.S. House and the state Legislature. That’s because Democratic voters are more geographically concentrated in cities and populous suburbs, meaning their voting power is typically confined to fewer districts.
From the 1960s through the 2000s, Democrats frequently held the majority of the state’s U.S. House seats. That’s a virtual impossibility today. The party’s decline among rural voters has left half the state’s eight congressional districts out of reach for them.
The clustering of Democratic voters in the state’s two biggest counties (Milwaukee and Dane) makes it very hard to draw a “50/50” congressional map. In today’s map, Democrats can plausibly win 4 of 8 seats, but only in very good Democratic years. It requires capturing seats in western and southeastern Wisconsin that lean marginally or modestly Republican.
At the legislative level, new maps have made Democrats much more competitive than they were in the 2010s, giving the party a chance to win both chambers. But even these maps still lean a little Republican. In a 50/50 election cycle, Republicans still have the upper hand.
Let’s turn to contests for president and governor, where the partisan playing field remains more level. But the landscape is shifting here, too.
At the presidential level, the Democrats’ decline with non-college voters has cost the party its longtime edge in mass-turnout elections. In 2012, the first year Marquette began polling in Wisconsin, Democrats had a more than four-point edge in party ID: 47.7% of voters statewide identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 43.1% identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party.
But now Republicans have the edge. In Marquette’s 2025 polling, 45.5% of Wisconsin voters say they are Republicans or Republican “leaners,” while 41.6% say they are Democrats or Democratic “leaners.” In other words, if every registered voter turned out, the electorate would tilt toward the GOP.
Since presidential cycles come closest to full turnout, that is where Republicans are now likely to do best, especially since their supporters include a lot of sporadic voters. After losing Wisconsin for president seven times in a row from 1988 to 2012, Republicans have won narrowly two of the past three contests.
Finally, midterm elections, when Wisconsin elects its governors, occupy a middle ground between presidential turnouts (best case for Republicans) and spring turnouts (best case for Democrats).
Democrats have won the last two contests for governor and may now enjoy a slight underlying edge in midterms because of their high-turnout base. Even though midterms have a history here and nationally of going against the president, Democrat Tony Evers bucked this trend in 2022 when he became the first person in the party of the White House to win a contest for governor in Wisconsin in more than 30 years.
So, is one party now in a worse position than the other to win elections here?
Once you look past the 2026 midterms, it’s hard to say. So far, the parties’ problems have been largely offsetting, producing 6 1/2 years of divided state government (a Republican Legislature and a Democratic governor); the leading political odd couple in the U.S. Senate (conservative Republican Johnson and liberal Tammy Baldwin), and alternating presidential outcomes (Democrats winning in 2012, Republicans in 2016, Democrats in 2020, Republicans in 2024).
These kinds of partisan swings and split outcomes aren’t new to Wisconsin. But what is new is the difficulty both sides have in achieving big victories.
The state’s voters are not only evenly divided, but they’re highly polarized, meaning close to half the electorate finds the other party unacceptable. This has left both parties with a much lower vote ceiling than in the past.
The past two elections for governor in Wisconsin were won with 49.5% and 51.1% of the vote. The last two elections for U.S. Senate were won with 50.4% and 49.3%. The last three elections for president were won with 47.2%, 49.4% and 49.6%. In five of these seven marquee elections, the victors failed to win half the popular vote. This pattern is unique in Wisconsin’s election history.
The other thing that’s new, as noted above, is the structural problem the two parties have in winning very specific kinds of elections.
And that’s one reason why elections these days feel more like a contest of weaknesses than a contest of strengths. Not only are the two parties unpopular in polling terms, but their struggle for power seems defined more by their deficiencies and limitations than by the breadth of their appeal.
Does this mean there is room for a competitive third party, as Elon Musk has proposed? Maybe, but there are reasons to be skeptical. The rules are stacked against third parties. And there is no large cohesive constituency for an alternative to both parties. In Wisconsin polling by the Marquette Law School, each major party gets negative ratings from voters overall. But the share of people who dislike BOTH parties is only 17%. Most people like one party and dislike the other.
Which brings us back to President Trump, who looms over any discussion of the two parties’ political challenges, especially in a state he won by the smallest margin in the country in 2024.
Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for the partisan realignment that has occurred over the last decade and a half in a state like Wisconsin, but he has amplified it.
And his final, combustible term in office has the potential to leave either side in political ruins.
He is central to the frustrations, paralysis and divisions that beset the Democratic Party, which continues to struggle with how to respond to this president. He also mobilizes Democratic voters like nothing else in their horror over his actions and rhetoric. In Marquette’s polling, 98% of Wisconsin Democrats disapprove of his presidency.
Trump, meanwhile, has the remade GOP in his image, with the unquestioning allegiance of Republicans in Congress and the overwhelming support of GOP voters; 93% of Wisconsin Republicans approve of his performance.
But Trump’s policy swings, his abandonment of traditional conservative values, and his cultivation of personal fealty have raised huge questions about what his party stands for and what it will look like after he leaves office.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gilbert: How Wisconsin exemplifies the weaknesses of both the Democratic and Republican parties
Reporting by Craig Gilbert / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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