Has "Trump Country" in Wisconsin turned around as 2020 approaches? Or declining like it was in 2016?

A recent article from Reuters referenced the recently released GDP by county information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and it reiterates a theory of mine about the 2016 election. Namely, that an economic slowdown that especially hit rural and blue collar areas of the country (particularly in the Midwest) may help explain Trump’s stronger showing in those communities.

For the U.S. economy as a whole, 2016 was an off year. Economic growth slowed to a tepid 1.6% annual rate, which was a five-year low and a sharp drop from the 2.9% pace of 2015.

The pain, however, was not equally spread. A global crash in oil prices had hit the country’s energy producers hard, and led to declines in business investment and manufacturing felt most acutely where Trump’s populist message was gaining traction.

Across the roughly 2,600 counties that he won in the election, growth barely breached 1% in 2016, low even by the standards of the sluggish recovery from the 2007-2009 recession. In some 1,200 of those counties, GDP actually fell by close to 4% in 2016.

By contrast, the overall growth rate of the roughly 500 counties carried by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was 1.8%, faster than the nation as a whole. Only about a third of the counties she won saw a decline in economic activity, and for those it was a shallow dip.

Yes, I know some of the appeal of the guy in “Trump country” may be because he’s racist and sticks it to “those people” in the big cities that are doing better. But the "2016 economic slowdown" theory also goes along with post-election stories that indicated some blue-collar Wisconsinites chose to roll the dice with an unknown quantity who hadn’t served in government because (in their minds) it offered a chance of getting better that currently didn’t exist.

So, how did that gamble turn out? Reuters tries to indicate that things are better in the areas Trump won in than in 2016, despite the fact that they lag the places that voted for Clinton.

Even if recent developments weighed on the economy in counties supportive of Trump, the first two years of his presidency saw many of them regain lost momentum.

The number of counties with negative GDP growth has fallen by nearly half over that time.

The counties won by Clinton have grown faster overall, and as a whole reached Trump’s 3% GDP growth target in 2018. The counties that voted for Trump in 2016, by contrast, grew by around 2.7% last year.

Still, the economic improvement in counties won by Trump has been steady and touched parts of the swing states of Ohio and Wisconsin that were won by former President Barack Obama in 2012 but voted for Trump four years later. Both those states were in Trump’s column in 2016.

That leads me to try out an experiment – let’s look at the counties that flipped from Obama to Trump.

As you can see, the hypothesis of the Reuters article held true through 2018 – the 22 counties that flipped from Obama to Trump had growth that was below both the US and the rest of the state in 2016, but grew faster than the rest of the state in both 2017 and 2018 (although still below the US rate of growth).

But the 2018 elections also featured a lot of these Obama-Trump counties in Wisconsin flipping back to support Democrat Tony Evers over then-Governor Scott Walker, especially in SW Wisconsin. So let’s look at those 7 counties and see if there are any differences between those groups.

Both of these sets of counties were struggling in 2016, but the Evers-voting group did better in 2017 than 2018, while the Walker-voting counties did better last year vs the year before. Might be telling, or just a coincidence.

We’ll check back as county GDP comes in over the next few months. But for now, we know that Wisconsin’s GDP slowed down in the first 2 quarters of 2019, clocking in at a lame 1.1% in both Q1 and Q2, with the manufacturing and agricultural declines sinking in the longer the year went on.

So if it is just “the economy, stupid” in the swingy parts of Wisconsin, does the 2019 slowdown mean Trump is in bigger trouble than his already-low approval ratings would indicate, meaning that those 22 counties become more likely to be won by the Democratic presidential candidate (as the out/change candidate) over incumbent Trump? Much like how the 2016 economic slowdown helped Trump against Hillary Clinton, who was seen as a continuance of the Obama status quo?

Guess we’ll see as 2020 develops, eh?