Dane County leads an otherwise slow-growth state in adding people. We should ask why

On Thursday, the US Census Bureau released its population estimates for counties, and a familiar place headed the list for Wisconsin.

Though the rate of growth continued to slow, Dane County accounted for a quarter of Wisconsin’s population growth in 2018.

County-level population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau show the county added about 5,584 people, more than any other county in the state.

Dane County now has more than 540,000 people in it, but that’s still barely more than 9% of the state’s total population. So once again, here’s us crazy hippies in the Madison area punching above our weight in keeping this state afloat and growing.

A positive is that unlike other years in this decade, a majority of Wisconsin’s counties also added people – 56 out of 72 to be exact. It helped to slow the bleeding of people in small-town and especially Northern Wisconsin that has helped lead to the state’s stagnant economy and labor shortages.

Here is one-year county pop change. More Wisconsin counties are at least not declining over 2017-18 though percentage growth is quite small in much of the state. pic.twitter.com/BPxknJ6cxI

— Charles Franklin (@PollsAndVotes) April 18, 2019

But (you can also see) a big negative in the Census report, as Milwaukee County lost population, putting a lid on what would otherwise have been decent statewide growth for 2018. And many of the population gains we did have were still largely contained to 6 larger counties.

Population change, Wisconsin counties 2017-2018
Dane County +5,584 (+1.0%)
Waukesha Co. +2,002 (+0.5%)
Brown County +1,515 (+0.6%)
Outagamie Co. +1,301 (+0.7%)
St. Croix County +1,087 (+1.2%)
Eau Claire Co. +860 (+0.8%)
Milwaukee Co. -2,387 (-0.3%)
65 REMAINING COUNTIES +11,553 (+0.4%)

But outside of Milwaukee County, the population growth across the state was better than it had been in 2018. So what caused the increases? Some of it has to do with more people moving to Wisconsin and calling it home.

New census data out today show positive signs for Wisconsin. After years of net out-migration from the state, Wisconsin's migration patterns have turned positive over the past two years: +4,165 in 2017 and +7,040 in 2018. #Wisconsin #migration @WisCounties

— Dale Knapp (@Knapp_D13) April 18, 2019

That’s half correct. What’s not mentioned is that the increase in “migration” is due to people who are new to the country (aka “immigrants”) as opposed to domestic migration. We have slowed the sizable exodus that we had in the middle of the 2010s, and neared 0 for that category last year, but the number is still negative.

And while the amount of deaths dropped a bit last year, Wisconsin’s birth rate is at multi-decade lows, so our natural increase was only 14,656.

Moving out to the last 8 years, the Wisconsin State Journal also produced this nice graphic so you could look at your part of the state and see how it’s doing since the Age of Fitzwalkerstan dawned after the 2010 elections.

The same top 6 counties that had the largest increases in people in 2018 have also had the largest increases in population since the 2010s began, with the rest of the state being much more stagnant. Half of the total increase for the other 65 counties in Wisconsin happened last year, and only 38 of the state’s 72 counties have had any population growth at all since 2010.

On the other side, last year’s losses in Milwaukee County erased almost all of the small gains it had eked out from 2010-2017, and it’s also noteworthy that Dane County leads the way by an even wider amount in this time period.

Population change, Wisconsin counties 2010-2018
Dane County +54,297 (+11.1%)
Brown County +15,371 (+6.2%)
Waukesha Co. +13,134 (+3.4%)
Outagamie Co. +10,674 (+6.0%)
Eau Claire Co. +5,655 (+5.7%)
St. Croix County +5,347 (+6.3%)
Milwaukee Co. +465
65 REMAINING COUNTIES +21,639 (+0.7%)

You can see the contrast between the southern and western parts of the state with the northern and central parts of the state, and especially how Dane County's growth dwarfs everyone else. And the stagnancy of the state's largest metro area comes in a time when other mid-size metros are adding sizable amounts of people - for example, the Twin Cities metro area added 36,500 people in 2018 ALONE, the Indianapolis metro added nearly 22,000, and even the Des Moines area added 10 times as many people as the Milwaukee metro in 2018.

But this state is held hostage by representatives of these dying areas of lower population, and pro-GOP oligarchs that make up the Milwaukee "business community." So I will ask yet again- “Why do we follow the losing strategies of the MMAC and their "big fish, small pond" allies at WisGOP and ignore what’s working in Madison in getting the bodies that Wisconsin's economy needs?”