Recent history shows Republicans will be big favorites to retain Mike Gallagher's seat

With Mike Gallagher’s announcement that he is retiring from Congress after this year, Republicans will be overwhelmingly favored to retain his northeastern Wisconsin congressional seat.

That is largely because the more rural parts of the district that stretch north and west of Green Bay have shifted distinctly rightward over the past decade.

In the last presidential race, the district’s voters favored Donald Trump by about 16 points.

Even in the 2022 race for governor, which Republicans lost statewide by 3.4 points, the 8^th congressional seat voted Republican by 13 points.

And in the 2022 vote for U.S. Senate, Republican incumbent Ron Johnson carried the district by 18 points.

These numbers underscore how much Wisconsin’s voting patterns have changed.

The 8^th District has for decades occupied the northeastern corner of the state, stretching from Green Bay and Appleton northward toward the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Its borders haven’t dramatically changed over the years.

But it was once much more of a battleground than it is today.

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From 1975 to 2016, three of the six U.S. House members to represent the district were Democrats and three were Republicans.   This seat changed partisan hands more often than any other in Wisconsin during those decades.

Democrats never held the district for long, because of its GOP lean.

But they were able to win it in good years for the party, because Democrats were more competitive in rural and northern Wisconsin than they are now and because more voters split their tickets than today, making it easier to win on opposition turf.

One illustration of how the landscape has shifted: in 2012, Democrat Barack Obama lost the 8^th District by less than 4 points, but four years later, Republican Donald Trump carried it by more than 17 — a far bigger swing to the right than occurred in the state as a whole.

The district was redrawn after the 2020 census, but its partisan makeup wasn’t altered much, leaving it about 16 points more Republican than the state as a whole.  In other words, in a 50/50 election year statewide, Republicans would be expected to win the 8^th by about 16 points.

Within the district, voting patterns vary pretty widely.  The most liberal parts of the district — tribal communities, and parts of the cities of Green Bay and Appleton — are overwhelmingly Democratic.

Meanwhile, the most conservative villages and towns in northeastern Wisconsin vote Republican by 3-to-1, or more.

One core part of the district remains fairly competitive: Brown and Outagamie counties, which contain Green Bay and Appleton.

These two counties made up almost 60% of the district’s voters in 2022. They lean modestly red, but Republican margins have shrunk there since Trump was elected president in 2016. In Brown County, the GOP edge has decreased from 18 to 8 to under 5 points in the past three races for governor, and from 11 to 7 points in the last two races for president.

But most of the rest of the district — smaller, less densely populated counties like Shawano and Waupaca and Oconto — is far redder. And in some of these counties, the GOP edge has been growing, not shrinking.  Oconto and Shawano are two of the most Republican counties in the state, and each voted for Trump in 2020 by more than 35 points.

There is one county in the district, Door, that has actually turned marginally blue in the past few years. It voted Democratic for president by 1 point in 2020 and Democratic for governor by 5 points in 2022. But it represents only about 5% of the district’s voters.

In short, while the 8^th is not the most Republican congressional district in Wisconsin (that title belongs to the 5^th District in the outer suburbs and exurbs of Milwaukee) it is not competitive either.

It would take a very special set of circumstances for Republicans to lose this seat.

Gallagher, often described as a rising star in his party before his recent retirement announcement, won his four U.S. House races in landslides.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mike Gallagher's seat likely to remain in GOP hands, history shows