Cities and Their Neighbors
Benny Witkovsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Kenosha County, Wisconsin held the state's only contested race for District Attorney last year. The community's recent history of protest and violence resurfaced in the campaign as the Republican candidate had once represented a bail fund for Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager who shot and killed two local protesters. In the end, Republican Xavier Solis secured a narrow victory (51% - 49%) over Democrat Carli McNeil. However, this overall result obscures deep divisions within Kenosha County. Solis won just 43% in the city of Kenosha—the largest, most diverse city in the county and the site of the recent protests—he averaged 63% of the vote in the much smaller, whiter, and more rural communities in the rest of the county. The largest city in the county will now be served by a district attorney whose political base lies outside of it.
That 20-point difference in how Kenosha City and its neighbors voted perfectly mirrors Trump and Harris’s performance in Kenosha County in 2024. While the political gulf between rural and urban America has received considerable attention in recent years, the divide within counties, between adjacent rural and urban places, is less often discussed. In my paper, “Cities and Their Neighbors,” I show that nearly every county in Wisconsin—regardless of size, region, or rurality—now sees a significant partisan divide between its rural and urban communities.
As the figure below shows, as recently as the mid-1990s there was almost no difference between how county seats and their neighbors voted in partisan elections. By 2008, the average county seat was 6 points more Democratic than its neighbors; by 2020, that gap had doubled to nearly 12 points. The same is true when comparing incorporated cities and villages and unincorporated towns that share a county: by 2020, the average rural town was 14 points more Republican than the cities in its county. Over the years, this gap has become more significant and consistent: in the 1990s, cities were more Democratic than rural places in only half of Wisconsin counties; today, that is true nearly everywhere. This local divide appears in partisan elections for president, governor, and congress, and is almost certainly—as the example above suggests—influencing local races as well.
Figure 1: Local partisan divide: county seats vs. other communities, 1990-2020.
People who study, work in, or care about urban governance know that adjacent rural communities are bound to one another in countless ways. Thousands of people move between rural and urban communities throughout the course of their day to go to work, school, stores, and public services. The policies that one community adopts have a direct impact on the communities around them. County and regional governments—responsible for things as fundamental as education, public health, law enforcement, utilities, and more—all must balance the interests of and conflict between the adjacent rural and urban communities they represent. All of this becomes even more challenging as partisan politics is superimposed on longstanding local divides.
Fights over COVID-19 mitigation, as this paper briefly explores, tested all of these dynamics. When some cities in Wisconsin held public meetings to debate mask mandates, they were overwhelmed by conservative opponents, often coming from adjacent rural communities. Other cities balked at the prospect of trying to enforce a mask mandate or social distancing when stores, bars, and restaurants just across city lines could operate as usual. And some cities waited, hoping that county governments would step in to adopt COVID policies, only to see those county efforts hampered by more conservative rural communities.
Beyond the implications for urban governance, the local divide documented in this paper demands that we ask a more fundamental question about the roots of conflict and division in American politics. We know how distance, isolation, and ignorance feed partisan animosity and how cities and rural communities separated by thousands of miles come to misunderstand and mistrust one another. But this local divide suggests that proximity and interconnectedness can stoke division and conflict as well. Communities bound together—perhaps in some ways because they are bound together—have grown politically distant.
This paper is a starting point. It documents the growing local divide in one state—Wisconsin—over the last thirty years and reviews several illustrative examples of how this divide can shape urban governance. Hopefully, it provides a conceptual framework and method for measuring the local divide that will prove helpful for future work on geographic polarization and its impact on local political life.
Benny Witkovsky is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and University of Wisconsin—Madison. His research focuses on nonpartisanship and polarization in Wisconsin's small cities. His work has been supported by the American Sociological Association's Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.