Pat Ruttum lived in her Milwaukee suburb for 25 years before she felt comfortable revealing to her neighbors that she was a Democrat.
When she did, by placing a Barack Obama sign in her yard in 2008, the social blowback was immediate.
“The next day, my neighbor just ignored me in the grocery store,” said Ms. Ruttum, a now-retired nurse. “I said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ She said to me, ‘I never knew you were one of those.’”
Sixteen years after Ms. Ruttum’s Obama sign caused a stir in Elm Grove, which was once among the most Republican communities in Wisconsin’s most populous and important G.O.P. county, the village is on the verge of backing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
As places like Elm Grove and its much larger Waukesha County neighbor, Brookfield, gradually shift from Republican dominance to tossup status, they have chipped away at the party’s advantage in right-leaning suburbs across the country. And without running up a big victory of more than 20 percentage points in Waukesha County, the statewide math becomes next to impossible for Republicans, who cannot overcome the Democratic advantages in Madison and Milwaukee through the state’s rural red counties alone.
In so many places in the presidential battleground states, the election has become a game of margins. Nowhere is this clearer than in Elm Grove and Brookfield, where Ms. Harris and former Representative Liz Cheney held an event last month that was an explicit appeal to Republicans skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump. Just a decade ago, these communities made up the beating heart of the state’s Republican base in Waukesha County.
As in so many American suburbs, politics in Elm Grove and Brookfield shifted left when Mr. Trump took over the Republican Party. Mitt Romney took nearly 70 percent of the vote in the two communities 2012, but Mr. Trump won with a little over 50 percent in 2020.
Still, while longtime Republican counties around Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis swung hard toward Democrats during the Trump era, Milwaukee’s have moved much slower — in part, because they had a longer way to go.
“Waukesha County is changing, and it is not as red as it used to be,” said Brian Fraley, a Wisconsin Republican strategist. “The calculus is different now from what it used to be.”
Before Mr. Trump’s ascent, Waukesha County routinely gave two-thirds of its vote to Republican presidential candidates. But this year, Democrats have an ambitious target: 40 percent, a level none of the party’s presidential nominees have cracked since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
The Democratic effort to cut into Republican margins in the county is part of a broader party strategy of losing by less in conservative areas.
For Mr. Trump, holding Ms. Harris below the 39 percent of the vote in Waukesha that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in 2020 will be essential.
“If Waukesha County can get to 40 for Harris, numerically the G.O.P. is in massive trouble,” said Mike Hallquist, a Brookfield city alderman who is a rare Democrat elected to a local office in Waukesha County.
Mr. Fraley, the Republican strategist, predicted that Ms. Harris would win Brookfield, where he lives, and come close in Elm Grove, but he called the idea that Democrats would crack 40 percent countywide “a pipe dream.” Republicans, he said, would make up some of the margin lost with a stronger showing in the western, more rural part of the county, and in nearby Washington County.
Former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said Brookfield and Elm Grove were going through the same political evolution that took place a decade ago in Wauwatosa, a Milwaukee County suburb that used to be a Republican stronghold and now reliably votes for Democrats. Such was the change that in 2020, Mr. Walker said, his old house had a sign in the yard for Mr. Biden.
“It’s part of this overall shift you see with blue-collar voters becoming more Republican and white-collar voters becoming more Democratic,” he said.
Still, Mr. Walker predicted that Mr. Trump would exceed 60 percent in Waukesha County because of his enduring strength in county’s western half.
Brookfield and Elm Grove have shifted to the left because their populations have grown younger and more diverse, even as educated suburbanites everywhere have abandoned Republican candidates in greater numbers. But some of the vestigial politics, and the social pressure to support Republicans, remain.
The path successful Democrats have taken in Waukesha has been to appeal to suburban, educated women who are now vital to the party’s fortunes across the country. The latest polling from The New York Times and Siena College found that in Wisconsin, Ms. Harris had an advantage of 17 percentage points over Mr. Trump among female voters, a gap consistent with her status in other states. Mr. Trump led among Wisconsin men by 15 points, the poll found.
Robyn Vining, a Democratic State Assembly member from nearby Wauwatosa whose district was redrawn this year to include Elm Grove and half of Brookfield, said she had organized her office and campaign to appeal and speak to women and their concerns. Some of her campaign signs say “Love Wins” in large font instead of her name, an indication of how she views her political message.
“You have to communicate with a woman who’s sitting on the floor nursing or bottle feeding a baby and watching a 3-year-old,” Ms. Vining said while canvassing an Elm Grove neighborhood on Saturday morning. “You have to know that that’s how much of her attention you get.”
One of the largest Democratic organizing groups in the area is an invitation-only Facebook group known as the Momma Dems, whose members — as Ms. Ruttum did for decades before planting her Obama sign — have vowed not to discuss the group publicly, to allow some members to keep their politics separate from their social, professional and, in some cases, family lives.
While polling suggests the presidential race in Wisconsin is effectively a dead heat, stories abound in the state’s Democratic circles about Harris voters who are unwilling to publicly say they support her for fear of creating conflict with Trump-supporting neighbors and family members.
“In Madison, everyone has a Harris sign,” said Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat whose congressional district includes the state capital. Elsewhere, he said, “I hear the stories about supporters being afraid to tell anyone they are going to vote for her. I do think the silent majority is us this time and that’s going to make a difference.”
In Waukesha County, Democrats have made incremental gains in recent elections. Mr. Biden’s 39 percent was the highest margin for any Democrat in the county since Michael Dukakis drew the same level in 1988.
Last year, a liberal candidate for the State Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, won 42 percent of the county’s vote on her way to a high-stakes victory for Wisconsin Democrats. This August, in a statewide referendum about legislative power over federal money that served as a proxy vote for the state’s parties, the Democratic-backed “No” side took 43 percent in Waukesha County.
Waukesha Democrats are not living under an illusion that they will win the county. Ben Steinhoff, 33, a Democratic firefighter running in a long-shot race for Waukesha’s congressional seat, said, “We know our role in this election.” But there is a giddiness that the days of Republican dominance may be over.
“We’re in a competitive area now,” said Sarah Harrison, a Democrat running for a Republican-held State Assembly seat in Brookfield. “I don’t know that it’s going to be solid blue. But I think we’re less maroon and more actual purple.”
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