Here & Now

Charles Franklin on Wisconsin a Year Out from the 2024 Vote

Frederica Freyberg:

It’s a year out from the 2024 general elections and Wisconsin Republican voters are showing signs of increased support for Donald Trump, but also for Nikki Haley. The latest Marquette University Law School Poll took the political pulse of the state electorate. Poll Director Charles Franklin is here to describe the numbers. Charles, nice to see you.

Charles Franklin:

Good to be back.

Frederica Freyberg:

With this week’s Republican primary debate and Donald Trump’s highly visible court cases, voters definitely have their eyes on the presidential race. In your poll that was in the field last week, it shows that Biden tops Trump by two points right now in Wisconsin, but if Trump were out of the mix, interestingly, it shows that Ron DeSantis tops Joe Biden by two points and then even more interestingly, it shows that Nikki Haley tops Biden by nine points. So what is that about in a state and in all the states where Trump has this huge lead against both those people?

Charles Franklin:

Well, in the primary, Trump’s lead is huge, it’s 20 points in our poll this time for Republicans, but the two-point margins for Trump or for DeSantis, our margin of error is four and a half points, so those are really toss-ups, but you can see DeSantis doing a little better than Trump does when paired against Biden. What’s interesting, as you say, is the Nikki Haley performance. A plus nine lead for her, that’s phenomenal and not realistic if we were in a general election. But what we see in the data is, first, about a third of the public say they don’t know much about Nikki Haley. And when she’s paired against Biden, I think that lack of knowledge and the fact that she’s not closely identified with the Trump wing of the party, allows independents and some Democrats who have reservations about Biden for various reasons, the economy, his age and so on, it allows them to say that they would vote for that Republican who is not from the Trump-y wing of the party. Conversely, people’s opinions of Trump and Biden are so set in stone that we end up with this near tie there and, indeed, independents split evenly between Trump and Biden, but independents give 58% of their vote to Nikki Haley.

Frederica Freyberg:

So could you have conceived a race where the frontrunner, that being Donald Trump, just doesn’t do debates, not to mention he’s under indictment and is still gaining in the polls?

Charles Franklin:

Yeah. His hold on the party is very strong to begin with, but not as strong as maybe myth would have it. We find about 70% of Republicans with a favorable view of Trump and about 30% with an unfavorable view of him among Republicans. That 30% almost none of them support Trump in the primary, but they haven’t coalesced around anybody else. At the beginning of the year, DeSantis was actually drawing about 30% of the vote among people who liked Trump, among Republicans who liked Trump, but that has plummeted since then. So the pro-Trump wing of the party really has coalesced around him and abandoned thinking about DeSantis, but none of the other candidates have really coalesced that 30% or so that don’t like Trump, and so it’s scatters between DeSantis and Hayley and then very small percentages for everybody else.

Frederica Freyberg:

Let’s take a look at what your survey found in the state of Wisconsin. Your poll shows that Tony Evers is right side up with approval ratings while the legislature is way upside down, and the state Supreme Court is also enjoying some firm approval. What do these numbers tell you?

Charles Franklin:

Tony Evers fell just below 50% approval before he was re-elected last November. He bumped up in June and has come down about three points now, but he’s a net positive. The legislature, on the other hand, when we last asked, which was back in 2022, had been pretty close to even, so they seemed to have slipped considerably in the meantime and we haven’t asked about the state Supreme Court before, this is our first time. They’re at 51% approval, which is fine, but, you know, the court will be in the news in coming months and we’ll see how the public reacts to that as the court becomes more visible in the news.

Frederica Freyberg:

I found your survey results on the redistricting interesting. Your poll shows that 51% want to keep the current maps until 2031. Now, those maps are the object of so much vocal disfavor. What do you make of these results?

Charles Franklin:

Two things. First, we did not mention gerrymandering or partisan districting in the question. That was deliberate. We want to know, if you just describe the situation before the court and what the option of putting off redistricting until 2031 is, what do people respond to that? How do they know that? When we’ve previously asked about non-partisan redistricting a couple of years ago, it was very popular, and so the point here is Republicans, about 75%, say they don’t want to redistrict. About 72% of Democrats say they do. Independents, a little more don’t. But the messaging on redistricting simply has not penetrated to the public so that with a neutral question, they automatically think of it in terms of partisanship and gerrymandering. If they did, we’d probably see more Republicans opposed, but we’d also see more Democrats and independents opposed. That messaging just hasn’t gotten through yet.

Frederica Freyberg:

We have less than a minute with a big topic that is abortion. Does this topic continue to stay resonant through 2024?

Charles Franklin:

I think the evidence is it does and this past Tuesday’s election shows that. What we see is about 57% favor abortion rights, about 35% opposed. That’s the deep partisan divide and also the party divide if you think about the legislature.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Charles Franklin, thanks very much.

Charles Franklin:

Thank you.