'Interesting and unique': Since 2000, only these 2 Wisconsin towns have picked the winner in every major election

 

MERRIMAC, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Every four years, Wisconsin voters help chart the course of the United States. Within this battleground state is a pair of bellwethers.

Wisconsin is made up of more than 1,800 cities, towns and villages. Since 2000, only two of them have voted for the Wisconsin winner in every election for president and governor: the town of Harmony in Rock County and the village of Merrimac in Sauk County.

To reach Merrimac from the south, one can either wait for the ferry, which runs until Lake Wisconsin freezes over, or take the long way around the lake. In town, longtime residents were surprised to learn their community had a propensity to pick Wisconsin's electoral winners.

"Very interesting," Gale Bahe quipped.

Her husband, Garry, agreed.

"Interesting and unique, in a way," he said.

The Bahes are two of the reasons Merrimac has a history of backing candidates from both major parties. Garry spent much of his life in Sun Prairie while Gale grew up in Mequon. In the more than 20 years they've lived in Merrimac, the Bahes said they've both voted for Democratic and Republican candidates.

At the Ferry Crossing Bar & Grill, people were proud of their independent nature.

"I feel pretty good about it, I guess," Virginia Fisher, a server at the restaurant, said. "It's a good mixture of people, you know. We don't all have the same opinion."

Over a glass of wine, Susan Caldwell recounted voting for Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

"People are never really one way or the other, most of them," Gale Bahe said. "They're middle of the road, and they're gonna vote for who they think is gonna be doing the best job."

John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University, crunched the election results for each of Wisconsin's municipalities this century. He said the reason there aren't more bellwether communities is so many places have shifted significantly to either the left or right.

"Sometimes, people do this thing where they're like, 'Oh, there must be some special sauce in the bellwether community,'" Johnson said. "I don't think that's exactly right."

Johnson said his research found more than half of Wisconsin's communities have moved by 15 percentage points in one direction or another. UW-Eau Claire has compiled interactive data from past Wisconsin elections, and a comparison between the 2000 and 2020 presidential maps reveals the extent to which rural communities have gotten much more conservative while the most populous counties, Milwaukee and Dane, are more liberal now.

"There's almost nowhere that has been right in the middle that whole time," Johnson said.

For a place to remain highly competitive, it needs to have a little bit of everything. Jennie Klecker, who serves as Merrimac's village administrator, clerk and treasurer, said that describes Merrimac.

"It's pretty economically diverse here," she said. "We have retired professors, lawyers, CEOs living on the lake, and then you have your blue-collar community living off the lake."

Johnson said geography best explains why Merrimac has been able to bounce between picking Democratic and Republican candidates.

"You know, if we were to draw the line where it's like, 'Here's the edge of the Madison thing and the beginning of the rural thing,' Merrimac would be pretty close to that line," he said.

Seventy-seven miles to the southeast, it's a similar story in the town of Harmony. Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson previously served as the town clerk. Now, her husband, Tim, has that responsibility.

"There was one night, our ballots came out, and they were really close," Lisa Tollefson recalled. "I called my husband at home. I said, "How's the rest of the state going? Am I packing for a recount?" That's how close we were. It was just a few votes apart."

Lisa Tollefson said she agreed with Johnson's assessment geography explains how a Wisconsin community can still swing between parties, even as the state overall becomes more polarized.

"It's a mix. We have a lot of rural, ag, dairy, lots of farming," she said. "And we have a lot of subdivisions that border the city of Janesville."

With absentee ballots already going out, many of the swing voters in Merrimac have yet to make up their minds.

"I'm not really sure who I wanna vote for," Fisher said.

Fisher said she was concerned about the economy but also was disturbed by former President Donald Trump's record in terms of "what he stands for, as far as women." She said abortion rights were also an important issue to her.

Caldwell said her main issues were the economy and immigration, as well as Social Security as she approaches retirement age.

"I'm not sure what's gonna happen this time," she said. "I haven't made a decision this time."

With voters yet to decide who they'll support, it's hard to get a read on whether this streak will continue.

"I wouldn't know how to guess how it's gonna turn out," Garry Bahe said. "I think it's gonna be close."