PEPIN, Wis. – Angie Bocksell stood in the shade of a sprawling swamp oak tree. She was soaking in a picturesque afternoon on her fifth-generation dairy farm and discussing the state of American politics. This centuries-old tree, it occurred to her, is the perfect symbol of her family's place in a politically shifting America: firmly rooted in one place, resistant to change around it.
"Farmers are the people with roots in our area like that 300-year-old swamp oak," Bocksell said. "Farming on the same land and watching the cultures change around us."
Her conservative politics grow from those roots. Her Christian faith bristles at an increasingly permissive American culture. Her frugal farmer mindset disapproves of President Biden's government spending. Big government's COVID measures went against her rural self-reliance and common sense. She's doesn't love Trump — his divisiveness, his pompous attitude — but she feels she has no other choice.
"He's just going to cause more divide, and I don't like that," Bocksell said. "But I want to vote for things that make sense for us as citizens. I can't vote for Joe Biden."
The votes of people like Bocksell are of vital importance in 2024, with Wisconsin again among a handful of crucial swing states. And her region — called the Driftless Area for its hilly landscape untouched by ancient glaciers — has experienced voting shifts among the most drastic in the nation.
Of more than 3,000 counties in America, there are only 206 so-called "pivot counties" that voted for Barack Obama twice before swinging to Trump in 2016, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan digital encyclopedia of American politics. Nearly 90% of those counties stuck with Trump in 2020. The biggest concentration of pivot counties is in the Upper Midwest, with more than 40% of them in the Driftless, a region that stretches across the nexus of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and a bit of Illinois.
It's in Bocksell's home county, Pepin County — with its 7,500 residents, touristy Mississippi River towns, towering blufftops, and resilient farm economy — where that political swing is most stark.
"What Obama and Trump have in common is they said, 'The system isn't working, and I'm going to do something different," said Anthony Chergosky, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. "That resonated with a lot of voters in Wisconsin, particularly in the western part of the state — that 'you're getting a raw deal' message."
Half a century ago, this region, whose small towns and rolling hills of farmland feel more rural New England than Midwest, was a hotbed of hippies and progressivism. Pepin County has leaned blue for generations. Before Trump, it voted Democrat for 10 consecutive presidential elections, with Richard Nixon its last Republican winner in 1972.
But Trump didn't just win Pepin County: He demolished Hillary Clinton by more than 23 percentage points. And although Biden in 2020 defeated Trump by 7 million votes nationally, Pepin County swung further right, with Trump winning by more than 26 percentage points.
The significance of the rightward drift in the Driftless is evident with Wisconsin again predicted to be a swing state. In 2020, it was one of three states that pushed Biden to an Electoral College victory; Biden won Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona by fewer than 45,000 votes.
The idea of one county swinging nearly 40 points from Democrat to Republican in a dozen years mystifies even its residents. Wisconsin political experts point to several factors: a Badger State independent streak swayed by singular candidates, the national trend of rural America getting redder while urban America gets bluer, and places like the Driftless feeling ignored by political elites.
Wisconsin politics are a unique beast. Its two U.S. senators are Tammy Baldwin, a progressive and the nation's first openly gay senator, and Ron Johnson, a staunch Trump ally and COVID vaccine skeptic. Its state legislature has neared a Republican supermajority for a decade, but political pundits here attribute that to gerrymandering: Wisconsin remains evenly divided and a presidential bellwether. That doesn't mean it's filled with moderates. Political observers see pockets of ultra-progressives and of ultra-conservatives.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll and a professor of law and public policy at the Milwaukee law school, points out that the Democratic party of the 1960s talked about progressive issues like civil rights while continuing its New Deal legacy in rural America: rural electrification, farm support programs, outreach to blue-collar workers.
But the Democratic message no longer resonates in the Driftless, he said.
"Democrats don't speak a whole lot to the rural residents of southwestern Wisconsin, where counties are 90 percent-plus white and where the biggest community in the whole county may be 10,000 people," Franklin said. "It's like a switch was turned between 2012 and 2016 here. "
'The born-heres and the moved-heres'
Minnesotans often refer to the Driftless as Bluff Country. Winding roads rise from the Mississippi River bottoms and disappear into lush blufftops. Pat Malone, who runs the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension office in four Driftless counties, said her great-uncle compared it to his homeland: "It's as beautiful as Ireland," he'd say, "without all the damn rain."
On Wisconsin's side, fishing boats sit near riverside homes. Then the land rises east into barely populated forests. The region's feeling of isolation despite its proximity to the Twin Cities — it's barely more than an hour's drive from the Minnesota State Capitol to Pepin County — is its biggest selling point and biggest challenge. Residents love the simplicity and slower pace, but plenty of spots remain without cell service or broadband internet.
"That's the way the world is viewed around here: 'Do you live on the ridge or in the valley?'" said Ben Wojahn, a farmer outside Viroqua who also works for Vernon County. "People who are from here, who grew up here for many generations, often they tend to be more conservative. Then there's a massive wave of newcomers [that] just got ignited with COVID. So people who made money somewhere else can buy up land from underneath the locals."
Alan Nugent is one of those outsiders. He moved from the Twin Cities to the Bohemian riverside village of Stockholm 20 years ago with his now-husband. Stockholm is to Pepin County what Austin is to Texas: a liberal enclave — restaurants and art galleries and Nugent's Stockholm Pie and General Store, recently named America's best pie shop — within an increasingly conservative area. Residents here joked after Trump's 2016 win that they should decorate the town in black bunting.
Nugent knows it's silly to see an urban-rural divide in the whitest and geographically smallest county in Wisconsin. Still, he sees it. River towns survive on tourism and lean liberal; blufftops have urban folks' expensive second homes and progressive politics, though many don't vote in Wisconsin; farming communities over the bluffs, centered on the county seat of Durand, are Trump's base.
"There's always been a difference between the born-heres and the moved-heres," Nugent said. "It's a microcosm of what's happening in Minneapolis and the rest of Minnesota, or Madison and Milwaukee and the rest of Wisconsin. The divide is intense here, but the divide existed before. I just don't think it was a negative thing."
That changed in 2016, Nugent said. Trump gave voice to rural conservatives who felt ignored or denigrated, both by D.C. elites and this area's urban transplants, and Nugent felt their backlash. It got to the point where a Pride event that Nugent helped organize was canceled this year after local conservatives protested.
"They voted for change with Obama, and the change they wanted didn't happen," Nugent said. "With Clinton, it felt we were moving back to the old school again, where no one gives a damn about them. Trump was able to convince them that he actually gave a damn."
Frustration with big government
Tom Milliren is a self-made man. He married his Durand High School sweetheart 49 years ago, then bought his first piece of Pepin County farmland. There were hard times, but Milliren persisted. Now he owns 1,000 acres and operates 10,000 more.
He's always been conservative. But what solidified him as a Trump-style Republican wasn't anything headline-grabbing like immigration or culture wars. It was when Milliren began serving on the county board and grew frustrated with big government.
The federal government always tells them what to do despite not knowing the area, Milliren said. It tells farmers they can't build in flood zones — "We know where the high spots are, and it's our money," he lamented — yet he sees million-dollar beach homes get wiped out by hurricanes then built back up. When a tenth of an acre is needed from a farmer to build a bridge, Milliren asks the farmer himself: easy. But federal grants stipulate land acquisition plans, costing $10,000 or more.
"I'd like to sit down with some of those guys and say, 'Do I look so stupid that you're gonna tell me what to do all the time?'" Milliren said. "The people haven't changed. The politics changed. What was blue is now red. They're so far left they're going to run off the road. I don't care which party you are — let's have some common sense."
Not every Driftless farmer feels like Milliren. John Rosenow owns a compost business and dairy farm in neighboring Buffalo County. In the 1990s, starved for good workers, Rosenow began hiring Mexican immigrants. He's become an immigrant advocate, helping others hire Mexican workers.
Politics aren't as important to him as, say, milk prices, and recent financials have been brutal. Still, he fears a return to the Trump years, when anti-immigration policies spooked his workers and a trade war cost Rosenow $50,000.
"Overnight, we lost $4 per hundredweight," Rosenow said. "I can't afford to have Trump be president again. All the talk about shipping everybody out of here, every [farm] was two or three people short. A lot of people went home. That ended after about six months, because it was all talk."
There are certainly MAGA diehards here, like 64-year-old Galen Erickson on his farmstead outside Pepin. An outbuilding has a weathered "TRUMP-PENCE" sign; Erickson blacked out Pence's name for his disloyalty to Trump. Erickson said he wants gas prices to rise to $6 a gallon before November so Trump wins.
"I love his honesty," Erickson said of Trump. "He tells it the way it is. People don't like that. Women don't like it. I love it."
But the Driftless sensibility seems less MAGA stronghold than an isolated area pushed rightward from a frustration of being ignored. Conservatives here may not be thrilled about Trump, but they say they prefer him to urban-centered Democrats.
People like Sue Fedie.
Fedie's family has been in Pepin County since the mid-1800s, when her great-great-grandfather built a grist mill here. She lives next door to her 89-year-old parents and runs the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. (Fedie is a distant cousin of the author, who was born just outside Pepin.) She's seen the political divide widen in recent years. Outsiders have injected money into the economy, though so many AirBnbs strain the housing stock. Old-timers resist urban transplants and their politics, preferring life to stay the same.
She's a small-government conservative with a quiet liberal streak on some social issues. ("Don't tell my dad," she laughed.) She'll vote Republican because conservatives allow people to keep their wealth. But she turns the television off when either candidate appears.
"I'd like politics to be calmer," Fedie said. "I have to vote for a conservative candidate, I have to, because I don't care for liberal candidates in general. I just wish politics had more dignity. But we don't have any other choice right now."