Is Wisconsin — or the country — really as divided as the maps make it look?

On the spreadsheet of unofficial election totals posted by each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties following the election Nov. 5, a handful showed a clear majority for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Many more counties were won by the winning Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Trump garnered enough votes to carry Wisconsin and enough states to return to the Oval Office in January.

A lot of those Trump-voting counties were rural ones, contributing to longstanding stereotypes about a monolithic body politic of deep blue cities and a bright red countryside.

But months before Election Day, on a mild August evening in a quaint round barn north of Spring Green, the writer Sarah Smarsh cautioned against oversimplifying the politics of rural voters — and against turning a blind eye to a part of the country that, she said, has too often been written off.

“I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in south central Kansas,” Smarsh said that evening. It’s a place of “tall grass prairie, which happens to be the most endangered ecosystem … and simultaneously the least discussed or cared about or protected. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s the ecosystem of the place and people that I also happen to believe have not been given fair attention and due consideration.”

Smarsh made her mark with the book “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” As a journalist and author she has straddled the community of her upbringing and the urbane, academic world that she entered when she became the first in her family to pursue higher education.

The child of a carpenter and a teen mom, Smarsh has explored the socioeconomic divide in the U.S., mapping it to the destruction of the working class, the demise of family farms and the dismantling of public services from health care to public schools. 

“I write about socioeconomic class and I write about rural issues, but that’s because I grew up in working poverty, and that’s because I grew up on a farm,” Smarsh said. And while those identities “are enormously consequential,” she added, she seeks to break down the assumptions that people carry about them. Her message: “You don’t know who my family is, and especially if what we assume is that they’re white trash, worthless.”

It’s a story that gives new context to the election results from 2016 on, and takes on new importance after the election of 2024. The residents of those places dismissed as “flyover country,” Smarsh said back in August, have many of the same concerns of urban and suburban voters, including reproductive rights, public schools, gun violence and other subjects. And understanding them in their diversity and complexity casts politics, especially national politics, in a more diffuse and complicated light.

Where ‘people don’t care about political affiliations’

Concern about climate change and a desire to live more sustainably led Tamara Dean and her partner to move to western Wisconsin’s Vernon County in the early 2000’s, where they built a homestead, grew their own food and became part of the local agricultural community.

Climate change followed them. In their county, extreme weather events became almost the norm, with a 500-year flood “happening every few years or every year,” Dean said in an interview.

“A rural community really coalesces when extreme situations happen and they help each other out,” Dean said. “And when we were cleaning up after a flood, helping our neighbors salvage their possessions or even getting people to safety, no one’s going to ask who you voted for, and people don’t care about political affiliations.”

Dean has written a collection of essays on the couple’s time in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, “Shelter and Storm,” to be published in April 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Distrust of the federal government

Residents, she found, had something of an ambivalent relationship with the federal government. 

For all the complexity of agricultural economics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide financial farm support were familiar and well-understood by longtime farmers and easily accessible to them, she said. But when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promised recovery assistance for flooding in 2018, “it just took forever to come, and it took a lot of bureaucracy to try to get it,” Dean said. For individual applicants, “getting any kind of assistance might be so daunting that they just wouldn’t think it’s worth it.”

For Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator who has been thinking at length about politics and government in recent years, the election outcome has prompted contemplation.

Schultz left the Legislature a decade ago after splitting with Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker over legislation stripping public employees’ union rights and weakening Wisconsin’s mining laws.

Since then he has campaigned for redistricting reform and supported the overturning of Wisconsin Republicans’  gerrymandered legislative maps. iIn October he went public as a Republican supporting the Harris campaign for president.

In his part of the state, he saw a distinct contrast between the Democratic campaign and the Republican one.

“I saw an extremely good Democratic effort to talk to people face-to-face,” Schultz said in an interview. The GOP campaign along with allied outside groups such as American for Prosperity, however, appeared to him to focus almost entirely on mailings, phone calls and media.

“It became clear to me that politics is changing from the time I spent in office, being less people powered and more media powered,” Schultz said.

Ignored by both parties

Schultz said he’s observed a level of anger among some of his one-time constituents that has alarmed and surprised him, a product, he suggests, of having been ignored by both parties.

One target has been regulation, to the point where “they’ve lost track of why regulations are important and why they should support them,” he said. Yet he sees the direct answer to that question where he lives in Southwest Wisconsin.

“In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance in trout fishing, like I could not even have imagined 20 years ago,” Shultz said. He credits the Department of Natural Resources and its personnel for working with local communities to ensure conditions that would turn trout streams into suitable habitat to support a burgeoning population of fish. “That doesn’t happen without water quality and water quality regulations, and land use and land use regulations.”

Schultz has been  spending time in conversation with friends “who are like-minded and similarly curious,” he said. “And then you just watch and wait and see what happens, and try to voice concerns that are real and that need to be dealt with, and [that] we’re not going to be able to hide from as a country.”

He hopes for the return of a time when people like him,  who consider themselves “just to the right of center,” can again “talk to everyone and possibly craft a solution.”

Back in August, Sarah Smarsh offered a gentle warning about the coming election to her audience in the round barn north of Spring Green.

“Whatever happens in November, everybody else is still here — the other side is still here,” Smarsh said. “And so there’s going to be some caring to do, and that’s probably going to be for generations, because we didn’t arrive at this moment overnight.”

This time of the year, plenty of college football players across the country are getting ready for the end of the season, while others are already looking ahead to 2025. We’re of course referencing the transfer portal, with things set to officially open up next month.

Wisconsin, just like every season, is expected to lose some players who will be looking for playing time elsewhere. Such will be the case for redshirt-freshman quarterback Cole LaCrue. A former 3-star signee from the 2023 class, LaCrue is buried on the depth chart. According to On3’s Pete Nakos, LaCrue will enter the portal. He has four years of eligibility left available to him:

LaCrue deciding to head elsewhere isn’t a stunner whatsoever. When QB Tyler Van Dike went down with his torn ACL, Braedyn Locke stepped in as the team’s new starting quarterback. Behind him is freshman Mabrey Mettauer, a four-star signee from last year’s recruiting class.

LaCrue was never going to see playing time for the Badgers this season. Not only that, but Wisconsin is among the finalists for four-star 2025 quarterback Carter Smith, an elite signal-caller who recently backed off his pledge from Michigan.

According to 247’s Evan Flood, Smith is down to Wisconsin and Florida State. He’s taking an official visit to Tallahassee later this month, with a decision coming leading up to the Early Signing Period, which starts on Dec. 4. The Badgers appear to be in a great spot to potentially land Smith’s services.

Should he end up signing to play for Fickell and Co., it’s only going to make the QBs room even more crowded in Wisconsin and LaCrue will fall down further on the depth chart. Once the portal opens up, he’ll start looking for a new place to call home for next season. When he signed with Wisconsin, he did so over other offers from Colorado, Central Michigan, Northern Colorado, South Dakota and Tulane.

MADISON – Perhaps no player on the Wisconsin football team will feel the absence of former offensive coordinator Phil Longo more than Braedyn Locke.

The opportunity to play in Longo’s Air Raid offense played a large role in the redshirt sophomore’s decision to transfer two UW from Mississippi State two years ago. And when Locke was in high school, Longo, then the offensive coordinator at North Carolina, was among the coaches in pursuit of the Texas high school star.

The two go way back – Longo also recruited Locke’s younger brother Landyn to Wisconsin’s 2025 class – so when Badgers head coach Luke Fickell fired Longo as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Sunday, Locke admitted the news hit hard.

“Yeah,” he said. “We have a great relationship, but that relationship will never fade. I feel strongly about that and take comfort in that.”

That said, Locke also knows this isn’t the time for emotions to get in the way. He, center Jake Renfro and receiver C.J. Williams spoke with reporters about Longo’s dismissal and a couple of themes came from the interviews.

1. While each shared his appreciation/respect for Longo, they also expressed the need to focus on Nebraska. The Badgers play the Cornhuskers at Memorial Stadium at 2:30 p.m. Saturday.

2. No one wanted to put a finger on what went wrong, or if they had some idea they weren’t sharing their thoughts with the media.

“I feel like everyone went through their own sort of shock when we found out, but you’ve got to move on,” Renfro said. “We’ve got a game to prepare for. That’s in the past, so whatever is in front of us we’ve got to attack, and that was this week Coach Longo moving on. But it is what it is. We’ve got a game to prepare for and we’re ready to for that challenge.”

‘We have so much to play for’. Trophy games close the season

Life without Longo begins with the Badgers at crossroads. With a 5-5 record, the team still needs one win assure bowl eligibilty for the 23rd straight year. UW also has a run of 22 straight winning seasons to preserve.

Nebraska is equally desperate. The Cornhuskers (5-5, 2-5) are trying to reach a bowl for the first time since 2017 as well as snap a four-game losing streak.

UW closes the season against Minnesota at home in the battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe.

“We have so much to play for,” Locke said. “We have two trophy games left on our schedule that are very important to our players and our coaches and fan base and our state. Two great opportunities, games that will require a full 60 minutes to win.

“It means a lot for us to do this the right way for our seniors and to finish well. We don’t take that lightly, the players or coaches. That is where our hearts and minds are right now.”

The Badgers’ offense produced a season-low 226 yards in the loss to Oregon on Saturday, went 1 for 12 on third downs and failed to get a first down on its final two possessions, drives that could have netted a go-ahead touchdown or game-tying field goal.

The game completed a three-game run when the Badgers didn’t gain more than 300 yards. Williams said the offense’s struggles created frustration.

“The defense performed at a very, very, very high level like they have multiple times this year and we put it on our shoulders to perform better at times as receivers, as quarterbacks, as an offense, the tight end group. Offensive line,”  Williams said. “I truly feel in my heart when I walk off that field and we don’t put up points for the defense it hurts me.”

Cutting ties with Longo forces staff, players to adjust

Life without Longo will require some adjustments. There will be a new play caller, though Fickell would not identify that person.

A key change will be how the quarterback position is coached. That unit along with the receivers will now be coached together by receivers coach Kenny Guiton, who played quarterback at Ohio State and served as the interim offensive coordinator at Arkansas last season.

Williams and Locke like the early returns on that portion of the change.

“It’s been a good mesh,” Locke said. “Coach Guiton played the position, understands that perspective and how to manage that position so I’ve enjoyed working with him.

“But we’ve worked closely with the receivers all year, so I think that’s been good. We had a good day of practice today and will clean up things tomorrow and put another good one together and we’ll go in there Saturday ready to play.”

This marks the second straight year Fickell has relieved a coach of his duties. Last year offensive line coach Jack Bicknell was not retained. Two other coaches left for other jobs: receivers coach Mike Brown took the same position at Notre Dame and safeties coach Colin Hitschler moved on to Alabama.

“If anyone is listening or reading this, this is the new day and age of college football,” Renfro said. “Coaches leave. Players leave. This and that. It’s so much. It’s really turning into the NFL and you just have to trust the process, trust your work ethic, trust everyone around you because it’s all going to work out.

“You might not see it right then and there, but now I’m a fifth-year and I’ve looked back at all the work I’ve put in and all the stuff I’ve gone through and it’s made me better.”