Wisconsin had a big political year. We look back on the top politics stories of 2024.

Wisconsin was front and center in the world of politics for the majority of this year.

WPR Capitol Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson joined “Morning Edition” host Alex Crowe to help us sum up the political whirlwind of 2024.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Alex Crowe: President-elect Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin, where President Joe Biden won in 2020. Can you help us break down where we saw some of these shifts that helped Trump get the state?

Shawn Johnson: So when it comes to Trump’s numbers, I wouldn’t say that you would look at it there were major shifts where a certain pocket of the state that hadn’t supported him before did, or vice versa.

I think what happened is that he just outperformed what he had done in the past. It was still the same Trump model, where he had huge turnout in rural counties. He just ratcheted that up.

Kamala Harris actually got better numbers than Joe Biden did in 46 counties. It’s just that Trump did better than his 2020 numbers in all 72 counties. He outperformed his own 2020 numbers by more than 87,000 votes, and that was enough to carry him over the finish line.

It felt like a commanding win because of the size of the vote that he got, but it was still within 1 percent because this is Wisconsin.

AC: Wisconsin is often thought of as a purple state. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. How did that end up happening?

SJ: It is a real nice snapshot of purple Wisconsin when you can have two very different candidates win on the statewide level.

I think you start with Tammy Baldwin being a formidable candidate, and she received about 4,500 more votes than did Kamala Harris. Baldwin outperformed Harris in 57 counties.

Baldwin still has some support in these rural counties, even as they’ve gone very strongly Republican over the years.

Then, you look at Baldwin’s Republican opponent, Eric Hovde. He received about 54,000 fewer votes than did Trump. Trump outperformed Hovde in 70 counties. You add that up, and you end up with a narrow Baldwin victory.

AC: The Republican National Convention was hosted this past year in Milwaukee. You were there. Can you tell us a little bit about the energy and the feel when you were there?

SJ: Remember this was coming off of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance. Biden had Democrats lobbying him to get out of the presidential race. He was still in it when the Republican convention happened in Milwaukee.

Then the weekend before the convention, there was an assassination attempt on Trump, where a bullet grazed his ear. At first, there were some questions about, well, is this going to go forward? What’s it going to be like?

The convention did happen. It was very secure environment, just given all the miles of fencing and police all over the place, but the Republican Party really rallied around him at this convention. Some people were talking about him in biblical terms.

And coming out of the convention, the conventional wisdom was, there’s no way Trump can lose this election. Then Kamala Harris gets in the election, and she has her convention in Chicago, and there was a conventional wisdom coming out of that, that there’s no way that Harris can lose.

It was just one of those years where so much happened of great consequence, and in the end, it was Trump who came out on top.

AC: We’ve all been focused on this presidential election, but a lot happened at the state level as well, especially new legislative maps going into effect. Tell us a bit about those maps and how it shaped this past year’s elections.

SJ: It was a seismic change in Wisconsin politics, because we’ve been operating under roughly the same maps since 2011 when Republicans took control of state government after the census and drew maps that helped grow and cement their power for more than a decade.

Well, in 2023 we got a new state Supreme Court. They overturned the existing GOP maps and said, “Governor and Legislature, if you don’t draw new maps, we are going to take over for you.” I think to a lot of people’s surprise, Democratic Governor Tony Evers and the Republican Legislature did, in fact, agree on new maps that were drawn by Evers.

The calculation among Republicans was that these were kind of their best option among the potential options that were before the court. They felt like they could compete under these maps.

And they did. If you look at the Assembly races in a map, Republican candidates for the Assembly won 54. So not a massive majority like they had before of 64 seats, but they still have a majority in the Assembly.

In the Senate, Democrats had kind of a best-case scenario election. They flipped four seats. That sets them up very well for the 2026 election, when they would have a chance to flip that chamber.