In Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, ask about the best bar in town and most will say it’s downtown Poh’s Corner Pub.
Kim Poh, 68, and her husband, George, 70, have been in charge for the past 38 years. Kim’s parents had owned the bar for over ten years.
It’s an institution, a locals’ bar, like Sam Malone’s Cheers. There are darts, a pool table, a jukebox and cheap food. A ‘half pounder’ burger costs $6.50. A side of Wisconsin cheese curds will set you back $4.00.
“We get about as many tourists here as locals,” says Kim. “Most of our locals are Trump supporters.”
George agrees that the hard-working small business owners he knows are voting for the former president. But out-of-towners who moved here from nearby Milwaukee or Chicago tend to vote Democrat, he says.
There is an ‘unwritten rule’ in Poh’s: don’t talk about politics.
People don’t always follow the rules.
Kim points along the bar to an older man with graying hair, his elbows on the railing as he drinks a pint.
“He’s voting for Harris,” Kim says. “Check the bathroom, I bet he wrote something on the board. He does it every time he comes in.”
Sure enough, in the men’s room, the letters “FDT” are written in big bold letters on a blackboard.
Kim tells me this stands for ‘F*** Donald Trump.’
She shrugs.
In Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, ask about the best bar in town and most will say it’s downtown Poh’s Corner Pub.
Sure enough, in the men’s room, the letters “FDT” are written in big bold letters on a blackboard. Kim tells me this stands for ‘F*** Donald Trump.’
Kim and George support Trump, but they are acutely aware that Sturgeon Bay — and all of Door County, Wisconsin, where they live — is divided.
That’s why Door County is among the 18 swing counties in the seven swing states that will decide the 2024 election.
As in 2020, the presidential race will come down to these battlegrounds (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina in the Sun Belt).
Four years ago, all states were decided by a margin of three percentage points or less — and only a handful of their 513 counties really make a difference.
In 2020, Joe Biden carried Door County by just 292 votes — the tightest margin of any county in the state that year — and Biden won the state by a narrow margin of 0.63 percentage points.
It is a strange feature of American elections that the election of the president comes down to so few votes – but that is the reality in a country that has become so polarized.
There are only a few places left that are politically diverse enough to occasionally change minds.
And Door County is actually very unique.
No other swing county in America has voted for the eventual winner of the election in the last six times, earning Door the nickname “America’s Swingiest County.”
Erika May outside her home on October 25, 2024 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin
Jerod Santek poses with his yard signs on October 25, 2024 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin
Beginning in 1996, Door County voted twice for George W. Bush. Then it was Barack Obama twice, followed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
In Sturgeon Bay, the Mail noticed neighbors with lawn signs supporting various candidates.
Erika May, an 82-year-old retired teacher, is a longtime Republican voter who has lived in Door County since 1964.
She proudly shows off her pro-Trump signs: “Trump Safety/Kamala Crime, Trump Low Prices/Kamala High Prices.”
Her neighbor Jerod Santek, 60, is an arts administrator and she is voting for Harris.
The signs in the garden read: ‘Vote Blue’ and ‘Hate will not make us great.’
‘There really isn’t a choice between the two. “If you listen to Trump’s rhetoric, I don’t know how anyone can support this kind of hate,” he said.
There’s something else fascinating about these swing counties: they are microcosms of America.
“Door is a signature county,” former Ronald Reagan pollster Craig Keshishian told DailyMail.com. “The demographics in this place are largely consistent with the makeup of the country in general.”
Nicknamed the “Cape Cod” of the Midwest, Door is located 20 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, on a peninsula with 300 miles of coastline jutting into Lake Michigan.
During the summer the population explodes with more than 2.5 million visitors per year.
Over the years, some of those vacationers have returned to stay — and the decidedly red province eventually turned an ever-changing shade of purple.
There are 21,815 registered voters and the province has a turnout of 90%.
Although the county is 92 percent white, it is economically diverse.
There are retirees, farmers and professionals who have fled the big cities. There is a heavy manufacturing industry here and some very wealthy enclaves, but there are also people struggling to make ends meet.
Bob Schottenhelm, who voted for Kamala Harris, poses for a photo on October 25, 2024 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin
Austin Vandertie, 25, is a multi-generational farmer in Brussels, Wisconsin, a town in southern Door County where dairy farms and grain silos dot the landscape.
“These people’s lives are affected by the state of the economy,” Keshishian said.
The old political maxim applies here as everywhere else: it’s the economy, stupid.
Arizona’s Maricopa County is another crucial swing state prize. It is home to 62 percent of the state’s population and has fluctuated between Trump in 2016 (a winner with 47.6 percent of the vote) and Biden in 2020 with 50 percent of the vote. That year, Arizona went for Biden.
If Vice President Kamala Harris can take over Georgia’s Fayette County this year, it will be a major boon to her White House hopes.
Trump carried Fayette County County in 2016 and 2020. But his margin of victory decreased significantly in each election — from 19 points against Hillary in 2016 to just seven points against Biden, who carried the entire state.
Pennsylvania has established itself as a battleground in the 2024 election.
Only six of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties switched from voting Republican in 2016 to voting Democratic in 2020.
Erie County is one of them. Trump won there in 2016, but lost to Biden in 2020 by about 1,400 votes.
Back in Door County, 25-year-old Austin Vandertie is a multi-generational farmer in Brussels, Wisconsin, a town in southern Door County where dairy farms and grain silos dot the landscape.
Vandertie and his family own 40 dairy cows and 400 hectares of land that they farm. He says he earns less under Biden than Trump because his spending has skyrocketed.
Nicknamed the “Cape Cod” of the Midwest, Door is located 20 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, on a peninsula with 300 miles of coastline jutting into Lake Michigan.
“Fertilizer prices rose the day after the war between Russia and Ukraine started,” says Vandertie. ‘If something happens somewhere in the world, we farmers feel the time impact the next day.’
Vandertie also points out that when then-President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2018, “it hurt at first, but it got better in the long run.”
“Under Trump we had access to more markets and we could have fair competition in those markets,” he said.
That said, Vandertie knows some people are voting for Harris. That’s how it is around here.
At Poh’s Corner Pub in Sturgeon, I ask the gray-haired man at the bar for an interview. He agrees and says he only has two minutes.
He declines to give his name, but says he is a 69-year-old retired teacher and a lifelong Democrat (except for that one time he voted for George W. Bush).
“Did you write ‘f*** Donald Trump’ on the blackboard in the bathroom?” I ask him.
He gets up to leave, turns to me with a grin as big as a Cheshire cat, says “yes” and walks out.