Between the bluffs and the river, a divided land of American character—and characters.
“I am a true neutral.”
Matthew Johnson, a short, energetic Texan, was talking politics as he showed off his spread on the south end of Bagley, Wisc., about a thousand feet from the Mississippi River.
There was Abby, the miniature horse from the same sure-footed breed that once worked in the nearby lead mines; his father’s old gravestone protected by a working replica of an early 19th-century signal cannon; and, in a wooden crate, the traditional blacksmithing forge he built. Johnson breaks it out at fairs to reenact life on the American frontier.
Politics, Johnson said, leads to division. People in Bagley try to avoid the subject.
“We’ve got ultra-conservatives, ultra-liberals, and everybody knows that this is not the place to start your crap,” he told The Epoch Times. Behind him, a freight train screamed on its way through town.
Bagley voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, narrowly the first time and by a much greater margin in 2020. In 2012, former President Barack Obama swept the community, winning 123 votes to just 47 for Republican former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
The village is in Grant County, one of many western Wisconsin counties that flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016. WisContext found that in 2016, Republican turnout increased in rural areas and small urban centers. What’s more, even as overall turnout fell, it rose in many counties that flipped. Like virtually every county that went from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, Grant stayed in Trump’s corner in 2020.
Two hundred sixty miles north of Bagley in the state’s Northwoods vacationland, Sawyer County also flipped in 2016. Voter turnout rose that year too.
Once a presidential bellwether, Sawyer broke that streak in 2020 when it stuck with Trump.
Jim Miller, a local Republican and Fourth Ward alderperson in Hayward, theorized that Sawyer’s Republican turn was “part of a national trend where rural counties have become more red and the large metro areas have become more blue.”
