Ask around Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin for the best bar in the city and most will say it is Poh’s Corner Pub downtown.
Kim Poh, 68, and her husband, George, 70, have run the place for the past 38 years. Kim’s parents owned the bar for more than a decade before her.
It’s an institution, a locals’s bar, like Sam Malone’s Cheers. There are darts, a pool table, a jukebox and cheap eats. A ‘half pounder’ burger costs $6.50. A side of Wisconsin cheese curds will run you $4.00.
‘We get about an equal number of tourists and locals in here,’ Kim tells me. ‘Most of our locals are Trump supporters.’
George agrees that the hard-working small business owners that he knows are voting for the former president. But the out-of-towners who’ve moved here from nearby Milwaukee or Chicago tend to vote Democrat, he says.
There’s an ‘unwritten rule’ in Poh’s: Don’t talk politics.
Folks don’t always follow the rules.
Kim points down the bar to an older man with graying hair, his elbows on the rail, nursing a pint.
‘He’s voting for Harris,’ Kim says. ‘Check the bathroom, I bet he wrote something on the chalkboard. He does it every time he comes in.’
Sure enough, in the men’s room in big bold letters on a chalkboard are the letters ‘FDT’.
Kim tells me that stands for ‘F*** Donald Trump.’
She shrugs it off.
Kim and George are backing Trump, but they’re well aware that Sturgeon Bay — and all of Door County, Wisconsin, where they live — is split.
That’s why Door County numbers among the 18 ‘swing’ counties across the seven ‘swing’ states that will decide the 2024 election.
Just like 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 the states were decided by a margin of three percentage points or less – and only a handful of their 513 counties really make the difference.
In 2020, Joe Biden carried Door County by just 292 votes — the tightest margin in any county in the state that year — and Biden won the state by a narrow 0.63 percentage point margin.
It’s an odd feature of American elections that the selection of the president comes down to so few votes – but that’s the reality in a country that has grown so polarized.
There are only a few places left politically diverse enough to occasionally change their collective mind.
And Door County is, in fact, very unique.
No other swing county in America has voted for the eventual winner of the election the last six times, earning Door the nickname, ‘America’s Swingiest County.’
Starting in 1996, Door County voted for George W Bush, twice. Then, it went for Barack Obama, twice, followed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
In Sturgeon Bay, the Mail noticed next-door neighbors with lawn signs supporting different candidate.
Erika May, an 82-year-old retired schoolteacher, is a longtime Republican voter and a resident of 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’s voting for Harris.
The signs in yard read: ‘Vote Blue’ and ‘Hate will not make us great.’
‘There really is no choice between the two, if you listen to Trump’s rhetoric, I don’t know how anyone can support that type of hatred,’ he said.
There’s something else fascinating about these ‘swing counties’ — they’re microcosms of America.
‘Door is a signature county,’ former Ronald Reagan pollster Craig Keshishian told DailyMail.com. ‘The demographics in this place largely match the makeup of the country in general.’
Nicknamed the ‘Cape Cod’ of the Midwest, Door sits 20 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin, on a peninsula boasting 300 miles of shoreline and jutting into Lake Michigan.
During the summer the population explodes with over 2.5 million visitors annually.
Over the years, some of those holidaymakers have come back to stay – and the decidedly red county was eventually turned a shifting-shade of purple.
There are 21,815 registered voters and the county boasts a 90% voter turnout.
While the county is 92 percent white, it is economically diverse.
There are retirees, farmers and professionals who escaped the big cities. There is heavy manufacturing industry here and some very wealthy enclaves, but there are also some folks who are struggling to get by.
‘These people’s lives are impacted by the state of the economy,’ says Keshishian.
The old political maxim rings true here as it does everywhere else: It’s the economy, stupid.
Maricopa County in Arizona is another critical ‘swing’ state prize. It is home to 62 percent of the state’s population and has swung between Trump in 2016 (a winner with 47.6 percent of the vote) to Biden in 2020 with 50 percent of the vote. That year Arizona went for Biden.
If Vice President Kamala Harris can carry Fayette County in Georgia this year, it’ll be a big boon to her White House hopes.
Trump carried Fayette County county in 2016 and 2020. But his margin of victory decreased significantly with 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 the battleground in the 2024 election.
Only six of 67 counties in Pennsylvania flipped from voting Republican in 2016 to Democrat 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, Austin Vandertie, 25, is a multi-generation 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 head of milking cows and 400 acres of land that they farm. He says he’s making less under Biden than Trump because his expenses have skyrocketed.
‘Fertilizer prices spiked the day after the Russia Ukraine war started,’ Vandertie tells me. ‘If something happens across the world us farmers feel 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 was better in the long run.’
‘Under Trump we had access to more markets and allowed us to have fair competition in those markets,’ he said.
That said, Vandertie knows a bunch of people voting for Harris. That’s how it is around here.
At Poh’s Corner Pub in Sturgeon, I ask that gray-haired man at the bar for an interview. He agrees, saying he only has two minutes.
He refuses to give his name but says he’s a 69-year-old retired schoolteacher and life-long Democrat (except for that one time he voted for George W. Bush).
‘Did you write ‘f*** Donald Trump’ on the chalkboard in the bathroom?’ I ask him.
Getting up to leave, he turns to me with a smirk as big as the Cheshire cat’s, says ‘yes’ and walks out.
