Tag Archives: Wisconsin

One small community claims to be at the center of a hemisphere

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If the Earth is roughly a sphere, is one point on its surface more at the center of things than others? One spot in Wisconsin makes note of its particular location:

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Venture west of Wausau, and you’ll find yourself meandering down a country road that leads to a point of global significance—a point where latitude and longitude find harmony at 45 degrees North and 90 degrees West.

Visualize yourself standing at this exact midpoint, not just in a geographical sense between the North Pole and the Equator, but also between the prime meridian and its direct opposite across the globe…

If you pulled out a map, you’d find yourself at the intersection of some of the world’s most important lines of navigation.

Of the four such points globally, Poniatowski’s slice of longitude and latitude is the only one that’s readily accessible.

The others?

They’re either swimming with the fishes in oceanic depths or hiding in landscapes far less hospitable…

The original marker was a humble signpost in a field, but today, thanks to generous community efforts, there stands a clear path, welcoming benches, and an official marker that stakes its claim in the ground.

Hmmm. As Wikipedia notes, “A prime meridian is an arbitrarily-chosen meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°.” And the one prime meridian that won out affects this claim in Wisconsin.

While this claim is based on imposing coordinates on the surface of the planet, I wonder how people around the world would answer this question: “What do you consider to be the center of the world?” Would it be major cities, like New York City or Tokyo? Religious sites? Their homes or land? A natural spot?

Or it might be interesting to investigate which places claim to be at the center of things. A place could be at the geographic or social center of a country. Where are the center points of cities or regions? Is it more important to be at the geographic or social center (see this example from the United States)?

Connecting sundown towns and votes for Trump in Wisconsin

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Sundown towns were once common in the North and one academic looks at the connections between such communities and voting for Donald Trump:

Did sundown towns elect Trump in Wisconsin? My research assistant, Kathryn Robinson, and I tried to find out. Since it is much easier to get county-level election returns than municipal ones, we concentrated on “sundown counties,” those having a county seat that could be established as a sundown town or likely sundown town in Loewen’s mapping. An incredible 58 of the state’s 72 counties fit into such a category. Of the 58 sundown counties 31 are 1% or less African American (and only eight more than 2%), suggesting that the proxy of the county seat works in identifying sundown areas at the county level.

The simple answer on Trump and sundown towns in Wisconsin is: “Clearly they elected him.” Sundown counties gave Trump almost 935,000 votes to Clinton’s just over 678,000. His margin in the sundown areas exceeded 256,000 votes. That Clinton won the fifteen non-sundown counties by almost 230,000 votes could not make up for Trump’s 58% to 42% margin in the sundown ones. Just short of two/thirds of all Trump voters in Wisconsin came from sundown counties. Only nine sundown counties chose Clinton with 49 for Trump…

Our appreciation of the critically important historical dimension to sundown voting—both Robinson and I are trained in that discipline—ironically came through a sociologist. That is, when I contacted Loewen to outline the project to him, he mentioned having recently been to Calhoun County, a tiny sundown county in Illinois near where I grew up. That county, he told me, had voted for Obama in the same proportions as the rest of the country in 2008. I then looked up its 2016 vote, a landslide for Trump. Robinson and I had reason to wonder if a similar swing from Obama to Trump characterized the 2008 to 2016 trajectory of sundown county voters in Wisconsin.

The pattern could hardly been more striking. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain in all but eight of Wisconsin’s sundown counties. These virtually all-white counties delivered to the African American candidate a majority of nearly 143,000 votes. The fifteen very small sundown counties discussed above supported Obama in 2008 by 57.4% to 42.6%. The countervailing continuity lay in the metro Milwaukee suburbancounties, where the vote went to the conservative candidate in both 2008 and 2016, by overwhelming margins in both cases. The intervening 2012 election proved a halfway house, with the Milwaukee suburban counties solidly for Romney but Obama splitting the other sundown counties with the Republican ticket. By 2016, just under 400,000 votes had switched from the Democratic to the Republican candidate in sundown Wisconsin. Outside of the sundown counties the pro-Republican swing from 2008 to 2016 was just 17,000 votes.

It would be worthwhile to see such research carried out elsewhere as there were more sundown towns than people imagine (even if actual laws or records about them are difficult to find).

While Loewen alerts us to this important history, it is also interesting to consider how sundown counties or towns can experience rapid racial and ethnic change. This article cites a rural community that suddenly had an influx of Latino workers for several manufacturing plants. Or, imagine some suburban areas after World War Two that had rapid development and demographic change. I’m thinking of Naperville, Illinois, a sundown town that due to high quality residential and job growth is a suburb today that is increasingly non-white and where city leaders praise the growing diversity. Is there a point where the effects of being a sundown town disappear or could such effects pop up again depending on the situation (economic factors, racial and ethnic change, certain leaders, etc.)?

Two “cousin” states follow different paths: Minnesota goes Democrat, Wisconsin goes Republican

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A look at the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin highlights the political differences between the two states:

In 2013, Wisconsin’s lawmakers cut income taxes. They approved an expansion of school vouchers. They passed a requirement, portions of which are now being contested in court, that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that women seeking abortions get ultrasounds. They rewrote iron mining rules to ease construction of an open pit in Northern Wisconsin.

In Minnesota, lawmakers sent more money to public schools, raised income taxes on the highest earners, increased the tax on cigarettes and voted to add new business taxes. They allowed some undocumented immigrants to get in-state tuition for public universities. They legalized same-sex marriage.

“It’s staggering, really, like night and day,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got two states with the same history, the same culture, the same people — it’s kind of like they’re cousins. And now they’re looking across the border and seeing one world, then seeing something else entirely on the other side.”

This sounds like a good natural experiment for social scientists to look at. If the states share similar backgrounds and geography, perhaps the differences in outcomes over the next few years can be attributed to the different political parties in control. Unfortunately, the article is pretty impressionistic thus far and doesn’t offer too many concrete differences in life. Perhaps not enough time has passed – or perhaps the differences in daily life still might not change that much for most residents.

The battle between Illinois and Indiana casinos

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Due to budget issues, Illinois lawmakers recently approved new five new casinos. But it remains to be seen how the new casinos in Illinois will affect the already-existing casinos in northwest Indiana:

All told, the five casinos [in northwestern Indiana] generated nearly half a billion dollars in tax revenue in 2010.

Five casinos are strung along the Lake Michigan shoreline in some of the Hoosier State’s most economically depressed communities. Ball State University economist Mike Hicks says at least one casino likely would be shut down by increased competition. Some 80 percent of gamblers visit casinos once or twice a year, and choose newer, glitzier options, Hicks said…

Horseshoe spent $400 million to build a brand-new “boat” that is essentially a floating building just three years ago, an investment Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said was made with the prospect of a downtown Chicago casino in mind.

“We wanted to build something that was Chicago-proof,” McDermott said. “I think it’s the best option outside Las Vegas.”

I have to think that the knowledge that this gambling tax revenue was going to Indiana helped motivate Illinois lawmakers to capture some of this money. And I wonder if any politicians were thinking about the talk from Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, and other states months ago regarding encouraging businesses to leave the high taxes of Illinois.

I haven’t seen much talk about many casinos the Chicago area could reasonably support. There are already four, two in Joliet, one in Elgin, and one in Aurora plus the five in northwest Indiana plus more across the borders in Wisconsin and Michigan. And it would be interesting to see how these existing casinos have helped or hurt their communities (and the state government).