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President Biden gestures after speaking about student loan debt relief at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisc., on Monday. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This week President Biden took his campaign to save his embattled presidency to Madison, Wisc., the capital of a state he is counting on winning in November.

The capital, sometimes known as "Mad City," is also home to the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin, the largest college in the state. Beyond the state government and education establishment, Madison has become a magnet for white collar occupations and a hard place for many recent UW graduates to leave.

Given the recent voting proclivities of younger voters and especially those who are current or recent college graduates, Madison and surrounding Dane County should be a trove of votes for Democrats. And indeed, they are.

Historically, Democrats have counted on running up big margins in industrial Milwaukee County, long a stronghold of organized labor and the state's most populous county. Dane and a few other populous counties were counted on in supporting roles. If a Democrat was to win statewide, these polities had to counterbalance the strong Republican leanings of the state's more affluent suburbs and farm towns.

But in recent elections, Dane has stepped out to sing lead. It is the quintessential example of a college-and-government population center that has become more than a trove of Democratic votes. It has become a defining feature of the party identity. It is not much of an exaggeration, if it is one at all, that college towns are to the Democrats today what factory towns were through most of the 20th century.

In 2020, for example, Biden carried Milwaukee County by about 183,000 votes over Trump out of about 451,000 votes cast. But he had an almost equal bulge in actual votes in Dane County, where he managed 181,000 votes over Trump out of a far smaller total of about 338,000 votes cast.

In midterm elections, such as 2018 and 2022, the role of Dane County's Democratic turnout has been even more dominant. And the same was true when Wisconsin elected a liberal state supreme court justice in 2023, making it possible to restore abortion rights and throw out Republican-drawn maps for state legislative districts.

So it made sense for Biden to be in Madison if he hopes to keep Wisconsin in his column this fall. And it is hard to overstate the importance of doing so for the president. In 2020 he managed just 49.6 percent of the statewide vote, but it was better than the 46.9 percent Hillary Clinton had in the state in 2016 and just enough to shade then-incumbent President Donald Trump who had 48.9 percent. Trump was only 20,000 votes behind.

Clinton's 2016 loss in Wisconsin had become for some the emblem of her fatal weakness in the Great Lakes region. Michigan and Pennsylvania also fell out of the "Blue Wall" that year after voting Democratic for president every year since 1992 even when the Democratic candidate was losing nationally.

But somehow Wisconsin seemed the unkindest cut of all. Polls there had shown Clinton's lead well beyond the margin of error. And Wisconsin had been voting Democratic even longer than the others, all the way back to 1988. Confident of Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign did not return for events in the state after the primary.

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Wisconsin's 'Mad City' is a rational choice for Biden's appeal to youth - NPR