ALGOMA, Wis. — The confrontation in this tiny fishing town on Lake Michigan that markets itself as “Friendly Algoma” began, in the modern American fashion, with a Facebook post.
In early October, an anonymous poster complained on Algoma’s community Facebook page that someone had been vandalizing political signs around town. Stay off your neighbor’s lawn, the poster wrote, saying that “kindness should always win.”
Dennis Paul, 65, an Algoma resident, saw the post and typed in a couple of sharp comments. So did his neighbor, Abbey Bridges, 40, a Democrat who lives across the street, writing that there was little point in engaging in political debate with Paul, a supporter of former President Donald Trump.
Hours later, sitting on the wraparound porch of his white clapboard house, Paul saw Bridges walking her dog and decided not to let the whole thing rest.
“Get a job!” he shouted, Bridges recalled, lobbing more insults and what she perceived as a threat to beat her up. She called the police.
Algoma is known in Wisconsin as a sleepy, charming little place, a draw for tourists with its charter fishing trips, antique shops and beachfront boardwalk that is perfect for a lakeside stroll.
What is less widely known is its unusually deep political divide.
The vast majority of Americans live in geographic polarization, towns and cities where many people generally share the same political sensibilities. Only 5% of the U.S. population lives in a neighborhood where the vote margin between President Joe Biden and Trump in 2020 was less than 3 percentage points.
Algoma is one of those places: It is among the most politically split communities in the nation, a 50-50 town in a 50-50 battleground state. Four years ago, Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes. He won in Algoma — population 3,200 — by a mere six votes.
Now in the final days of the presidential campaign, the race in Wisconsin appears deadlocked, far too close for pollsters to call.
And even typically placid towns like Algoma, where everyone knows each other, have begun to boil over.
It has been this way for weeks, as nerves over the election have infused real-life interactions. Neighbors of Paul and Bridges watched, aghast, as the police arrived to mediate their dispute earlier this month — “there was yelling, shouting,” said one neighbor, Celeste Karol, 71.
Longtime residents of Algoma said later that the intersection near the homes of Paul and Bridges was so filled with conspicuously warring political signs that locals had a name for it: “the crazy corner.”
Some people in Algoma have tried their best to show a professionally neutral stance, while anxiously counting the days until the election.
“I have to really think about my words sometimes,” said Ileen Ross, a florist, whose clients are a mix of Democrats and Republicans. “We live in a very interesting small town.”
Other business owners have thrown aside their reluctance, hanging Trump flags outside or displaying signs for Vice President Kamala Harris in their store windows.
Ellen Levenhagen, a potter, hung a sign for a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly, Renee Paplham, at the entrance of her art gallery. She has more campaign signs in the back of the store, she pointed out, visible from a back street.
“My husband’s going, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to get the window broken,’” Levenhagen said.
Tensions have emerged within families that are mixed with both Republicans and Democrats, arguing over immigration policy, the economy and reproductive rights — all hot-button issues in Wisconsin.
Gloria Moore, 42, a Harris supporter and Algoma resident, has grown frustrated by her father, Dusty Moore, who is a Harris voter but lately comes back from coffee with his friends, she says, sounding suspiciously like a conservative.
“He has no problem with immigrants, but then he says, ‘The illegals are coming over and getting money,’” she said. “I tell him, ‘You’re sitting in that coffee club too long — it’s seeping into your brain. You sound like an idiot.’”
Jacob Blazkovec, a lawyer and official with the county Republican Party, said his family was particularly divided by the election.
His sister, Amy Johnson, is a former teacher, a Democrat and a City Council member who lives in Algoma. She is married to Stan Johnson, the chair of the county Democratic Party.
Blazkovec refers to his sister as “Switzerland,” a neutral human buffer between the two men. Stan Johnson calls Blazkovec “Jakey.”
“Our views are different politically,” Johnson said. “But that’s her brother and I’m her husband. She’s the one that keeps the family together.”
Then there is Blazkovec’s wife, Peggy, an independent who has refused his request to put a Trump sign in their front yard.
“She goes, ‘I will not vote for that man,’ and I think it’s because of his character,” Blazkovec said, sitting in his office in downtown Algoma. “So we agree to disagree, and our votes are going to cancel out.”
Town officials are feeling the effects of the political divide, too.
In the basement of the police station last week, Algoma Police Chief David Allen wearily listed incidents that had required intervention from his five-officer force. Two teenagers were ticketed for kicking over Harris signs as they rode by on bicycles. (They were tracked down with the help of video surveillance and cited for damage to property, he said.)
A resident complained that there were political signs on a parkway, which is technically public property and therefore not a legal place to post political messaging. An officer responded and made sure that the signs were removed.
Another resident has been receiving anonymous mail in recent weeks attacking her for supporting Trump, Allen said, pushing a postcard across his desk with a cartoon of Trump with a spiked tail and horns.
“It just seems like it just makes my job harder,” Allen said. “And it makes my officers’ jobs harder. Their jobs are hard enough doing the things that they’re dealing with.”
Residents of Algoma said that they were used to carefully navigating political differences, a way of life in a place that is split down the middle. It is one of at least 26 Wisconsin towns of 1000 residents or more where the 2020 presidential election was divided by fewer than 25 votes.
“This is a very small community, where everybody cares about everybody, regardless of what your political beliefs are,” said Erin Mueller, the city clerk. “Everybody’s going to sit at the same table and drink out of the same pot of coffee.”
The regular coffee group hosted by Dusty Moore gathered in his garage in Algoma last Friday, sitting in a circle next to his gleaming vintage cars.
They are a politically diverse group: George Davies, 83, a Trump supporter who lives in Arizona most of the year; Melanie Shaw, 54, an independent who is voting for Harris; Rick Basken, 43, a Harris supporter who works in real estate; and Joel Krautkramer, 65, a retired electrician who intends to vote but is still undecided.
Shaw said that when the group had recently gathered outside, she saw what Moore was wearing — a “white dudes for Harris” hat — and began to worry.
“I’m sitting here thinking, are we on a street that has a lot of Trump people?” she said. “Like we’re kind of in an open area. Are we going to get shot at or anything?”
Several blocks away, back on what locals call “the crazy corner,” the neighbors have been locked in an impasse since the incident earlier this month.
Bridges, who called the police on Paul, her Trump-supporting neighbor, said that she had been keeping the shades in her living room closed, so that he cannot see inside.
“He called me a whole bunch of things that really didn’t make sense,” she said in an interview from her backyard, a location chosen to stay out of Paul’s sightlines. “Now, I am avoiding him like the plague.”
Paul, who is retired from a manufacturing job and likes to dress up in a Trump suit and march in the town parade, acknowledged that he yelled at her.
But she said all kinds of nasty things about him in the Facebook post, he said as he stood on his front porch, which is decorated with Trump signs and a banner declaring “Kamala Harris is an idiot.”
Paul is nervous about the presidential election. Motorists who drive by keep honking and giving him the middle finger. Some people yell that he is a traitor, or a loser. How can half of the people in this town vote for Harris, he asked, when she wants to keep abortion legal and allow immigrants to enter the United States?
He might leave Algoma altogether, depending on the outcome of the election. It’s a dying town, he said, full of old people and too reliant on tourism.
And Paul doesn’t know why the people across the street with the Harris signs are so mad at him, anyway.
“I have no problem with my neighbors,” he said. “I really don’t.”
