Obama won the state of Wisconsin with 52.83% of the vote to Romney's 45.89%, a 6.94% margin of victory.[2] While this represented half the victory margin of Obama's 13.91% win in 2008, when he won 59 of 72 counties and 7 of 8 congressional districts, it is still a much stronger Democratic victory than Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, or even his running mate Joe Biden in 2020, who all won the state by less than 1% of the vote. Obama's win was also surprisingly comfortable in spite of the fact that Wisconsin was the home state of Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, making him the first Republican vice presidential nominee to lose their home state since Jack Kemp lost New York in 1996. Obama's win was attributed to victories in Milwaukee, the state's largest city; Madison, the state capital; northeastern Wisconsin; and the Driftless Region. Romney's strength was concentrated in the loyally Republican Milwaukee suburbs, particularly the WOW counties (Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha), where he carried a combined 67.03% of the vote to Obama's 32.00%. He also flipped 24 counties in the Northeast and Central Plain regions, though most of them were rural and therefore insufficient to overcome Obama's aforementioned victories.
As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last time the Democratic presidential nominee won the following counties: Adams, Buffalo, Columbia, Crawford, Dunn, Forest, Grant, Jackson, Juneau, Kenosha, Lafayette, Lincoln, Marquette, Pepin, Price, Racine, Richland, Sawyer, Trempealeau, Vernon, and Winnebago. This remains the last time that any candidate won Wisconsin with more than 50% of the vote or by more than 1 percentage point, that the state weighed in as more Democratic than the nation as a whole, or that a Republican won greater than 60% of the vote in the traditional Republican strongholds of Waukeusha and Ozaukee counties, or that Wisconsin voted to the left of Pennsylvania.