Kamala Harris urged Wisconsinites to “turn the page” on Donald Trump as she rallied voters just outside Milwaukee on Friday night — scrambling to boost turnout in a Democratic stronghold lagging the rest of the state in early voting.
Data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows the city of Milwaukee is trailing the rest of the state by about 7 percent both in its mail-in return rate and in overall registered voter turnout. It’s a warning sign, even some Democrats privately say, for Harris as her campaign looks to run up the score with urban and suburban voters to overcome Wisconsin’s rural counties.
“For you who have not voted yet, no judgment. Let me just be clear, no judgment at all, but do get to it if you can,” Harris said with a laugh during her rally, where she was also joined by rapper Cardi B. “For those of you who have not yet voted, please think about, right now, your plan for voting.”
Harris’ rally — held just a few miles from where Trump held a dueling event the same night — came as she and Trump returned to the swing state days before an election that polling suggests is virtually tied here, as in the other battlegrounds. And the Harris campaign will dispatch former President Barack Obama to Milwaukee on Sunday to campaign for her.
But even with the increased attention on the state this week, some Wisconsin Democrats are still “most worried about Milwaukee,” where “we need more attention,” said one operative, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. They acknowledged that Milwaukee has “seen the steady erosion of Black and Latino support from election to election.”
Support for Democrats — and the size of turnout — “has exploded” in Dane County, home to the state capital and its flagship university, the operative said. But that's not the situation in the largest city. "It's covered up problems in Milwaukee in the polling," they said. "The trend looks bad buried inside these wins."
In Wisconsin, Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide contests, an impressive run in a narrowly divided state. Their success comes primarily through building insurmountable margins in urban and suburban communities — a handful of heavily populated blue dots scattered across a mostly rural state. Their ability to secure those margins in the cities and the suburbs while avoiding a blowout in rural counties worked especially well for Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who won re-election in 2022 by a 3-point margin.
“I worried in 2022 that the Republican voters would snap back to the Republican party, but instead, Republicans moved toward MAGA, and suburban voters felt left behind,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “There’s a hunger for a return to reasonableness that started in 2016, then even more in 2018, when Democrats started flipping Republican-held assembly seats, and the governor's race in 2022 and [state] Supreme Court race in 2023 — we see that energy now.”
But 2024 presents a fresh slate of challenges for Democrats. There are eight presidential candidates on the ballot, the most of any battleground state, raising the risk of third-party candidates cutting into Harris’ totals. The state also hasn’t drawn as much attention as Pennsylvania or Michigan, ranking fifth in TV ad spending for the Harris campaign, according to a POLITICO analysis. Before this week, Harris had visited the state seven times — more than Trump, who had visited it five times — but less than the other two Blue Wall states. That changed this week when Harris held rallies in Madison on Wednesday and hit three cities on Friday.
Before her rally on Friday night, Harris greeted voters at an electrical workers’ union hall in Janesville, Wis., and rallied supporters at a high school gymnasium in Little Chute, Wisc., where she committed to eliminating college degrees for some federal jobs as a day-one executive action.
But in Milwaukee, Democrats have “lost ground,” a long-term challenge for the party that hasn’t been able to match the voter turnout that Obama generated in 2008 and 2012, said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic consultant based in Wisconsin.
So “we may well lose ground again, but the question is — where are we doing better?” he said.
“Look at Dane County. Look at Republican shrinkage in the WOW counties,” Zepecki said, referring to the three Republican-leaning suburban counties around Milwaukee, where Democrats have improved their numbers in the Trump era. The last example came from Waukesha Mayor Shawn Reilly, a Republican, who endorsed Harris last week. “Yes, we’ve seen some diminishment of Democratic performance in Milwaukee over time. But compare that to Republican Trump-era struggles in the suburbs … One of those matters — for the statewide math — a lot more than the other.”
Indeed, Democrats pointed to strong turnout in Dane County, which is outperforming the rest of the state, as a positive sign for Harris. A Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss internal data, said their modeling shows that, so far, the Republicans who participated early voting are not sporadic voters. Instead, the vast majority of them voted in the 2022 midterms, putting more pressure on the former president to get out low propensity voters on Election Day.
Milwaukee, too, set a record for its strongest in-person absentee voting day on Thursday.
“We’re seeing extremely strong turnout across the state, setting records each day, and part of that is because Republicans are now early voting, so suddenly, we’re seeing high-propensity Republican voters converting to becoming early voters versus Milwaukee, which has more low-propensity voters,” said a Wisconsin Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “Milwaukee is about performing where it was in 2020 and in 2022, and Democrats won those years.”
On Friday, a senior Harris campaign official also said that their data shows late-deciders are breaking their way by “double-digits,” which they believe will help them on Election Day turnout.
Mandela Barnes, the state’s former Democratic lieutenant governor, said he’s “still expecting a huge Election Day turnout” in the city.
“The rally she’s having in Milwaukee, all the events she’s had here, has demonstrated the campaign’s understanding of how important this area is,” said Barnes, who now leads Power to the Polls Wisconsin, a progressive turnout operation.
Mandela said his group has 150 to 200 people knocking doors this week and they’ll be expanding to 500 on Election Day. But to fix the longer-term challenge of declining Black turnout in Milwaukee, “we need to do off-cycle organizing because that's what we need to do to build power.”
Jessica Piper contributed to this report.
0 Comments