RACINE, Wisconsin — Just hours before former President Donald Trump accepted his party’s nomination Thursday for a third straight presidential election in front of thousands of Republicans on the final night of their national convention at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, about two dozen Democrats convened in their storefront office in this city about 25 miles south.
Feeling more like a PTA meeting than a political strategy session, the Democratic Party of Racine County’s monthly gathering wrapped up quicker than Trump’s record-length speech. Chair Kelly Gallaher ran through the nuts and bolts of a local party operation, congratulating volunteers for knocking on nearly 1,000 doors the previous weekend and announcing the opening of a field office in the city of Burlington to reach more voters on the county’s Republican-leaning west side.
Elected to lead the local party last year, Gallaher, who’s originally from Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, is clear-eyed about Democrats’ chances in this narrowly divided part of narrowly divided Wisconsin.
“It would be amazing to swing back to a blue county,” Gallaher said in an interview earlier this month, noting Racine County flipped to Trump in the past two presidential elections after supporting Democrat Barack Obama in the previous two. “I’m not counting on that happening. But I would like to narrow that gap. And if we narrow that gap, we know that we’re actually doing the work that is helping the overall vote in the state. … We take it really seriously because we have the votes here. We’ve just got to turn them out.”
Republicans have departed from Milwaukee, but as Democrats prepare to gather in Chicago in four weeks, ostensibly to celebrate the renomination of President Joe Biden at their convention, Wisconsin and much of the Midwest will remain near the center of the political universe as the path to the presidency runs through this state and neighboring Michigan.
In a race roiled by Trump’s felony conviction in May, the assassination attempt on his life on July 13 in Pennsylvania, another state key to the outcome of the election, and consternation among Democrats about whether the 81-year-old Biden should remain at the top of the ticket after a disastrous debate performance last month, the primacy of these states to both parties’ strategies remains unchanged.
Indeed, since selecting Chicago to host the Democratic National Convention more than a year ago, party officials have touted the importance of the “Blue Wall” states in carrying Biden to the White House in 2020 and to Democrats’ chances of retaining it for another four years.
The Biden campaign underscored this message in a memo earlier this month as it sought to calm the fears of jittery Democrats searching for alternatives.
“We have multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes, but we know that PA, MI and WI are critical to victory, which is why we’re investing heavily there and President Biden has prioritized the region over the past week,” the memo said.
On Friday, as speculation continued to swirl about whether Biden would drop out, the White House announced Vice President Kamala Harris would come to Milwaukee on Tuesday for a campaign event, her fifth visit to Wisconsin this year.
In accepting his party’s vice presidential nomination two days earlier, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, a Marine veteran, memoirist, former venture capitalist and onetime fierce critic of Trump, also nodded to the importance of the key Midwest battlegrounds.
The moment was not about him, Vance said, but rather “the autoworker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs” and “the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.”
Trump put it more bluntly in his own speech the following night, claiming the GOP convention was making an economic impact of more than $200 million to the Milwaukee area.
“So I hope you will remember this in November and give us your vote. I am trying to buy your vote. I’ll be honest about that,” he said. “And I promise we will make Wisconsin great again.”
While the presidential candidate who carries the state only wins 10 electoral votes, Wisconsin, once a reliably Democratic state, has become a toss-up in the 21st century, with four of the past six presidential elections decided by less than a percentage point. The exceptions were Barack Obama’s nearly 14-point victory in 2008 and his nearly 7-point win four years later.
In the past two elections, the state, with a relatively small population that doesn’t reflect the diversity of the U.S. as a whole, has been the tipping point that tilted the Electoral College vote to the winning candidate, Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
Wisconsin has undergone political shifts in the past decade and a half, with Democrats making inroads in suburban areas outside Milwaukee, particularly in the so-called WOW counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. The dynamic has been similar in the Chicago area, where Democrats have usurped the GOP in the collar counties. But unlike Illinois, Wisconsin has rural areas — where the GOP has gained strength — making up a sizable share of the state’s population.
As a result, Wisconsin has remained a closely divided state that gets an outsized share of attention from the national political parties, even as other once-purple states have tipped more reliably in one direction or the other — Colorado toward the Democrats and Ohio toward Republicans, for example.
“I don’t think there’s been another state that has stayed at that kind of knife-edge point for so long,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Balanced on that knife’s edge are places like Racine County, home to fewer than 200,000 people and located about halfway between Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s border with deep-blue Illinois.
The county is in some ways a microcosm of the state’s political situation, divided between the heavily Democratic city of Racine, which accounts for nearly 40% of the population, and the smaller municipalities and rural areas that favor the GOP.
In the past two presidential elections, Trump has carried the county by about 4 percentage points, though his margin of victory dropped slightly in 2020. But the county has alternated between supporting the state’s split U.S. Senate delegation, Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin, each time one has appeared on the ballot since 2010.
The area also is in the forefront of politics at the state level, with both the speaker of the State Assembly, Republican Robin Vos, and the leader of the Democratic minority, state Rep. Greta Neubauer, hailing from Racine County.
As Baldwin seeks a third term this year, winning in places like Racine County could prove crucial to Democrats retaining or building on their razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate. Her likely Republican opponent is Eric Hovde, a Trump-backed businessman from Madison who faces nominal opposition in the state’s Aug. 13 primary.
Wisconsin Democrats also are hoping to unseat three-term GOP U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil of Janesville, who represents the area in Washington, with a challenge from Peter Barca, a longtime state legislator who served a single term in Congress in the mid-1990s and most recently was the state’s revenue secretary.
And with new state legislative boundaries taking effect with this year’s election — maps that were agreed upon by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled state legislature after the state Supreme Court’s newly minted liberal majority threw out the previous GOP gerrymandered version — Democrats hope Racine County can help them come closer to winning a majority in Madison.
“A full set of intersecting political battles all come to this one place,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said in a recent interview. “And for that reason, we’re going to be pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, checking in with voters every place we can find them all the way until the polls close at 8 p.m. on Nov. 5 because what happens in Racine County could tip the whole state, and what happens in Wisconsin could tip the whole country.”
If that sounds like hyperbole, dueling visits from the presidential candidates in recent months show both campaigns are taking the county’s pivotal role seriously.
On a sunny afternoon about a month ago, Trump delivered a meandering address at Festival Park in the city of Racine along the Lake Michigan shore to a crowd dressed in all manners of American flag paraphernalia and sporting T-shirts with slogans such as “I’m voting for the felon,” referring to the fact that a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.
A few days earlier, Trump had reportedly called Milwaukee a “horrible city,” and, during the day of his Racine rally, his campaign worked to knock down media reports that during the RNC he planned to stay at Trump Tower in Chicago rather than in Wisconsin.
During his remarks, he proclaimed his “love” for Milwaukee, said he preferred the lakefront to the Atlantic or Pacific coast due to its lack of sharks, referred to the House select committee that investigated the insurrection by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political thugs,” and falsely claimed that “radical left Democrats rigged the 2020 election.”
Trump also railed against Biden’s executive action, announced that day, to ease the process for the noncitizen spouses and children of U.S. citizens to remain in the country, which he inaccurately characterized as “a mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens that came into our country,” drawing boos from the crowd.
Left unmentioned in Trump’s roughly 90-minute speech was the unfulfilled promise he made early in his presidency that Taiwanese tech firm Foxconn would build a giant manufacturing facility — which Trump dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world” — in nearby Mount Pleasant.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican who helped broker the deal, also neglected to mention Foxconn when he spoke before Trump took the stage at the rally, focusing instead on inflation during the Biden administration.
“We can’t afford four more years of Joe Biden,” Walker said.
When Biden visited the area in May, however, what’s become commonly known as the “Foxconn debacle” took center stage. That made sense, given the reason for his official presidential visit was to announce a new $3.3 billion Microsoft data center to support the company’s endeavors in artificial intelligence. The facility is planned for some of the same land once slated for Foxconn’s flat-screen factory.
Despite some pandering asides, like a story about how he attended “the only high school in Delaware that overwhelmingly rooted for Green Bay,” Biden’s message that day was focused: The policies of his administration, including investments in infrastructure and high-tech manufacturing, would deliver for southeastern Wisconsin what his predecessor had not.
“He came here with your senator, Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the ‘eighth wonder of the world,’” Biden told the crowd at an outpost of Gateway Technical College in Sturtevant. “Are you kidding me? Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it.”
It’s not that Foxconn abandoned its plans entirely.
The massive glass globe of the company’s High Performance Computing Data Center is visible along the highway that separates Racine County from its neighbor to the south, Kenosha County.
But it’s widely acknowledged the company won’t achieve its initial promise of creating 13,000 jobs and investing $10 billion in Wisconsin.
Foxconn did not respond to a request for comment on how many people the company currently employs in Racine County.
While it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration’s promise of 2,000 permanent jobs created by Microsoft’s AI data center comes to fruition, company President Brad Smith sounded more like a campaign surrogate than a business executive as he praised local officials and the president for making the project possible.
“Everything that we’re doing here in Racine County, Wisconsin, is also benefiting directly from the work of this White House and this president,” said Smith, a Milwaukee native. “In 2021, this president sat down across the aisle and persuaded our Congress to pass a bipartisan infrastructure law — a bipartisan infrastructure law that is investing in the roads and bridges that are needed to bring the steel to this plant.”
The controversy surrounding the Foxconn deal — which offered $3 billion in tax subsidies if the company fulfilled its promised investments — was a catalyzing event in Wisconsin politics, in Racine County and statewide.
Many observers attribute the defeat of Walker — whose pro-business, anti-union agenda helped remake Wisconsin politics — at the hands of Democrat Evers in the 2018 governor’s race at least in part to his central role in the Foxconn flop.
Pushing back against the proposed factory and the way local officials in the village of Mount Pleasant were handling it also prompted Gallaher, the Racine County Democratic chair, to go from active party volunteer to political candidate.
“It just never made sense from the very beginning,” said Gallaher, who ran unsuccessfully for village trustee in Mount Pleasant last year before being tapped to lead the local Democrats.
In addition to issues like abortion rights and protecting democracy, Democrats in Racine County and across Wisconsin are campaigning on the economy under Biden, even as lingering inflation overshadows other positive indicators in the minds of many voters.
Andrew Docksey, a Mount Pleasant village trustee who chairs the Racine County GOP, said he feels “pretty confident” about Republicans’ prospects in November because “a lot of this is kitchen-table issues.”
“All the people that were hit hardest with the last few years with … all the inflation, it’s not wealthy people,” he said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats that are living pretty close to paycheck to paycheck.”
While Foxconn was a risk that didn’t pay off, Docksey said, preparations for the project laid the groundwork for Microsoft to come to the area. Democrats from Biden on down are taking credit for the project, he said, but it should go to local officials.
Despite Trump’s prominent role in the unfulfilled promises of Foxconn, polling suggests a majority of Wisconsin voters rate him as better equipped to handle the economy, both here and nationally.
In the most recent Marquette Law School poll, for example, 52% of registered voters said Trump would do a better job than Biden on the economy, which ranked as the top issue among voters. Only 34% said Biden would do a better job.
The poll of 871 registered voters in Wisconsin was conducted June 12-20, before Biden’s listless debate performance ignited angst among Democrats about the top of their party’s ticket and before the assassination attempt on Trump and the RNC. At the time, the two candidates were virtually tied in a head-to-head matchup in the state.
What limited polling there has been in Wisconsin since the debate has shown a small slide in support for Biden without a corresponding boost for Trump, said Charles Franklin, a Marquette University Law School professor who directs the poll.
Marquette’s pollsters will be back in the field after the RNC, with results expected by the end of the month.
But given all that’s transpired in recent weeks, it may be somewhat difficult to tease out the impact of any one event, Franklin said.
“We’re going to have that combination of the shooting and the (Republican) convention and some lingering effects from the debate, maybe,” Franklin said. “So I don’t think we will have a clear answer about the effect of the shooting as opposed to the effect of the shooting and the RNC.”
What remains clear, both in Wisconsin and nationally, is that each candidate has a low favorability rating among voters — 40% for Biden and 41% for Trump in Wisconsin, according to the last Marquette poll.
A lack of support for Biden and Trump even among some in the party bases was evident in the state’s April presidential primary.
On the Democratic side, 48,373 voters, or about 8%, cast ballots to send “uninstructed” delegates to the DNC. That fell short of the 15% threshold needed to actually send unpledged delegates to Chicago but was more than double Biden’s margin of victory in the 2020 general election.
In the GOP primary, Trump received 79% of the vote, lower than Biden’s nearly 89% in his primary, with almost 13% voting for his former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’d dropped out a month earlier.
When Trump visited Racine in June, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Milwaukee-based immigrant and workers rights group Voces de la Frontera, was among a group of a few dozen protesters gathered a couple of blocks away, beneath an obelisk topped by a Union soldier on Monument Square in the city’s downtown.
Neumann-Ortiz’s group is adamantly opposed to Trump and helped drive turnout among Latino voters for Biden in 2020, but it also helped organize the “uninstructed” campaign in this year’s Democratic presidential primary, she said.
“People are very disillusioned with the Democratic Party, with the political system as a whole,” Neumann-Ortiz said.
Much as Biden’s continued support for Israel jeopardizes support among progressives who oppose the war in Gaza, the president’s increasingly restrictive approach to the southern border risks alienating those who have long advocated for immigration reform, she said.
But Trump also has alienated some voters who would traditionally support the Republican candidate for president.
On the morning of Biden’s May visit to announce the Microsoft project, Bob Froelich of nearby Calendonia was having breakfast with a group of friends at the Castlewood Restaurant, about a mile from where the president would speak.
“I’m absolutely disgusted with both candidates,” said Froelich, who noted he’s the same age as Biden.
Among the reasons he wouldn’t support Biden, he said, was that the Democrat’s stance on abortion conflicts with his own Christian faith.
But, he said, “I know I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump, so I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Speaking by phone during the week of the RNC, Froelich said little had changed in the intervening two months.
He said he was considering writing in Haley, whom he’d voted for in the primary, though it made him “a little sick to my stomach” to see her speaking in support of Trump from the convention stage in Milwaukee.
“I get it,” he said, “but I don’t have to like it.”