Biden is trailing Trump in the polls and could be more bullish in one battleground

In most battleground states, President Biden’s reelection campaign is being followed by worrying polls, complaints of a slow rise and Democratic calls to show more urgency to the threat posed by former President Donald J. Trump.

Then there’s Wisconsin.

Mr. Biden — who will travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday to visit his state campaign headquarters — did not need to fire up a reelection apparatus in Wisconsin. Local Democrats never shut down a storied organizing network they built for the 2020 presidential campaign and maintained through the 2022 midterm elections and a 2023 Supreme Court contest that was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history .

While Democrats in other presidential battlegrounds are still trying to explain what’s at stake in the 2024 election and what a second Trump term would mean, Wisconsin Democrats say their voters don’t have to tell the difference between winning and losing. to be told.

Wisconsin Democrats were pushed out of power for eight years by Governor Scott Walker and Republicans who had an iron grip on the state government, and then for another four years with a Republican-led legislature. Then they watched abortion become illegal overnight when an 1849 ban suddenly became law with the fall of Roe v. Wade. Party leaders in the state say there is widespread understanding that the stakes are not theoretical.

“We organize year-round in Wisconsin,” said Lt. Governor Sara Rodriguez. “We already have the infrastructure ready. We know how to do this, and we have been able to activate the people who know what is at stake.”

Mr. Biden has come to Wisconsin so often — eight visits since he became president, and six for Vice President Kamala Harris — that his visit on Wednesday comes almost as an afterthought to many Wisconsin Democrats.

An equally big problem for local organizers, Ms. Rodriguez said, are the Democratic Party of Wisconsin kickoff events, which will begin Saturday at the 44 offices being opened by the party and the Biden campaign across the state. Ms. Rodriguez said she planned to be in Wausau, a city in central Wisconsin where the progressive mayor will be up for re-election in April.

It helps Mr. Biden that the two issues his campaign has focused on — abortion rights and democracy — have been at the center of political discussion in Wisconsin in recent years.

Polls from The New York Times and Siena College in November showed that while Biden had a three-point Democratic lead in all the top states, he had a 13-point lead in Wisconsin alone. . In those polls, Mr. Biden led in Wisconsin while lagging in each of the other battleground states.

More recent studies of Marquette Law School And Fox news have discovered that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were actually locked in a feud; including third-party candidates, the former president is ahead by two or three points.

Wisconsin Republicans there contested Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory, who won just 20,608 votes, well into 2022. One of the party’s candidates for governor in 2022 ran to decertify the 2020 election and to revoke ten of Wisconsin’s electoral votes (which is not the case). something the Constitution allows), and the State Assembly has given permission for a year $2 million investigation to election fraud that provided no new evidence.

Last year, a liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won the crucial election for the state Supreme Court, a major victory for Democrats. Soon after, Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the state Assembly, floated the idea of ​​impeaching her before she could cast a decisive vote on issues that would ultimately lead to the undoing of the state’s gerrymandered legislative plans and abortion ban.

Internal polling by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin last September showed that 70 percent of Democratic voters had heard of Republican threats of impeachment — an extraordinary figure considering it was a state issue in an era of weakened local news reporting.

And right-wing Republicans in Wisconsin remain angry. On Monday, a group of them submitted more than 10,000 signatures to recall Mr. Vos, who is widely seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump despite his efforts to sow doubts about the election. (The Wisconsin Elections Commission said Tuesday that an initial review found that the recall group’s petitions did not contain enough valid signatures to force a recall election for Mr. Vos.)

Sen. Ron Johnson, the spiritual leader of Wisconsin Republicans, said in an interview Monday that Biden’s position in the state depended more on voters’ sour views on the economy than on questions about democracy and abortion rights.

“When you go to the supermarket and see what the bill is, when young people try to buy a house and realize it is completely unaffordable, when you are stuck in your house with your low interest mortgage and you can no longer trade because the interest rates are so much higher. These are the things that actually impact people,” Mr Johnson said. “They are not economists. They don’t look at the monthly economic numbers that Biden is trying to tout.”

Mr. Johnson said he “hoped Democrats would not be able to scare” on abortion rights and that he did not believe Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election draw – in which he was partly involved – the consequences for 2024.

“Personally, I think these are pretty forgotten stories,” he said. “The 2020 election mess is pretty much in the rearview mirror.”

Whether that’s true or not will become clearer during the Republican National Convention, which will be held at Milwaukee’s professional basketball arena in July.

Abortion is also a much more tangible issue in Wisconsin than in other political battlegrounds.

The procedure became illegal overnight in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the 1849 state law went into effect. Women across the state were outraged, and the issue led to victories for Gov. Tony Evers, Judge Protasiewicz and several mayors last spring.

By the time the courts ruled in September that abortions could resume in the state, Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats had waged a 15-month campaign to remind voters that conservatives were responsible for the ban. When he won his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2022, Mr. Johnson campaigned on holding a statewide referendum on the issue — partly to stave off his party’s support for abortion restrictions.

Dianne Hesselbein, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, said abortion politics continues to drive political discussions, including one at her birthday party last weekend.

“My 24-year-old daughter said how excited she was to vote for Biden and how she never thought this whole abortion thing would actually happen,” Ms. Hesselbein said.

One point of danger for Wisconsin Democrats is the slow decline in attendance and enthusiasm of the state’s black voters, many of whom live on Milwaukee’s north side. In January, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission wrote in an email to party members that a decline in black turnout in the city “was due to a ‘well-thought-out, multi-faceted plan.’”

Democrats, who for years have fought with little success against Republican efforts to require voter ID, limit drop boxes and enact other voting restrictions, said in interviews that the elections of black Democrats as Milwaukee mayor and Milwaukee County executive Mr. would give a chance. Biden has key party surrogates that he did not have in his 2020 campaign.

“That’s really going to help us bring that excitement to these neighborhoods, to the communities that we grew up in,” said David Crowley, district administrator. “We can talk about the work we were able to do.”