Voters mark their ballots on Nov. 5, 2024 in Tryon, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Despite more Latino men shifting more Republican, a majority continued to vote Democratic in 2024, new polling released Tuesday reveals.
The findings from the 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll came a week after the historic presidential race in which Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win his second White House term. Both heavily targeted Latino voters throughout their campaigns.
“The national exit polls are wrong about Latinos in general and Latino men in particular,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of Barreto-Segura Partners Research, during a Tuesday media briefing on the poll’s findings.
Among voters in the poll, 56% of Latino men said they voted for Harris, compared to 43% who selected Trump.
Roughly two-thirds of Latino women voters voted for Harris, while about one-third chose Trump.
Some exit polls, in contrast, emphasized the movement of Latino voters toward Trump.
Data scientists and polling experts at Barreto-Segura Partners Research, the African American Research Collaborative and Harvard University conducted the survey, which several national organizations sponsored.
Battleground states
Between Oct. 18 and Nov. 4, the survey targeted more than 9,000 Latino, Black, Native American, Asian American and white voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The survey also provided additional data for California, Florida and Texas, given the large share of minority voters in those three states.
“We’re extremely confident that our sample is accurate, that it is an accurate portrait of Latino men and Latino women, and that it is balanced to match their demographics, and that it was available in Spanish at every stopping of the survey,” added Barreto, who was a pollster and adviser to the Harris campaign.
“Young voters in particular of every racial and ethnic group shifted to be more Republican as compared to 2020 — this was not driven by any individual particular racial group, but all young voters shifted compared to 2020,” he added.
A shift of all groups towards the GOP
Henry Fernandez, CEO of the African American Research Collaborative, said “this election was not about one group moving towards the Republican Party, but instead a shift of virtually every group towards the GOP by relatively small but consistent margins, largely due to concerns about the cost of living.”
“While voters of color voted majority for Harris and white voters, majority for Trump, this shift towards the GOP occurred across almost all groups, even those like younger voters that the Democratic Party has relied on for its future success,” Fernandez said.
He added that “this weakening of support for Democrats occurred even as key issues championed by Democrats did extremely well, both in ballot initiatives across the country and in our poll.”
Among all Latino voters, more than 6 in 10 said they voted for Harris, compared to a little over one-third who chose Trump.
Meanwhile, more than half of all Latino voters felt that Democrats would do a better job at addressing the issue most important to them, compared to about one-third who felt Republicans would.
Inflation, health care cited
Across all racial and ethnic groups of voters surveyed, inflation, health care costs and jobs and the economy proved to be the most important issues.
Abortion and reproductive rights also proved to be an important issue for voters across all groups, followed by housing costs and affordability and immigration reform for immigrants already in the United States.
Roughly three quarters of voters across racial and ethnic groups were in support of a federal law that would “guarantee access to abortion and give women control over their own private medical decisions.”
The majority of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American voters also expressed worry about Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative agenda from the Heritage Foundation.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the platform, though some former members of his administration helped write it.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the results of the 2024 election in the Rose Garden at the White House on Nov. 7, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Thursday reassured the nation that democracy won despite his party’s resounding election losses, and promised his accomplishments will live on, in brief remarks from the White House.
“I know for some people, it’s a time for victory, to state the obvious. For others, it’s a time of loss. Campaigns are contests of competing visions. The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made,” Biden said in just over six minutes of remarks to his staff and administration officials gathered in the Rose Garden just after 11 a.m. Eastern.
Former Republican President Donald Trump, now president-elect, handily won the 2024 presidential contest Tuesday against Vice President Kamala Harris, earning victories in closely watched swing states, including Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump as of early Thursday afternoon had 295 Electoral College votes, to 226 for Harris, with 270 needed for victory. He also led in the popular vote.
The Republicans also secured a Senate majority, gaining at least 52 seats while Democrats have 45. Control of the U.S. House remained unclear, though a trend toward GOP victory was emerging as ballots were still being counted.
Biden ran against Trump for the majority of the 2024 presidential race but dropped his reelection bid weeks after a disastrous presidential debate performance sparked a pressure campaign for him to step aside.
Biden phoned Trump Wednesday to congratulate him and arranged an in-person meeting to discuss the White House transition — a step that Trump did not take following his loss to Biden in 2020.
“I assured him I’d direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve,” Biden said.
Biden also talked about his phone call Wednesday with Democratic nominee Harris, whom he described as a “partner and public servant.”
“She ran an inspiring campaign, and everyone got to see something that I learned early on to respect so much: her character. She has a backbone like a ramrod,” Biden said.
The president said he told his team that “together, we’ve changed America for the better.”
“Much of the work we’ve done is already being felt by the American people, with the vast majority of it will not be felt, will be felt over the next 10 years,” Biden said, specifically citing the bipartisan infrastructure legislation he signed into law in November 2021.
Harris conceded the race Wednesday in a phone call to Trump.
In a speech to somber supporters at her alma mater Howard University in Washington, D.C., the same day, Harris told the crowd “I get it” when it comes to feeling a range of emotions following the outcome.
“But we must accept the results of this election. … A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election we accept the results,” Harris said.
Following the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his allies challenged the results in dozens of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits. Following his losses in court, Trump and a team of private lawyers continued to deny the election outcome and pressure state officials to manipulate slates of electors.
Trump’s repeated denials of his loss — including a speech on Jan. 6, 2021 where he told his supporters he would never concede — culminated in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress met that day to certify the election results.
Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz signs on neighboring lots in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
Is Wisconsin — or the country — really as divided as the maps make it look?
On the spreadsheet of unofficial election totals posted by each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties following the election Nov. 5, a handful showed a clear majority for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Many more counties were won by the winning Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Trump garnered enough votes to carry Wisconsin and enough states to return to the Oval Office in January.
A lot of those Trump-voting counties were rural ones, contributing to longstanding stereotypes about a monolithic body politic of deep blue cities and a bright red countryside.
But months before Election Day, on a mild August evening in a quaint round barn north of Spring Green, the writer Sarah Smarsh cautioned against oversimplifying the politics of rural voters — and against turning a blind eye to a part of the country that, she said, has too often been written off.
Sarah Smarsh speaks during a presentation in August near Spring Green, Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
“I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in south central Kansas,” Smarsh said that evening. It’s a place of “tall grass prairie, which happens to be the most endangered ecosystem … and simultaneously the least discussed or cared about or protected. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s the ecosystem of the place and people that I also happen to believe have not been given fair attention and due consideration.”
Smarsh made her mark with the book “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” As a journalist and author she has straddled the community of her upbringing and the urbane, academic world that she entered when she became the first in her family to pursue higher education.
The child of a carpenter and a teen mom, Smarsh has explored the socioeconomic divide in the U.S., mapping it to the destruction of the working class, the demise of family farms and the dismantling of public services from health care to public schools.
“I write about socioeconomic class and I write about rural issues, but that’s because I grew up in working poverty, and that’s because I grew up on a farm,” Smarsh said. And while those identities “are enormously consequential,” she added, she seeks to break down the assumptions that people carry about them. Her message: “You don’t know who my family is, and especially if what we assume is that they’re white trash, worthless.”
It’s a story that gives new context to the election results from 2016 on, and takes on new importance after the election of 2024. The residents of those places dismissed as “flyover country,” Smarsh said back in August, have many of the same concerns of urban and suburban voters, including reproductive rights, public schools, gun violence and other subjects. And understanding them in their diversity and complexity casts politics, especially national politics, in a more diffuse and complicated light.
Where ‘people don’t care about political affiliations’
Concern about climate change and a desire to live more sustainably led Tamara Dean and her partner to move to western Wisconsin’s Vernon County in the early 2000’s, where they built a homestead, grew their own food and became part of the local agricultural community.
Tamara Dean
Climate change followed them. In their county, extreme weather events became almost the norm, with a 500-year flood “happening every few years or every year,” Dean said in an interview.
“A rural community really coalesces when extreme situations happen and they help each other out,” Dean said. “And when we were cleaning up after a flood, helping our neighbors salvage their possessions or even getting people to safety, no one’s going to ask who you voted for, and people don’t care about political affiliations.”
Dean has written a collection of essays on the couple’s time in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, “Shelter and Storm,” to be published in April 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Distrust of the federal government
Residents, she found, had something of an ambivalent relationship with the federal government.
For all the complexity of agricultural economics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide financial farm support were familiar and well-understood by longtime farmers and easily accessible to them, she said. But when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promised recovery assistance for flooding in 2018, “it just took forever to come, and it took a lot of bureaucracy to try to get it,” Dean said. For individual applicants, “getting any kind of assistance might be so daunting that they just wouldn’t think it’s worth it.”
For Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator who has been thinking at length about politics and government in recent years, the election outcome has prompted contemplation.
Schultz left the Legislature a decade ago after splitting with Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker over legislation stripping public employees’ union rights and weakening Wisconsin’s mining laws.
Since then he has campaigned for redistricting reform and supported the overturning of Wisconsin Republicans’ gerrymandered legislative maps. In October he went public as a Republican supporting the Harris campaign for president.
In his part of the state, he saw a distinct contrast between the Democratic campaign and the Republican one.
“I saw an extremely good Democratic effort to talk to people face-to-face,” Schultz said in an interview. The GOP campaign along with allied outside groups such as American for Prosperity, however, appeared to him to focus almost entirely on mailings, phone calls and media.
“It became clear to me that politics is changing from the time I spent in office, being less people powered and more media powered,” Schultz said.
Ignored by both parties
Schultz said he’s observed a level of anger among some of his one-time constituents that has alarmed and surprised him, a product, he suggests, of having been ignored by both parties.
Dale Schultz
One target has been regulation, to the point where “they’ve lost track of why regulations are important and why they should support them,” he said. Yet he sees the direct answer to that question where he lives in Southwest Wisconsin.
“In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance in trout fishing, like I could not even have imagined 20 years ago,” Shultz said. He credits the Department of Natural Resources and its personnel for working with local communities to ensure conditions that would turn trout streams into suitable habitat to support a burgeoning population of fish. “That doesn’t happen without water quality and water quality regulations, and land use and land use regulations.”
Schultz has been spending time in conversation with friends “who are like-minded and similarly curious,” he said. “And then you just watch and wait and see what happens, and try to voice concerns that are real and that need to be dealt with, and [that] we’re not going to be able to hide from as a country.”
He hopes for the return of a time when people like him, who consider themselves “just to the right of center,” can again “talk to everyone and possibly craft a solution.”
Back in August, Sarah Smarsh offered a gentle warning about the coming election to her audience in the round barn north of Spring Green.
“Whatever happens in November, everybody else is still here — the other side is still here,” Smarsh said. “And so there’s going to be some caring to do, and that’s probably going to be for generations, because we didn’t arrive at this moment overnight.”
Wisconsin’s sizable rural electorate played a decisive role in flipping Wisconsin into the win column for Donald Trump this week.
Trump won Wisconsin’s rural vote by a margin of about 22.3 percentage points, a 2.4 point improvement over his 2020 performance.
That amounted to a gain of about 29,000 net votes for Trump, compared to 2020. That accounts for nearly all of Trump’s statewide victory of 30,000 votes.
Trump also improved on his 2020 turnout across the state in all of the Daily Yonder county categories, from major metropolitan areas to small metro areas. But his largest turnout gain was in rural counties. In Wisconsin, where rural voters make up 26% of the electorate, compared to about 15% nationally, the rural gains were decisive.
(This article uses the Office of Management and Budget 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural. Counties that are not in a 2013 metro area are considered rural.)
Unlike in Pennsylvania, where Trump won because Harris hemorrhaged votes in urban areas compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, in Wisconsin Trump won the state in a battle of turnout.
Both candidates got more votes in 2024 than presidential candidates in 2020 in Wisconsin. But Trump attracted more of that increased turnout to his camp, improving his percentage of the two-party vote in all but four counties.
Three of the counties where Trump did not improve his margins were in the Milwaukee metro area, but one was rural. Door County, which flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020, remained in the Democratic column this year, with a slight increase for Harris over Biden’s performance.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin gives a victory speech Thursday at the Steamfitters Local 601 hall east of Madison after winning a third term Tuesday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
While a majority of Wisconsin voters helped elect Republican Donald Trump as president this week, one statewide candidate managed to defy the odds that favored the GOP.
Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin squeezed out enough votes to overtake Republican Eric Hovde and return to Washington, D.C. for a third term.
Although the victory was much narrower than her last reelection in 2018, the outcome preserved Baldwin’s winning streak.
“2024 marks a continuation of Tammy Baldwin’s record of undefeated elections,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said Thursday at a brief Baldwin victory celebration.
Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
“The way we won this race is the way I’ve always approached this job,” a smiling Baldwin said in her 10-minute victory speech. “We did everything, everywhere, all at once. I traveled to red, blue, purple, rural, suburban, urban parts of our state. I listened to people. I really listen to people and then deliver for them, and in turn, these Wisconsinites showed up for me, and I’m so grateful.”
Baldwin is “uniquely good at cultivating her own brand and separating it from the national Democratic Party brand,” said Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari in an interview Thursday.
Democrats in Wisconsin often seem to do better in midterm elections, “where it is a little bit less nationalized and the candidates can cultivate their kind of personal and localized brands,” Azari said. “Baldwin has been pretty successful and she’s running ahead of Democrats statewide in a lot of contests.”
Baldwin got her political start on the Dane County Board, graduated to the Wisconsin Legislature and was elected to the U.S. House in 1998, the state’s first female and first gay member of Congress. After 14 years in the House, she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, the year Barack Obama won his second term.
In 2018, running against a Republican state senator, Leah Vukmir, Baldwin easily won reelection by nearly 11 points, while her fellow Democrat, Tony Evers, won his first term as governor by 1 percentage point.
Julia Azari, Marquette University
“She addresses more sort of state priorities, and has become well known in rural parts of the state that we don’t really associate with Democrats,” Azari said. Baldwin’s much narrower 2024 victory came in “a very difficult national environment for Democrats.”
Baldwin held her event Thursday at a Steamfitters union apprenticeship training center on the East Side of Madison.
Steamfitters Local 601 business manager Doug Edwards called Baldwin “a homegrown roots type of person” who has been “just fabulous for working families in Wisconsin” and a staunch union ally.
“Tammy has just been a good advocate for all the people in Wisconsin, and I think that’s what put her over the top, even though it was close,” Edwards said in an interview.
In her victory speech, Baldwin recapped the broad range of issues that she’s made her own as a lawmaker, along with the people behind those issues who have been her supporters.
“It’s the farmers in the dairy industry who I fought alongside, earning the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau,” Baldwin said. “It’s the workers on foundry floors who are getting more business because of my Buy America rules — big shout-out to labor.”
Baldwin has successfully pushed congressional colleagues to include provisions favoring domestic suppliers and manufacturers in bills such as the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“It’s the LGBTQ families who saw through the nasty attack campaigns and knew that I had their back, and it’s the women who’ve had our rights stripped away and saw me on the front lines fighting for their freedom,” she added.
Baldwin has championed legislation to restore a federally protected abortion rights, ended in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade. The bill she authored has stalled in both houses.
Also in 2022, however, Baldwin argued that the loss of Roe meant that the Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage could be at risk. She spearheaded asuccessful bill that gained bipartisan support affirming same-sex marriage as well as interracial couples.
Baldwin also highlighted her involvement in the Affordable Care Act, for which she wrote a provision that allows children to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans until they reach the age of 26.
After four years in the Senate as a member of its Democratic majority, in January Baldwin will begin her third term as a member of the minority party. Throughout her tenure in Congress, however, Baldwin has repeatedly joined with Republicans on bills that have aligned with her own stances.
On Tuesday, her margin of roughly 30,000 votes was about the same as the margin by which Harris lost to Trump in Wisconsin. And the senator’s final tally was about 5,000 more than Harris’ — suggesting that some Wisconsin voters who picked Trump split their tickets to vote for Baldwin.
Baldwin diplomatically acknowledged the presidential contest outcome Thursday.
“While we worked our hearts out to elect Kamala Harris, I recognize that the people of Wisconsin chose Donald Trump, and I respect their choice,” Baldwin said.
“You know that I will always fight for Wisconsin, and that means working with President Trump to do that, and standing up to him when he doesn’t have our best interest at heart.”
Look on the bright side — all the talk about a stolen election, massive voter fraud, rigged voting machines and threats against local election workers disappeared overnight. Instead of planning an insurrection, MAGA Republicans have pivoted to picking out their outfits for president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration parties.
The minute it became clear that Trump won, Republican fulminating about “massive cheating” blew over. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe declared the election in Wisconsin a “great success.” Bipartisan poll watchers agreed: the whole thing went off practically without a hitch. Never mind the WisGOP warnings all day on social media about (nonexistent) illegal voting by noncitizens. Never mind the grandstanding at Central Count in Milwaukee by fake elector scheme co-conspirators Sen. Ron Johnson, elections commissioner Bob Spindell and WisGOP chair Brian Schimming. All is forgiven, because Trump won Wisconsin.
The mechanics of voting are not under attack. Instead, a majority of American voters, including a majority of Wisconsinites, chose to elect a right-wing authoritarian leader and to give his party control of the federal government, apparently because they believe Trump will repeal pandemic-fueled inflation (which is already way down in the U.S.).
As my friend Hugh Jackson, editor of our sister outlet the Nevada Current wrote on Wednesday morning: “the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. judiciary generally, is now even more on track to become nothing more than a functionary outlet for a right-wing extremist and authoritarian executive branch hell-bent on dismantling and superseding the rule of law. Also, poor Gaza. Poor Ukraine (poor Europe). And for all that, and so much more, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios still isn’t going to fall back to 2019 prices.”
Stress-eating leftover Halloween candy while watching the triumph of MAGA well into the wee hours, I remembered I’d agreed to speak to a group of retirees the morning after the election. What was there to say? The election results are a gut punch. Here in Wisconsin we are at the center of it. “You know Wisconsin put Trump over the top,” a journalist in Washington, D.C., texted me, helpfully.
Since I had to pull myself together and try to make sense of the results, I headed downtown and found myself in a room full of friendly faces. There’s no sugar-coating things, I told them. The results are a shock. Especially for Wisconsin’s immigrant community, this is a frightening time and we need to do everything we can to support people and ease the fear and suffering of those who are the targets of terrifying threats.
There are a few bright spots in Wisconsin among Tuesday’s results. In addition to the hiatus on election denial, there are the results of state legislative races — the first to be run with Wisconsin’s new fair maps — which ended the gerrymandered GOP supermajority in the state Senate and yielded a more evenly divided state Assembly.
The end of gerrymandering is the fruit of a long, difficult battle by citizens determined to get fair maps. It’s worth remembering that when all three branches of government in Wisconsin were controlled by a single party, that goal seemed far off. And a hard-fought win it was. We’ve come a long way. Don’t forget that progress is possible. It’s important to combat despair.
There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking of this election. I’ve written about how I believe the Democrats lost touch with their working class base, and how Trump took the opportunity to move into that space with his right-wing populist message.
But the fact is Harris was a powerful candidate who picked up the torch from Biden when he fell apart, painfully, publicly and irretrievably.
There are those who say our country is too sexist or too racist for a woman of color to be elected president. Another white guy would have been better, they suggest. Without a doubt, misogyny and racism were big features of the 2024 campaign. But you don’t beat that backlash by surrendering to it. And we must beat it back. That takes a lot of resilience. Harris took us another step forward in making Americans believe they could elect a female president. It will take more than one or two tries to bring that about.
For now, perhaps the most important thing for all of us who are hurting after this election is to prioritize real, human contact. Remember that you are still surrounded by friends, neighbors and loved ones. We need to connect with each other and stay in touch. As simple and maybe even simplistic as it sounds, we need each other’s company to help get us through this difficult time. We need to see other people in person and we need to take a break from scrolling online.
Being with other people, strengthening our bonds of affection and solidarity, is the foundation of democracy. That’s where we need to start.
Signs posted inside the Wisconsin State Capitol during debate over redrawing the state's voting maps. The new maps, which created many more competitive legislative voting districts, are in use for the first time for the 2024 election.| Wisconsin Examiner photo.
Wisconsin Examiner reporters are posting live updates here throughout Election Day from polling places, victory parties and on the ground throughout the state. Check back for the latest election news.
Wisconsin elections administrator calls 2024 election a ‘great success’
By: Henry Redman- Tuesday November 5, 2024 11:12 pm
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe at a press conference on Election Day | Screenshot via Zoom
Wisconsin’s election on Tuesday was a “great success,” according to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe. At a news conference Tuesday night, Wolfe said that outside of bomb threats to polling places that were deemed non-credible, a few bits of disinformation posted online and an incident in Milwaukee that was quickly and transparently resolved, the election went smoothly. At Milwaukee’s central count location where city election officials were processing and tabulating absentee ballots, election observers noticed that the panels on the tabulating machines that cover the USB ports through which results are downloaded no longer had their tamper-proof seals keeping them closed. Election officials determined that the panels hadn’t been locked and “out of an abundance of caution” decided to restart the tabulating process.
Wolfe said every decision about the process was up to Milwaukee officials but that “no equipment malfunctioned, no ballots were compromised, and every step of the process was completed in the public eye by election inspectors from both the Republican and Democratic parties and under the watch of Republican and Democratic observers.”
Also at central count, a prominent election denier who has frequently spread baseless and nonsensical accusations about the state’s election system was posting on social media that Milwaukee election officials were allowing the acceptance of absentee ballots without the required witness signature. That never happened.
Wolfe also debunked videos circulated online that purported to show supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump fighting at a Wisconsin polling place. She said it was clearly disinformation and didn’t take place at an actual Wisconsin poll site.“[It] really serves as an important reminder to just be aware of these disinformation efforts that are ongoing, and to really think critically about the information about elections that you consume,” she said. “Certainly think before sharing information about elections.”
Earlier in the day, the FBI had reported that bomb threats had been made against polling sites in a number of states, including poll locations in Madison. Law enforcement officials deemed the threats non-credible. “At no point today was there an active or credible threat to a polling location that we’re aware of,” Wolfe said.
3 weeks ago
Milwaukee Elections Commission director says every ballot counted accurately
Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez addresses news media on election night. | Photo by Henry Redman
Milwaukee Central Count has processed and tabulated more than 80,000 absentee ballots out of the the more than 107,000 cast, Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez said at a news conference shortly after 9:30. Asked about U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s questions about the incident which caused the city to restart counting ballots, Gutierrez said it’s impossible to meet Johnson’s request to compare the exact tally of the more than 30,000 votes that had to be re-run through the machines before and after the recount, because votes are broken down by ward, not by total tally, but that every vote will have been tracked and a chain of custody will be publicly available.
“At the end of the day, every ballot that was here that was legitimate was counted and was counted accurately,” she said. “It was tracked, there is a paper trail, there is a chain of custody, and we are going to get this done.”
Johnson had also criticized the error, in which the sealed panels on voting machines became unsealed, as “sloppy.” Gutierrez countered that, saying a bipartisan decision was made to correct a human error transparently. “We have an extensive chain of custody, we have checks and balances, this is a bipartisan team,” she said. “The observers also play a big role. We have things here that we’re tracking, and this is, this is all of our community’s, City of Milwaukee residents, Democrats and Republicans, and we’re doing this together, and when we saw an issue that was brought to our attention, we reacted swiftly and we acted transparently. So there has been nothing to hide here. Everything is here and tracked. This is not sloppy. This is how we do things, to make sure that things are transparent.”
Last updated: 10:27 pm
3 weeks ago
Milwaukee Mayor: ballot recount ‘an issue that we’ve taken seriously’
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson talks to reporters at the City of Milwaukee central count facility, (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson arrived at the city’s central count location shortly after U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson wrapped a live TV interview with Fox News from the convention center hall in which he called the error that caused about 30,000 absentee ballots to be recounted a “sloppy” error.
The senator has also been asking city election officials for the exact vote tally of the ballots that had to be recounted to make sure the vote total matches the second time. Officials have said, however, that an exact number doesn’t exist because the vote tallies aren’t tabulated until election workers are done feeding all the ballots into the machines.
The mayor said that it was “an issue that was caught, an issue that was addressed and an issue that we’ve taken seriously” before pointing out the Republicans in the state Senate had killed a bill that would have allowed the city to begin processing ballots on Monday.
“Folks want to have this as a wedge issue,” the mayor said, adding that Milwaukee’s elections are run with the “highest level” of integrity and transparency.
Election workers at central count have now processed and tabulated more than 63,000 votes, meaning it has made up for and doubled the total count from when the process had to be restarted.
Last updated: 9:10 pm
3 weeks ago
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson arrives to question Milwaukee election officials
Sen. Ron Johnson and Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming | Photo by Henry Redman
Updated: At Milwaukee’s central count location, where election workers had to recount more than 30,000 absentee ballots “out of an abundance of caution” because stickers sealing the panels protecting the USB slots on voting machines became unstuck, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming questioned Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez about the incident. “We’ve got a lot of questions,” Johnson said, asking about the chain of custody on the security footage of the machines and if the Republican party would be able to test if the votes tallied would match after the ballots were recounted. “My concern is I want to know how it opened up.”
Gutierrez said she’s not the commission’s public records staff but everything would be available and that Republican Party attorneys can request everything they need. “We have nothing to hide, request all the records you want,” she said. “We run safe, secure and fair elections,” before telling the pair they could “knock themselves out” and go look at voting machines on their own as election observers. “Let’s go knock ourselves out,” Johnson said before walking to the machines.
Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell arrives at Milwaukee Central Count with Sen. Ron Johnson (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Schimming, along with Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell, who also arrived to inspect Central Count, were involved in planning the fake electors scheme, in which Wisconsin Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College ballots for Donald Trump after President Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
As part of a legal settlement, Wisconsin’s fake electors agreed not to serve as Trump electors in 2024.
Johnson’s Senate office was involved in attempting to transfer Wisconsin’s fake Electoral College ballots for Trump to Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured to help him overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.
Last updated: 8:57 pm
3 weeks ago
Green Bay counts ballots at its central count facility, responds to concerns
At a press conference around 2:30 p.m., Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said workers at the city’s central count site will keep counting until all of the ballots are tabulated.
Green Bay’s central count site, where absentee ballots are consolidated and tabulated. (Andrew Kennard | Wisconsin Examiner)
“We will keep counting! And we will eat pizza,” Jeffreys said at a press conference this afternoon. “And eat delicious baked goods from one of our local bakeries. And drink coffee.”
Absentee ballots cast by city residents, including in early voting, are consolidated for counting at the central count facility in City Hall. At the end of the day Monday, the city reported having received 20,154 absentee ballots, 40% of the 51,630 registered voters in the city, as of Nov. 1 statistics from the Wisconsin Election Commission’s website.
As of about 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, 3,194 absentee ballots have been counted, the city of Green Bay reported on Facebook.
There have been problems with machines, Jeffreys said. If a machine is not functioning, ballots that were not able to go into the machine are placed in an auxiliary bin.
Asked if there have been complaints of electioneering or inappropriate behavior at the polls, Jeffreys said she received concerns from voters about the closeness of an observer at one location and the closeness of a poll worker at another location. Both voters were concerned about the secrecy of their ballot. Jeffreys said she addressed the issues with chief inspectors.
Jeffreys also said she deferred to the parks and police departments to handle certain complaints as those agencies felt were appropriate “given our guidelines and our access to public spaces.”
“So, there was a gathering over at Joannes Park,” Jeffreys said. “That has nothing to do with my office. There was a DJ who was playing music. That has nothing to do with my office.”
Jennifer Gonzalez, communications coordinator at the Green Bay Police Department, told the Examiner that the gathering at the park was reported due to a political signage. She said the signage was not considered electioneering and did not violate any other laws, so no enforcement action was taken.
Gonzalez said she was told the DJ was playing music near a polling site, and the volume had caused some concern. The person was cooperative and left, she was told.
Central Count in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Updated: Milwaukee Central Count is restarting its count of absentee ballots after the doors on its tabulation machines were mistakenly left open. According to CBS News reporter Katrina Kaufman, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs said the recount is being done for transparency and so “people can have confidence in the results.”
A.J. Bayatpour of CBS 58 in Milwaukee reports that Milwaukee’s Republican Party Chair Hilario Deleon told CBS reporter Tajma Hall that he doesn’t think anything “nefarious” happened.
Jeff Flemming, spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee, said that votes are being re-counted at Milwaukee’s Central Count “out of an abundance of caution. “Roughly 31,000 ballots are being re-run to correct an error where 13 voting machines were not “fully sealed” due to human error, Flemming said. The development comes as Milwaukee County continues to count ballots, and residents continue heading to the polls. “It is going to extend the time that we will get the totals here,” said Flemming.
Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, has continued to provide updates from Central Count in Milwaukee, from the website X, formerly known as Twitter. “Following up on this from Milwaukee,” Jacobs wrote on Twitter. “Before re-scanning, the tabulators are zeroed out – meaning they show no ballots in the tally. ALSO – and importantly – NOBODY knows how the originally scanned ballots were voted. No results were available or created.”Jacobs went onto post, “so like everyone else, we all must wait until tabulation (and re-tabulation) is complete early tomorrow to know Milwaukee’s vote totals! This is as it should be and is the correct process.”
Last updated: 6:48 pm
3 weeks ago
Wisconsin voters face long lines, but have few problems, Common Cause reports
On a national election protection update for reporters Tuesday afternoon, there were reports of long lines in several states and what turned out to be false bomb threats in Georgia.
In Wisconsin there have been long lines as well, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, one of the call’s panelists, but except for a glitch at the Milwaukee Central Count requiring 30,000 ballots to be retabulated, “we have not seen anything out of the ordinary.”
Jay Heck, Common Cause Wisconsin
Heck observed that nearly half of Wisconsin voters voted early this year, while about 1.7 million were expected to vote in person on Tuesday. Until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic increased the interest in absentee and early voting, Wisconsin voters have in the past “preferred to vote on election day.”
“The big issue, for most people, has been… long lines,” Heck said, with the heaviest traffic when polls opened at 7 a.m., over the lunch hour and more expected in the evening before the polls close at 8 p.m.
The longest lines have been reported on college campuses, particularly for same-day voter registration, Heck said.
One notable change has been “that there are many more partisan election observers, not only at polling places but in central count locations” where absentee ballots are sent to be counted. Milwaukee and Green Bay are among the Wisconsin communities using central count sites.
Heck said he had received reports of some 50 Republican observers at the Milwaukee central count site, along with 10 or 11 Democratic observers. There are also nonpartisan observers from organizations such as Common Cause.
Last updated: 6:06 pm
3 weeks ago
UW-Madison first-time voters register and observe voting at Memorial Union
UW-Madison students vote. | Photo by Baylor Spears
“Our ward is basically all freshman dorms, so a lot of people registering, a ton of first-time voters, however, this is definitely the biggest volume of Election Day registrations in one morning that I have seen here,” said Izzie Behl, chief inspector officer at the polling location inside the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union. Behl has worked as an election official for the last three years. By 2 p.m. 522 people had voted at the location.
Eric Sanderson, a UW-Madison freshman from Virginia, was one of those first-time voters. He said he decided to vote in Wisconsin because he figured it would be easier than mailing in his ballot. He said he had to call and ask on Tuesday morning for information about voting, but it was a “pretty easy, streamlined” process. He said he voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats down the ballot because he thinks it will be better for the environment and women’s rights, and because of Trump’s age.“Trump’s really old,” Sanderson said. “I’d like a president that’s not at risk of, like, going senile during the presidential term.” He said the debate between Trump and Harris affirmed his decision. “A lot of that was just looking at which of them had their head in it more, and were not saying weird, f*cked up things,” Sanderson said.
Grace LeClaire, a UW-Madison freshman, voted early for Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Friday but was at the polling location to observe the voting process with her anthropology class | Photo by Baylor Spears
Grace LeClaire, a freshman and Madison-native, voted early for Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Friday but was at the polling location to observe the voting process with her anthropology class. LeClaire said she is pro-choice and supports reproductive rights.“This is my first presidential election and that’s the case for a lot of people in my class, so it’s really cool to see democracy in action,” LeClaire said.
Across the street from Memorial Union on Library Mall, UW-Madison College Democrats were standing in the rain encouraging students to vote. “I’m noticing a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement. Students have either voted early, which is great, or they have a plan to vote or we’re helping them get that plan to vote,” Chair Joseph Wendtland said. “We’re answering questions about… what kind of ID do I need? What kind of proof of residence?”
UW-Madison College Democrats Chair Joseph Wendtland on Library Mall. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Wendtland said he is hearing a lot of enthusiasm for Harris in particular. For his part, he said he voted for Harris on the first day of early voting after a rally held by former President Barack Obama and vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Wendtland noted that others had come out to help on Tuesday including University of Chicago College Democrats, who were helping to knock doors, state Sen. Kelda Roys, who came to help put up their tents at 7 a.m., Wisconsin High School Democrats and Tennessee state lawmaker Justin Jones. “It’s really all hands on deck right now,” Wendtland said.
Students wait in line to vote at UW-Whitewater | Photo by Henry Redman
At UW-Whitewater’s on campus polling site, the line for students waiting to register to vote or update their address stretched to more than 4.5 hours at around 5 p.m. Orion Smith, who works with the university’s student government, told the Wisconsin Examiner the line had stretched for hours since about 9 a.m.
The line for student voters who didn’t need to update their registration was only about 20 minutes, Smith said. Outside of the University Center where voting was taking place, a group of Democratic students were encouraging their classmates to vote. Peter Johanneson, a 20-year-old junior, says it feels like students on campus are excited to vote for Democrats, including state Assembly candidate Brienne Brown — who Johanneson says made her presence felt on campus during the campaign. Audrey Hameister, also a 20-year-old junior, says she’s optimistic about the results for Democrats on Tuesday and that she believes a majority of student voters are supporting the Democratic ticket, especially since Vice President Kamala Harris became the party’s nominee.
3 weeks ago
Volunteers redirect Milwaukee voters arriving at now-closed early voting locations
UW-Milwaukee students who reside in the university’s Sandburg Hall streamed into the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center Tuesday afternoon to cast their ballots. Around 3 p.m., Poll Chief Kelly Conaty told Wisconsin Examiner that 812 ballots had already been cast. Conaty said that the polling site, which handles two separate voting wards, had seen no problems of any kind all day. Still, Conaty said that many students arriving to vote are needing to register before getting into the ballot line.
“We’re registering a lot of people,” said Conaty, adding that this is not uncommon for the college. As Conaty spoke to Wisconsin Examiner, a line of about 40 students lined up near the front door. Down the street, a modest tent of volunteers were also hard at work making sure students and adults alike know where they need to go.
Members of the non-profit group Super Market Legends said they noticed a trend of people arriving at locations that had been open for early voting, but are no longer active on Election Day. While they explained the situation to the Wisconsin Examiner, four students walked up at different times to the nearby Zelazo Center, which had been an early voting location. The volunteers at the tent made sure that the students knew where to go. So far this voting season, the volunteers said they have redirected hundreds of Milwaukeeans to the correct voting places after they’ve arrived at now closed early voting locations.
UW-Milwaukee students are directed to different polling sites according to their residential halls. Students at Sandburg Hall go to the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, which is across the street from the campus on Kenwood Blvd. Riverview Hall students go to the Gordon Park Pavilion on Humbold Blvd, while students in the Kenilworth Square Apartments go to the Charles Allis Art Museum on Prospect Avenue. students in the Cambridge Commons go to the Urban Ecology Center on East Park Place.
The Kenosha Police Department is reporting minimal disruptions or calls for service to polling places so far on Election Day. A Kenosha PD spokesperson, Lt. Joshua Hecker, shared two summaries of police calls to polling places on Tuesday. At 7:01 a.m., police responded to the Senior Citizens Center for “a person playing music in a City owned parking lot.” The DJ was one of Wisconsin’s contingent from DJs at the Polls, which has over 100 members across Wisconsin. KPD’s summary describes the group as “a nationwide network of non-political DJ’s playing music to spice up election day.”
While the DJ’s actions were not overtly political, the department noted that the DJ was playing music over 100 feet from the main entrance. “City poll supervisors deemed the music to be a disturbance and due to the fact they were in a city lot, Officers asked them to shut it down and leave, which they did.”
The second call came in around 10:33 a.m. Officers responded to the Prayer Assembly House for “a man being disorderly over voter ID.” The report summary states that a middle-aged man was there with his 93-year-old mother, who did not have a current ID. When poll workers said that her ID was not valid, her son “became argumentative with poll staff and refused to leave.” The summary states that the man was also argumentative with officers, “and made bad faith arguments about police denying his elderly mother her rights and asked if we were proud of ourselves,” the summary states. The man wanted poll supervisors to answer his questions, which they hesitated to do because he was also allegedly recording them. Eventually when the poll workers said that a passport would be enough, the man went home, got a passport, and he and his 93-year-old mother were allowed to vote “after he threw it [the passport] at poll workers and cussed them out,” the summary stated. No arrests were made during this incident.
3 weeks ago
Fort Atkinson Dems turn out for Evers, Baldwin and new maps
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers address a group of about three dozen members of the Jefferson County Democratic Party on Election Day. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
In Fort Atkinson, more than three dozen members of the Jefferson County Democratic Party — as well as a few joining from the neighboring Dodge and Walworth counties — packed into the small county party office to welcome U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers before kicking off some last minute canvassing.
Full of excitement at the prospect of electing Democrats Melissa Ratcliff and Joan Fitzgerald to its seats in the state Senate and Assembly (both in attendance at the event) after years of Republican representation under the old legislative maps, the Democrats from a rural county nearly mid-way between the urban centers of Madison and Milwaukee said they were expecting wins on Tuesday.
“I think our country has weathered the storm, and grown in the process,” Fort Atkinson Democrat Jim Marousis says. See more.
Last updated: 3:52 pm
3 weeks ago
Video: Sun Prairie, Wis. election official on why she does this work
VIDEO: Cindy Melendy – Election Officer at United methodist church in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin explains the ballot counting process and how the public can view it. She says that this election feels different because so many more people are coming out to vote and adds “it’s nice to feel part of process.”
3 weeks ago
Voters in western Wisconsin weigh in on Van Orden, Cooke race
Polling place in Independence, Wis. | Photo by Frank Zufall
Voters in Independence, Wisconsin — in the western part of the state encompassed by the 3rd Congressional District — are choosing between incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke.
Andrea Brandt voted for Cooke. She didn’t like Van Orden’s participation in Jan 6 pro-Trump rally protesting the 2020 election results in Washington, DC. “I don’t care for him,” she said.
Mary Bragger chose Van Orden. “It’s not one issue for me. I vote Republican because they tend to be more conservative and that is the way I lean.”
In Eau Claire, also part of the 3rd CD, Amanda Krueger, 26, voted for Cooke. “I know her personally. she’s a hard worker and she’s ambitious and she represents my needs and wants. Krueger said the critical issue was “Women’s rights ” and “the right to choose.”
Aaron Shaw also said he voted for Cooke because he didn’t like the “slander techniques used against her.”
Mary, who didn’t want to use her last name voted for Van Orden, but she voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, she said, even though she is opposed to abortion. After ticking Harris for president she voted mostly Republican dowballot as her way of balancing her concern. She had no issues with Van Orden and didn’t hold it against him that he went to the Jan 6, 2020 protest in Washington, DC, because he left before the violence started.
Did you know that if you’re living unhoused in Wisconsin, you can still vote?
The Wisconsin Elections Commission provides a voter guide for people who don’t have stable housing, or are living on the street.
In Milwaukee County, hundreds of people live without housing on the street, in vehicles, and in county and city shelters.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission states that anyone 18 years or older, who is not otherwise disqualified from voting, may do so in Wisconsin. Unhoused residents may designate a fixed location for their residence to vote, as long as it’s an identifiable location in the state of Wisconsin which could “conceivably serve as a temporary residence,” a voter guide from the Elections Commission states.
If you’re living in a shelter, you can claim the shelter as your residence for voting purposes, unless that shelter has any restrictions against doing that.
Proof of residency can be achieved by showing a document such as a letter from a shelter, or from a private or public social service organization which provides services to unhoused residents. The document must identify the individual and describe the location where they are living. Make sure the letter or document is also signed by a person affiliated with a social service organization.
People who are living unhoused but want to vote may contact the Wisconsin Elections Commission help desk at 608-261-2028 or email elections@wi.gov with any questions.
Last updated: 3:18 pm
3 weeks ago
DJ Reggie ‘Smooth Az Butta’ brings music to the polls
DJ Reggie “Smooth Az Butta” Brown at the polls in Milwaukee. | Photo by Isiah Holmes
Like many Wisconsin voters, Reggie “Smooth Az Butta” Brown chose to vote early this year. “I had to get that early vote in,” the Milwaukee radio personality told Wisconsin Examiner. “Made me feel good, too.”
For nearly 30 years, Brown has been a household voice and name in Milwaukee, especially for Black and brown communities.
Earlier this year, Brown was laid off from iHeartMedia and V100 radio. On Tuesday morning, Brown set up his DJ station and table outside Washington High School, in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. Starting at ince 6:30 a.m. he joined a group of 20 people serving as “DJs at the Polls,” a nationwide organization with 180 members in Wisconsin alone.
One of the other DJs, a friend of Brown’s, was stationed at Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, which is actually closer to where Brown lives. Later today, Brown will head down to the suburban city of Greenfield to play music and lift spirits as people cast their ballots.
Brown said that although it seemed slow at Washington High School, voting had been proceeding steadily all morning. He needed to keep his comments non-partisan due to his affiliation with DJs at the Polls, he said, but Brown did speak to the issues on his mind when he voted.
“All the women’s issues,” said Brown. “I have sisters, I have a daughter, all those issues. Cheaper groceries, you know. I want somebody in there that’s going to do good for the nation,” Brown said. “We’re Americans, so let’s live it right. Let’s do it right.”
Sun Prairie, Wis. polling place | Photo by Henry Redman
In Sun Prairie, which traditionally sees incredibly high turnout in presidential elections, the polling place at city hall opened with a “steady stream” of voters all morning, according to chief inspector Greg Hovel.
Around 11:30, the lunchtime rush was just beginning and a team of seven poll workers used a second tabulator to process the 1,639 absentee ballots cast in the precinct. The team had already gotten about 1,000 of those ballots processed and tabulated.
Hovel said there had been no hiccups despite having five new poll workers to get up to speed with the early morning line waiting and that the poll has seen a number of new voter registrations.
Last updated: 2:07 pm
3 weeks ago
UW-Madison students arrive at polls on campus Tuesday
UW-Madison students line up to vote. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Voting was running smoothly for University of Wisconsin-Madison students at a polling location inside of Gordon Dining and Event Center on Tuesday morning. At 11:22 pm, about 622 voters had already cast their ballots.
Sam Schwalbach, a freshman from Hudson in the western part of Wisconsin, said he voted for Trump. | Photo by Baylor Spears
College students could be influential in deciding whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump wins Wisconsin. The last two presidential elections were decided by less than 20,000 voters. Students the Examiner spoke with said the process was smooth and also brought up an array of issues that influenced their decision.
Sam Schwalbach, a freshman from Hudson in the western part of Wisconsin, said he voted for Trump. It’s his first time voting and he said his top issues were lowering taxes and “keeping the border safe.”
“We want to keep a lot of jobs here, and we can’t do that if we’re having people come over the border illegally. I think it just makes the country not as safe as well,” Schwalbach said. “Obviously immigration is a good thing, but it’s better when it’s like legal.”
Emily Blumberg, a junior from Illinois, and Adrianna Garcia, a junior from Minnesota, are friends who ran into each other at the polls. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Emily Blumberg, a junior from Illinois, and Adrianna Garcia, a junior from Minnesota, are friends that ran into each other at the polls. They said the process was smooth. “It was a very simple process. The school made it very easy,” Blumberg said. She added that it was easy to find the polling location and that some classes were canceled to allow students to make time to vote.
Blumberg and Garcia both said they voted for Harris in the presidential election, and decided to vote in Wisconsin because of what it means to vote in a swing state. “It holds more weight here, especially like Illinois has been a blue state,” Blumberg said. “Same with Minnesota,” Garcia added. “You know that to make that difference here means a lot,” Blumberg said.
“Anything but Trump,” Garcia said in discussing why she voted for Harris. “Growing up in the household that I did, we have very strong beliefs that morals are more important than policies that could benefit the economy in anyway.”
“This is an election where human rights issues should take precedence over like preferences with whatever economic policies, not that mine would even align with his,” Blumberg said. She said that women’s rights were also important for her and that she thinks its time for the U.S. to have its first female president.
Syed Rizvi, a freshman from New York, said he cast his vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. When President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, he said that he was initially excited because he thinks the U.S. “needs its first female president,” however he said Harris’ comments about pro-Palestinian protesters at rallies and other comments about the war in Gaza made him decide to vote third-party.
“My family has been a long-term Democratic family but I just feel like this election I wanted to vote for a candidate who represented my values, who has openly spoken against the genocide in Israel and Palestine,” Rizvi said. “I think Jill Stein is the only candidate that has openly and proudly spoken up for that, and so the moment Kamala Harris said that she would continue the weapons to Israel that is when she lost my vote.”
There are six third-party candidates on ballots in Wisconsin and Stein is seen as a potential spoiler for Harris.
Last updated: 3:23 pm
3 weeks ago
Watertown clerk expects to count ballots through early morning
Watertown, Wis. polling site | Photo by Henry Redman
In Watertown in Jefferson county, the library polling place has seen “steady” voting all morning, according to chief inspectors Kate Latin and RoxAnne Witte. The line had gotten the longest during the morning rush when voters waited about 15-20 minutes, but as of Friday, about 45% of the town’s registered voters had already cast a ballot.That high early vote means a massive amount of absentee ballots for poll workers to process and tabulate today. Witte said she anticipates it will take a long time to finish.“I’m expecting early morning,” she says of when the returns from the largely Republican community of about 20,000 people should be reported to the county.
Last updated: 1:26 pm
3 weeks ago
Police in Milwaukee area report ‘no issues’ with voting
The city police departments of Wauwatosa, West Allis, and Milwaukee are all reporting no issues so far this Election Day.
The updates, which came in just before 1 p.m., come as polling places report steady streams of voters. “We have not taken any reports of issues related to the election or poll sites today,” wrote Wauwatosa Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Abby Pavlik in an email statement to Wisconsin Examiner.
A spokesperson with the Milwaukee Police Department said they were “unaware of any major issues.”
Although many Milwaukee County residents voted early, others are still arriving at community centers, city halls, schools, libraries, and other polling sites to cast their ballots on Tuesday.
In the weeks leading up to the election, some Milwaukee-area communities experienced vandalism targeting Democratic candidate yard signs. Wauwatosa was one of them, with signs damaged across the city from the southeastern corner to the northwest.
Pavlik said that in recent days, no more reports of defaced yard signs were reported to Wauwatosa PD. “When these reports come into dispatch, we document the location and the damage to ensure a record is kept,” said Pavlik. “An officer is not automatically sent to every incident, we respond if the caller requests it.”
Last updated: 2:02 pm
3 weeks ago
Green Bay, Wis. has ‘very brisk start’ to Election Day, rotates election observers
Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said nine election observers are allowed at a time at Central Count, with rotations every hour. Whether they are Republican, Democrat, or other — such as someone with another party, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the League of Women Voters — they can watch at Central Count with rotations every hour, she said.
The city said on Facebook that 234 absentee ballots have been counted as of 10:30 a.m. At a press conference at City Hall at about 10:30 a.m., Jeffreys said the ballots must be opened and processed before they are put into the machine. As of the end of day yesterday, there were 20,154 absentee ballots returned, the city said. Absentee ballots can be returned to the clerk’s office at City Hall before 8 p.m. today.
In a press release Monday, the clerk’s office said the city would begin processing absentee ballots this morning at 7:05 a.m.“Voters should be aware that, even as some states report early voting turnout, our state does not allow pre-Election Day processing of any ballots,” the clerk’s office stated.
At the press conference this morning, Jeffreys said about 3,200 voters have gone through the polls, according to the polls that have reported in — 70% of polling locations. “A very brisk start to our Election Day here,” Jeffreys said. A couple of issues have come up. Jeffreys said a tech was sent to address an issue at Ward 41; she hasn’t heard back since and thinks everything’s fine. In a separate issue, she said she thinks a voter received a test ballot, and she’s looking into it. “I’m not sure how a test ballot got to polls, but I will be investigating that after this press conference,” she said. On Monday, Wisconsin Examiner spoke to Jennifer Gonzalez, communications coordinator at the Green Bay Police Department, about the election. She said there are no known incidents that have required a police response at that time. The Examiner reached out to Gonzalez this afternoon to request an update and is awaiting her response.
Last updated: 4:02 pm
3 weeks ago
Orderly election morning in Milwaukee as early voting cuts down on lines
Polling places In Milwaukee and surrounding suburbs did not have long lines Tuesday morning, unlike recent presidential elections, and poll workers said many voters had already cast their ballots during Wisconsin’s early voting period ahead of Election Day.
At West Allis City Hall, the chief poll worker told Wisconsin Examiner that 15,500 West Allis residents voted early. In contrast, by 9 a.m. Tuesday, 314 people had cast their ballotsacross the four voting wards covered by the city hall polling location.
By 9:30 am, the city hall in Wauwatosa had seen 375 voters. Wauwatosa also had high numbers of early voters, with poll workers telling Wisconsin Examiner that just over 60% of all registered voters in Wauwatosa voted early this year.
Standing in the middle of the room as people voted in Wauwatosa, cross armed and quiet, a man wearing an election observer sticker watched everyone who entered and exited.
Photo by Isiah Holmes
None of the poling sites Wisconsin Examiner visited in and around MIlwaukee had reported problems by late Tuesday morning, either from disruptions by citizens or with equipment failures.
In Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, Washington High School had a steady stream of voters flowing in and out. Outside, poll workers helped an elderly woman and her two relatives register to vote at the curb, while they waited in the car, out of the on again, off again rainfall.
Both at Washington High School and the nearby Washington Park Library, poll workers loudly rejoiced each time someone came in to register as a first-time voter.
Two people who tried to register were turned away at the polling site because they did not have proof of their address. A handful of voters were directed to other polling sites since they’d arrived at the wrong location.
At Washington Park Library, the poll site’s chief told Wisconsin Examiner that he hadn’t seen so many people vote early at that location since the pandemic presidential election of 2020.
Outside the library, a Hunger Task Force mobile food pantry operated, void of any political signage, providing meals and groceries to local residents.
Just up the road at the Milwaukee Public Schools Administration Building, 457 people from two voting wards had cast ballots by 10:37 a.m. As at the other Milwaukee area sites, there had been no problems with long lines and no technical or safety concerns.
3 weeks ago
Progressive coalition leader: If Harris wins, credit students and women
If the Democratic Party does well in Wisconsin Tuesday, Greg Speed thinks students’ votes and women’s votes will be a major contributor.
Speed is the president of America Votes, an independent expenditure operation that raises money and funnels it to progressive voter engagement groups. Born in the 2004 election, America Votes works with about 80 organizations nationwide; across the states it has hundreds of coalition partners, including 60 in Wisconsin alone.
The 2020 election was unusual because the continuing COVID-19 pandemic kicked up absentee voting overall, but University of Wisconsin-Madison students who might have normally voted in the city cast their ballots back home, whether elsewhere in Wisconsin or out-of-state.
But that’s not the only reason for this year’s higher early voter turnout among Madison students, who are among the voters that America Votes coalition partners targets.
“It is evidence of a lot of work on voter registration,” Speed said — and isn’t necessarily automatic, because the state allows registration at the polls on Election Day. If it was its own city, however, the UW campus is fourth in the state in new voter registrations. (Milwaukee and Madison are the top two.)
“The fact that so many have gone ahead and registered this year prior to election day is, in and of itself, pretty significant,” Speed said.
The 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a federal abortion right remains at a top priority with the voters that canvassers in the coalition encounter.
“It’s electric — still,” said Speed. “It is the issue that in a conversation at the doors, you see a person light up when you mention abortion.”
He recalls door-to-door canvassing with environmental groups in 2022 and raising the issue of climate change “and they’d almost stop you and they’re like, ‘What about abortion rights?’”
Two years later reproductive rights have remained as potent as ever, he said. If Democrats win, “the Republican Party … they’re going to have to grapple with what they’ve [done] — hitching their wagon to Trump for as long as they have, but they’ve hitched their wagon to the anti choice movement for much longer. And it’s definitional.”
Speed predicts the issue won’t go away.
“It’s definitional like, and I think Democrats need to buckle up and double down. This is going to be the issue in ‘26 it’s going to be the issue in ‘28 that is not going away until Roe is restored.”
America Votes and its coalition partners don’t focus on traditional Republican voters, but Speed has been watching the Harris campaign’s courting of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney and other Republicans such as the mayors of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and Mesa, Arizona. That’s “part of the path” to a Harris victory, he said.
Whether in Wisconsin, where Biden won by a little more than 20,000 votes four years ago, or Pennsylvania, where his margin of victory was about 80,000 votes, its not enough to rely on the core urban communities and students that make up so much of the Democratic base, he said.
‘”You’ve got to continue over-performing in Waukesha and Ozaukee [counties],” Speed said. “You’ve got to continue over-performing in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. That’s those Cheney events and other things. That’s who that was aimed at — those suburban, exurban areas.”
If Harris does better than the polls showing her neck-and-neck with Trump, “it’s definitely going to be [thanks to] a lot of crossover support in suburban, you know, suburban Milwaukee, suburban Philly.”
Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke cast her ballot in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District and took time out to chat with the Examiner’s Frank Zufall about turnout and the state of her race against Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden. “There’s no community too small or too red,” Cooke said of her campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort.
Voters enter a polling place at the Waunakee Public Library.| Photo by Henry Redman
In Waunakee, where former President Donald Trump held the Republican Party’s first campaign stop in decades in the deep blue Dane County in early October, the polling place at the local library had a line winding almost out the door at around 10:30 a.m.The poll’s chief inspector Bob Ohlsen says there have been no issues but the morning rush was incredibly busy with voters waiting about 30-40 minutes to vote.
The poll is where voters in half the city’s wards go to cast their ballot, with a large bank of four rows of voting carrels allow the process to move quickly.“People have been incredibly patient,” Ohlsen says. “It’s gonna take a while.”Two election observers representing the Democratic Party were watching voting take place, saying they’d be there all day.
Last updated: 10:49 am
3 weeks ago
Busy morning at downtown Madison, Wis. polling place
Voters cast their ballot in a polling place just blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wis. | Photo by Henry Redman
At a downtown Madison polling place just blocks from the state Capitol, voters from the 45th and 51st wards wound their way through an apartment building to vote in the 5th floor community center down the hall from the building’s dog run. Chief Inspector Ben Lebovitz says the location had a very busy early morning rush — causing 15-30 minute lines — that ended around 8:30.
“A lot of voting this morning, it’s gone smoothly,” he says. This polling place used to be at the Madison Municipal Building but has since been moved. Lebovitz, who has worked the polls for years, says voters have gotten used to finding where to vote. Around 8:45 a.m. poll workers began to process the around 700 absentee ballots cast in the two wards and shortly before 9:30, Lebovitz went to cast his own ballot only for it to read as unscannable by the tabulating machine.
It’s a “teachable moment” he said to poll workers as he walked them through how to document and issue a replacement ballot. Two election observers were monitoring voting at the polling place, saying it had gone smoothly all morning. One, Jonathan Fisher, is a staff member for Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is a member of the House Committee on Administration, which is running an election observer program.
Spirit Lutheran Church, a polling place in Eau Claire , Wis. Photo by Frank Zufall
Spirit Lutheran Church voting site in Eau Claire was packed at 9 a.m. as voters cast ballots. Democratic U.S. congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke, who is challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, is set to speak at Spirit Lutheran at 10 a.m. today.
At a news conference Monday morning, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe reminded the public about the absentee ballot counting process and that it will likely take hours after polls close on Tuesday before unofficial results are available.
Local election officials can’t begin processing and counting ballots until the polls open. In most communities across the state, absentee ballots are handled at the polling place where voters who used absentee ballots would have cast their ballots in person. In those places, the ballots are opened, processed and counted when poll staff can find the time in between assisting people who are voting in person.
In about 30 communities across the state, including some of the largest cities, absentee ballots are processed at central count locations, at which all of the community’s absentee ballots are sent to one location to be counted.
Central Count in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
In most communities where absentees are counted at the polls, those ballots are treated like that of an in-person voter. The voter’s name is announced and confirmed in the poll book before being fed into the voting machine to be tabulated. Those results then get reported after polls close along with all of the day’s in-person votes from that precinct.
At central count locations, the absentees are kept separate and all of that work to process, confirm with the poll book and feed the ballots into machines happens there.
The central count results then get reported all at once, separate from the precincts where those votes come from, once they’ve all been counted.
Republicans in the state Senate killed a bill proposed earlier this year that would have allowed ballots to be processed, but not counted, starting on the Monday before the election. The change was proposed in the wake of Republican conspiracy theories that ballots were “dumped” in the middle of the night in Milwaukee to swing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
Without that proposed change, absentee ballots — especially in Milwaukee — will likely take hours to count and may not be reported until the early hours of Wednesday morning.
“Election officials are always going to prioritize accuracy, integrity and transparency over speed, and just because you’re waiting until the early morning hours doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong, this just means that election officials, again, are prioritizing accuracy over speed in order to ensure that every legitimate ballot gets counted,” Wolfe said at the news conference. “Processing absentee ballots takes time, especially since Wisconsin is one of just a few states where poll workers and clerks can’t even begin processing absentee ballots until the polls open on Election Day.
“You may see unofficial results coming in from the individual polling places, but those don’t include the absentee numbers for these jurisdictions, because all the absentees are counted in one central facility, and when all the absentees are done being counted, then the absentees are added to their individual polling place totals,” Wolfe added. “So it doesn’t mean anything is wrong if the unofficial totals that you’re watching online or on TV increase once the absentees are added, that’s to be expected.”
More than 1.5 million people have already cast their ballots. Voters set a state record for in-person absentee voting this year, with 949,157 early votes cast. Another 645,477 absentee ballots were requested, which trails the number of mail-in votes cast in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in absentee voting.
Voting rights activists and others gather at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee on the first day of early voting in July 2022. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Election observers hover around Bonnie Chang, a member of Milwaukee’s Board of Absentee Canvassers, as she reveals blank flash drives to download vote totals from tabulation machines on Aug. 13. (Matt Vasilogambros | Stateline)
Both federal and state law provide protections against voter intimidation but recent years of widespread Republican activism alleging voter fraud and calling into question the integrity of elections have raised concerns about the issue on Election Day here in Wisconsin.
The Republican Party has promised to station thousands election observers at polling places across the country. At a handful of poll locations during the August election in Glendale, Wisconsin, where there was a Democratic primary in a special election for the 4th Senate District, local officials had to call the police after observers with a history of spreading election-related conspiracy theories became disruptive. The group left after law enforcement was called, but promised to be back in November.
Local election officials are responsible for maintaining security at polling places and have received guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on how to handle observers and what to do if they get unruly.
Under Wisconsin law, it is a felony to “compel, induce, or prevail upon” a voter to vote or not vote a certain way. It is also illegal for employers to prevent employees from taking time off to vote or to distribute printed material that contains “threats intended to influence the political opinions or actions of the employees.”
Additionally, state law provides that no person can “by abduction, duress, or any fraudulent device or contrivance, impede or prevent the free exercise of the franchise at an election,” or “make use of or threaten to make use of force, violence, or restraint in order to induce or compel any person to vote or refrain from voting at an election.”
Most violations of Wisconsin’s voter intimidation laws are class I felonies, which carry the punishment of a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to 3 years and 6 months, or both. Election officials convicted of voter intimidation are prohibited from acting as an election official for up to five years.
According to the Campaign Legal Center, common types of voter intimidation include:
Verbal or physical confrontation of voters by persons dressed in official-looking uniforms
Physical intimidation, such as standing or hovering close to voters as they attempt to vote
Flyers threatening jail time or other punitive action against persons who vote
Direct confrontation or questioning of voters or asking voters for documentation when none is required
Vandalism of polling places
Use of police officers to threaten or intimidate voters
Photographing or videotaping voters inside a polling place without their consent
Threats made by an employer to the job, wages, or benefits of an employee if he or she does not vote in a particular manner
Occupying the parking lot of a polling place in such a way that voters might be hindered from entering.
Election observers in Wisconsin may challenge any vote, arguing that it has been cast illegally due to ineligibility of the voter.
“Either election officials or fellow voters can challenge the qualification of a voter, but challenges should have reasonable and appropriate support,” the Campaign Legal Center said in a Wisconsin-specific guide on voter intimidation. “A voter can be challenged based on age, residency, citizenship, ability to sign the poll list or other disqualification from voting. A challenge based on an individual’s appearance, speech or inability to speak English is unacceptable. A challenger who abuses the right to challenge can be subject to sanctions.”
However a challenge only disqualifies a vote if “the municipal clerk, board of election commissioners or a challenging elector . . . demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the person does not qualify as an elector or is not properly registered.”
Making baseless or frivolous challenges may constitute violations of the state and federal laws against voter intimidation.
Election observers must sign in when they arrive at a polling place and poll workers have the ability to limit where they’re allowed to be. Observers are also barred from electioneering, taking photos or videos, seeing confidential voter information, having conversations about what’s on the ballot and making phone calls while in the polling place.
Poll workers can remove an election observer for being disruptive.
Last updated: 6:18 am
3 weeks ago
WEC Administrator gives final Election Day reminders
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe speaks at a virtual press conference after the state Senate voted to fire her on Sept. 14. (Screenshot)
For people going to the polls on Tuesday, state law requires they bring a government-issued ID. The ID is required to prove a voter’s registration, not their residence, so if the registration is up-to-date, the address on the ID does not need to be current, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said during a Monday a press conference.
Voters can register at the polls on Election Day, though they’ll need to prove their current residence.
“To register to vote at the polls, a voter will need to show a proof of residence document,” Wolfe said. “So this is something that has to contain your current name and your current residential address. So this could include something like a bank statement, a utility bill, or it could be a current invalid Wisconsin driver license or state ID card. If that ID card has your current name and address on it. Also remember that every single voter in the state of Wisconsin [who] head to the polls tomorrow has to bring an acceptable photo ID. This can include Wisconsin driver license, Wisconsin state ID card, a U.S. passport. It can also include a military or a veterans ID, a tribal ID, a certificate of naturalization and some student IDs.”
Polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Voters who are waiting in line at 8 should remain in line and they will be allowed to cast a ballot.
If a person still has an absentee ballot to return, it is too late to place it in the mail and have it arrive on time. Voters should now bring that ballot to their local clerk’s office, an absentee ballot drop box if they’re available in that community, their designated polling place, or to their community’s central count location.
After months of campaigning and numerous rally stops in Wisconsin from the two major party candidates, Election Day 2024 has arrived, with polls opening in the state at 7 a.m. Voters can find their polling place online at MyVote.WI.Gov.
On the ballot in the state are the two presidential candidates, the Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and the Republican, former President Donald Trump. Wisconsin voters will also vote for the race in the U.S. Senate between Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin and Republican banker Eric Hovde.
The state also has a few closely watched races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; a constitutional referendum on barring non-citizens from voting in the state and the balance of power is up for grabs in the state Legislature under the first elections with newly un-gerrymandered maps. Finally, in local elections across the state voters will decide on school referenda, property tax hikes and who will serve in important county government roles.
Maya Rudolph and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris appear on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 2, 2024 in New York City. With only days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning in battleground states along with making the appearance on SNL. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — On the final frantic Sunday of the presidential race, while Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a Black church service in Michigan, former President Donald Trump told supporters at a Pennsylvania rally that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
At a campaign rally at an airplane tarmac in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump again perpetuated the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and claimed that this year’s election would also be stolen because election results could take a while to be counted.
“These elections have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” he said. “Bunch of crooked people.”
The comments came as new polls showed good news for Harris. A highly regarded pollster in Iowa showed a shocking lead for Harris there and New York Times-Siena College polls of the seven major battleground states showed slight leads for Harris in some Sun Belt swing states, while Trump made gains in the Rust Belt.
As the campaign dwindles to its final hours, here are seven key developments from this weekend:
Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ White House
Trump spent much of his Lititz rally complaining about the election process and media coverage, seeming to repeat his false claim that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Trump said. “We did so well, we had such a great — so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”
He pointed to protective glass covering him on two sides and noted a press section was on another side of him.
“To get me, someone would have to shoot through the fake news,” Trump said. “And I don’t mind that so much.”
In a statement that seemed to contradict the plain meaning of Trump’s remark, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung denied Trump was encouraging violence against reporters.
“The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else,” Cheung wrote. “It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!”
Harris heads to the Big Apple
Harris made an unscheduled trip to New York City Saturday, where she made a surprise appearance during the cold open of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” alongside actress Maya Rudolph, who portrays the veep in the live sketch comedy show.
In the three-minute opener, Rudolph approaches a vanity dresser and wishes she could talk to “someone who was in my shoes” as a “Black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area.”
Rudolph turns toward the faux mirror, and Harris, on the other side, responds, “You and me both, sister.”
They wore identical suits and Harris turned to Rudolph and said that she is “here to remind you, you got this.”
“Because you can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors,” Harris said, joking about a recent campaign event where Trump tried to open the door to a garbage truck.
Rudolph cackled, doing an impersonation of Harris’ laugh, before the two women began a pep talk with puns of Harris’ first name.
“Now, Kamala, take my palmala,” Rudolph said. “The American people want to stop the chaos.”
“And end the dramala,” Harris said.
Harris and Rudolph then stood side-by-side and said they were going to vote for “us.”
Harris joked and asked Rudolph if she was registered to vote in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Harris headed from New York to Michigan, where she spoke Sunday at the historically Black Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ in Detroit.
Polling bombshell in a non-swing state
Polling in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, reported a shocking lead for Harris in a state that Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, with women and independent voters breaking for the Democratic presidential nominee.
The poll shows Harris leading with 47% of likely voters compared to 44% with Trump, according to the Register.
The Trump campaign quickly called the Iowa poll “a clear outlier,” and instead cited a poll by Emerson College as accurate, which showed the former president having 53% support compared to 43% for Harris.
Trump also took his grievances to his social media site, Truth Social.
“All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he wrote. “I LOVE THE FARMERS, AND THEY LOVE ME.”
The New York Times/Siena College Sunday polls found that Harris is improving in North Carolina and Georgia while Trump has gained in Pennsylvania and maintains a strong advantage in Arizona. Harris is still ahead in Nevada and Wisconsin, according to the poll, but Michigan and Pennsylvania remain tied. The poll of Georgia showed Harris with a 1-point edge.
Both candidates were within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that the seven swing states could tip to either candidate.
While both Democratic and Republican politicians have expressed confidence in winning the election, polling experts said during a panel hosted by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute in late October there’s no way to know for sure who will control the White House until all the votes are counted.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, founding partner at Echelon Insights, said there’s about a 60% chance that this year’s nationwide polling has been mostly correct, though she emphasized that the people who focus their careers on political polling are dedicated to providing a realistic understanding of where campaigns are headed.
“We are trying our very hardest to get it right,” Anderson said. “Even if you don’t believe in our altruism or even if you don’t believe in our academic and intellectual integrity, believe in nothing else than our financial incentives. You want to be the pollster who was right. It is very good business to be the pollster who is right.”
Jeff Horwitt, partner at Hart Research, said during the panel his firm has wrapped up its polling for this election year and expressed skepticism about the polls that emerge close to Election Day.
“Because our job, for our political clients, is to tell them the contours of the election,” Horwitt said. “How do we convince voters to vote for our candidate? What are the most effective messages? What do we have to think about? So the public polls are seeing now, they’re super interesting, and they’re important, but they’re not actionable.”
Trump welcomes sexist insult
As Trump spent his weekend in a campaign blitz across North Carolina, he welcomed a sexist remark from a rallygoer in Greensboro who suggested that Harris worked as a prostitute.
During the Saturday night rally, Trump questioned whether Harris’ previously worked at a McDonald’s. Her campaign has stated that she worked the summer job in 1983. In a campaign photo opportunity, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where he handed fries to pre-screened people at the drive through.
“It’s so simple,” Trump said. “She’s a significant liar, and when you lie about something so simple, so she never worked there –”
“She worked on a corner,” a man from the crowd shouted.
Trump laughed at the crude comment.
“This place is amazing,” Trump said. “Just remember, it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”
Harris has significantly gained support with women, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump has often dismissed criticism that he has lagged among women.
During a rally last week in Wisconsin, and in an attempt to win over women voters, Trump said that he would protect women and “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
Trump repeats ‘father of fertilization’ claim
At a Greensboro, North Carolina, rally Saturday, Trump again called himself “the father of fertilization,” a title he first gave himself during a Fox News town hall with women voters last month.
“I consider myself to be the father of fertilization,” he said Saturday.
The Iowa poll — and other late surveys — showed a stark gender gap, with women voters increasingly preferring Harris.
Nearly twice as many Iowa independent women voters, 57% to 29%, favored Harris. That represents a major gain for Harris since a September survey by the same pollster showed the vice president’s edge with independent women was only 5 percentage points.
Democrats have sought to exploit their advantage with women voters by emphasizing Trump’s record on abortion access. The former president appointed three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn the federal right to an abortion.
A flurry of state-level policymaking on reproductive rights has followed, including restrictions on in vitro fertilization, a common fertility treatment.
Trump has said he opposed an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the treatment in the state, but had not previously taken a position on the issue.
Roughly half of those have come in states that track voters’ partisanship. About 700,000 — roughly 2% of the total — more Democrats have voted in those states than Republicans, but the numbers include California, where Democrat Joe Biden won more than 5 million more votes than Trump in the 2020 election.
Among the six states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, Idaho and Virginia — that track voters’ gender, women accounted for 54% of the vote, compared to 43.6% for men.
‘Election eve’ blitz
The candidates for president and vice president plan to sprint across the key swing states in the campaign’s final days, with particular focus on Pennsylvania, the largest of the contested states where polling has shown a deadlocked race.
The Harris campaign announced Sunday the vice president would be in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on Monday, the night before Election Day, for rallies and musical performances. Scheduled entertainers and speakers included Oprah Winfrey, The Roots, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.
Harris is also set to hold an event in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a majority-Latino city, on Monday. Part of Harris’ closing message has highlighted racist comments Trump and his supporters have made about Latinos.
After spending much of the weekend in North Carolina, Trump will also hold a rally in Pittsburgh on Monday evening.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, will be in Milwaukee on Monday.
Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance will hold events in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania on Monday.
Harris will hold an election night watch party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s watch party will be at his Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
People enter a voting precinct to vote in the Michigan primary election at Trombly School Aug. 7, 2018, in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano | Getty Images)
In Kenosha, the local Democratic Party office has received calls about residents who put up yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris receiving letters, warning of reprisal and biblical hell fire if they don’t vote for former President Donald Trump.
Lori Hawkins, chair of the Kenosha County Democratic Party, said that people have been reporting the letters to the Kenosha Police Department. “There’s a couple different versions of it, but most people I know have gotten both of them,” Hawkins told Wisconsin Examiner.
One of the letters, images of which were shared with Wisconsin Examiner, opens with the line, “We see that you have Democrat signs on your property.” The letter asks, “are you not aware that when you die that you will be held accountable before almighty God for voting for an open border that allows millions of illegal immigrants to freely enter, many of which are felons and evil people that have been doing deadly harm and will continue to do so [?]” The letter goes on to warn that voters will be held accountable by God “for voting for communism to take over America,” ending that “we don’t want anyone going to horrible hell, but you are on a fast path to it.”
After receiving multiple reports about the letters, Hawkins said that the Kenosha County Democratic Party decided to make a social media post, to ensure that people knew that they weren’t alone. The letters are typed and unsigned. “We know that the people who are putting these letters in mailboxes really believe the topics or the issues that are in the letters, and they’re probably doing it because they are fearful,” said Hawkins. “We know that it’s a bigger organization that’s fomenting this kind of fear, and playing to people’s anxieties and worries.”
Hawkins feels that the letters are “twisting the platform of Democrats who are on the ballot in a way that is, you know, pretty vile and false.” Hawkins has also received reports of Democratic yard and barn signs being slashed, defaced, driven over, or stolen. “And let’s be clear, I have heard and seen none of that happening with the large political signs belonging to Republican Party candidates,” said Hawkins. “So this is just an attempt to silence people, and make people fearful.”
Still, hundreds of people turned out for recent canvassing days held by the Kenosha County Democratic Party. Nancy Locante, a volunteer with the Kenosha County Democratic Party, received one of the letters, mailed to her with no return address. “America is at a crossroads,” one of the letters she received stated. The letter described “transgender ideology infecting our children’s schools,” high grocery bills, immigration, and persecution of “Christian values.” The letter urged Locante to vote for “biblical truths.” Locante said, “that’s quite a bit of intimidation, but of course they don’t have the guts to put their names on it. It can be a little unsettling knowing that they are watching you. But it’s unfortunate that these people’s beliefs are so misguided.” Locante hasn’t been deterred. “I’m walking around with all my buttons and merch on,” she said.
Locante plans to continue helping the Kenosha County Democratic Party canvass neighborhoods ahead of Nov. 5.
In Milwaukee, Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) have knocked on over 600,000 doors urging people to get out and vote. LIT’s organizers said they have received reports of identical letters in communities between Milwaukee and Kenosha.
In early October, the Milwaukee suburban city of Wauwatosa experienced a string of sign vandalism, which targeted Democratic-endorsed yard signs. From Wauwatosa’s southeastern corner near 55th street and Wisconsin, all the way up to the northwestern corner of 81st street and Meinecke avenue, signs were defaced with red spray paint. The Republican Party of Milwaukee County denounced the vandalism in Wauwatosa, and said those responsible should be held accountable. In September, red spray paint was used to deface Democratic signs in Madison.
Both presidential campaigns continue to focus heavily on Wisconsin. Harris and Trump held competing rallies in Milwaukee Friday night ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.
Wisconsin’s swing-state status has driven the presidential candidates to visit the state often ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024, election — and it has driven Wisconsin Watch to fact-check many of the claims they’ve made here.
Our fact briefs, in partnership with Gigafact, centered on statements about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump over immigration, health care and the economy.
Some of those claims hit the mark; many did not.
Here’s a look at claims related to three of the top issues voters say they are focused on in this election.
(And be sure to share the video versions of our fact briefs from Wisconsin Watch’s Trisha Young.)
No, illegal immigration did not drop 90% under Trump: Southwest border encounters decreased 43% in 2017, the first year Trump was in office. But they were higher in each of the next three years than in 2016, including 80% higher in 2019.
No, Trump has not said he plans to force states to report miscarriages: The Project 2025 policy initiative, which Trump has distanced himself from, calls for the federal government to “ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place” and “ensure that statistics are separated by category,” including spontaneous miscarriage.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made a dent in former President Donald Trump’s lead among likely Iowa voters in the most recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. (Photos by Win McNamee and Megan Varner/Getty Images, photo illustration via Canva)
Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll published Saturday, just days before the Nov. 5 election.
The results are a surprising development for the state, which has been largely written off as an easy victory for Trump. He won Iowa in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The latest Iowa Poll showed Harris leading with 47% of likely voters and Trump with 44%, the Register reported.
The poll, taken Oct. 28-31 by Selzer & Co. with responses from 808 likely Iowa voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus3.4 percentage points.
While Harris’ lead falls in the margin of error, it’s a significant reversal from previous Iowa Polls. In September, Trump led the Iowa Poll with 47% to Harris’ 43%. Trump had the support of 50% of likely Iowa voters in June when President Joe Biden was expected to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Women, independents shift toward Harris
The largest shift heading toward support for Harris has been Iowa women – particularly women who identify as independent voters as well as those age 65 and older, the Register reported. More independent likely voters as a whole now support Harris at 46% to Trump at 39%, despite the demographic favoring Trump in every earlier Iowa Poll.
Independent women favored Harris in the September poll, with 40% supporting her and 35% supporting Trump. That lead grew in the latest poll to 57% of independent women who support Harris and 29% who support Trump.
More independent men still favor Trump over Harris at 47% to 37%.
While likely voters 65 and older also support Harris as a demographic, 63% of senior women support the vice president compared to 28% who support Trump – a more than 2-to-1 margin. More senior men also support Harris but by a margin of 2 percentage points at 47% to 45%.
Iowa Republicans have stumped for Trump in swing states
Iowa Republicans have spent time on the campaign trail touting Trump’s popularity in the state and the expectation that the former president will win Iowa for the third election in a row — U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, Iowa Republicans, have traveled to swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia to rally voters in recent weeks, with Ernst saying Iowa was “in the bag” for Trump.
Though both Harris and Trump have spent most their time in key swing states ahead of the election, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told reporters Saturday that the poll results show that Iowa is a winnable state for Democrats in the upcoming election.
“We’ve been putting in the hard work, and it is paying off,” Hart said. “We’ve been educating our voters, recruiting volunteers, listening to friends’ and neighbors’ concerns, and we recognize that Iowans are looking for better leadership. The fact that Vice President Harris now leads Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register poll is obviously very exciting for us.”
Iowa GOP chair calls poll an ‘outlier’
But Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann disputed the accuracy of the results, comparing the Des Moines Register’s poll results to one released by Emerson College earlier Saturday that showed Trump ahead at 53% to Harris at 43%.
“Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll,” Kaufmann said in a statement. “Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology.”
House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst argued that the Iowa Poll well respected, and should not be dismissed just because it does not show favorable results for one party.
“I’ve been in their shoes on a Saturday night before Election Day, where the Iowa poll results come out, and they don’t look like what we’d like them to (be),” Konfrst said. “And they can’t believe Ann Seltzer, one of the gold standard pollsters in the country, in 2020 and not in 2024.”
The poll also found Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who remains on the Iowa ballot despite ending his campaign, still has the support of 3% of likely voters. Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver earned less than 1% in the poll. Another 1% of respondents said they would vote for someone else, 3% responded that they were not sure who to support and 2% said they did not want to disclose who they supported.
Though the poll showed Harris in a favorable position for Tuesday, Hart said it was important to note that Iowa Poll results are not Election Day results. Konfrst said the poll is a welcome push giving “energy and enthusiasm and momentum” to Democratic voters and organizers leading up to Tuesday.
“We have three more days before this election, so remember, this is just a poll, and what really matters is that Iowans show up and make their voices heard,” Hart said.
Democrats say poll supports argument for more national help
In the final days before the election, Konfrst said that she and other Democrats are having conversations about the poll with the national party and supporting Democratic organizations, hoping to get support and surrogate visits ahead of Election Day.
“We’re going to be asking as many folks as we can to be surrogates here, but at the end of the day, we know that it’s the hard work of volunteers, our candidates up and down the ballot, the Congressional candidates and the party and all of our partners here in Iowa who are doing that hard work,” Konfrst said. “And so, surrogate or not, we think that we’re going to have a better night than expected for Kamala Harris and Democrats on Tuesday.”
Hart also said that Iowa’s decision in the 2024 presidential election could have major implications for the future of the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Iowa was ousted from its first-in-the-nation seat in the 2024 Democratic presidential nominating cycle and released its mail-in caucus results on Super Tuesday supporting Biden this year. The nominating calendar will be up for discussion again heading into 2028, and Hart said Nov. 5 results will have a crucial impact on Iowa Democrats’ argument to return to return as an early state in future elections.
“Once this election is over, we’re going to be having this conversation,” Hart said. “And the better we do here in November, the better case we can make. … The bottom line is that I hope this shows the rest of the country that Iowa is a good barometer for choosing good leadership.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
States Newsroom analyzed 238 of former President Donald Trump’s posts on X and Truth Social over 16 randomly selected days in August through October 2024. Out of 1,500 unique words, “comrade,” “fake,” “war,” “radical” and “lyin'” landed in the top 75. Reposts and direct quotes from others were not included in the analysis. (Ashley Murray/States Newsroom, image created using wordclouds.com)
WASHINGTON — Before a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden late last month, former President Donald Trump bellowed that the United States is “occupied” by illegal immigrants and that he will “rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered.”
Day one, if he’s elected, will be the “largest deportation program in American history.”
On stage in Arizona Thursday night with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump proposed former U.S. House member Liz Cheney should face guns of war. Cheney, a Republican who’s campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris and who helped lead the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, should have “nine barrels shooting at her” because she is a “war hawk,” Trump said.
“Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.
These types of comments are exactly why political scientists and historians are sounding the alarm on the former president’s language. The experts have found that Trump, who is neck-and-neck with Harris for a second term in the Oval Office, is increasingly divisive and threatening. They warn Trump’s speeches and social media posts, laden with insults, have become darker and more violent since his political career began in 2015, and urge more examination of their consequences in the real world.
Trump’s speeches have also become longer over the years and more meandering and random — an approach he describes as “the weave.” An analysis by the New York Times found Trump’s speeches last on average 82 minutes, up from 45 minutes in 2016.
Robert C. Rowland, who studies political rhetoric at the University of Kansas, summed up Trump’s recent speeches, social media posts and interviews as essentially delivering “fear, anger, grievance, braggadocio.”
“‘Things are terrible here.’ ‘We won’t have a country left.’ ‘We’ll have a nuclear war.’ He said things like that at the very end of the 2020 campaign, but this is different than most of his time in politics, and with that, even stronger claims about his greatness — all untethered from any discussion of how any of (his proposals) would actually happen,” said Rowland, author of the 2021 book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”
When contacted for comment about the former president’s evolving language, Trump’s campaign provided a statement from a Republican National Committee representative who criticized the media for not giving “the same attention to the brutal rape and murder of victims like Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Jocelyn Nugary.”
The correct spelling is Nungaray.
The women, whose deaths Trump has spotlighted in his campaign, were respectively attacked and killed in 2023 in Maryland by a man from El Salvador, in 2024 in Georgia by a man from Venezuela, and in 2024 in Texas by two men from Venezuela. Nungaray’s mother has appeared with Trump on the campaign trail.
The RNC’s Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement, in which she provided links, that “President Trump says the truth: the Harris-Biden administration has allowed over 100 terror suspects who crossed the border into the country, nearly 16,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended trying to cross the border, and over 5,000 unvetted illegal immigrants are being released into the U.S. everyday. Americans, including Hispanic Americans, overwhelmingly support President Trump’s plan to secure our country, and they are ready to Make America Safe Again on November 5.”
While Trump has focused on high-profile violent crimes perpetrated by immigrants who lack legal status, numerous analyses have shown that immigrants do not commit crimes at a rate higher than native-born Americans.
Graphic descriptions of killings
Increasingly, Trump describes gruesome scenes of rape and murder to his campaign rally audiences, warning them that “Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world.”
Before his arena crowd in Manhattan last month, the former president recounted the details of the September 2016murders by MS-13 gang members of two teenage girls on Long Island. “They didn’t shoot them. They knifed them and they cut them into little pieces because it was so painful,” he said.
University of California Los Angeles researchers Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman analyzed 99 of Trump’s speeches from April 2015 to June 2024 and found an upward trend in the frequency of violent vocabulary. They published their results in a working paper in July.
“What’s significant is this very clear over time upward trend since 2015,” Treisman told States Newsroom in an interview in early October.
Savin and Treisman also inspected 127 speeches delivered by major party candidates in the 20 months prior to each U.S. presidential election since 2008. Trump’s and the others’ speeches were chosen by the same criteria: the last major public speech of each month.
The pair have continued to monitor Trump’s language as part of their working paper.
“I just analyzed the last speech in September in Wisconsin, and that speech contained a higher frequency, or as high a frequency, of violent words as in any of his previous speeches that we’ve looked at,” Treisman said.
‘They’
Using a specialized dictionary of 142 words related to violence, the pair studied Trump’s language for words like “crime,” “war,” “prosecute,” “prison,” “missile,” “death,” “massacre” and “blood.” They also scrutinized for markers of economic and populist content.
Since 2020, Trump’s negative language about “elites” has trended upward, but “the thing on which he’s most distinctive is his use of the pronoun ‘they,’ — and that he’s very high on that compared to other politicians,” Treisman said.
When the research duo expanded the parameters of comparison to various U.S. and world leaders, past and present, they found Trump’s frequency of violent language “exceeds that of any other politician in a democracy that we studied and falls just a little below the level in a selection of Fidel Castro’s May Day speeches.”
Savin and Treisman acknowledge the limitations of their study in that it does not explore why Trump’s speech has changed, or the specific consequences of it. Additionally, a dictionary-based text analysis only measures the frequency of words, “without delving deeper into meanings and contexts,” they wrote.
“It doesn’t pick up violent thoughts expressed with nonviolent words. So for instance, his January 6 speech in 2021 doesn’t rate particularly high on our violence measures because he didn’t use a lot of words like ‘kill,’ ‘death,’ ‘blood’ and so on. He said, ‘Let’s go and walk down to the Capitol,’” Treisman said.
The authors wrote that, “Given the troubling evolution of his vocabulary, more research along these lines is clearly warranted.”
States Newsroom fed 238 of Trump’s social media posts across X and Truth Social into two AI word cloud generators. The posts, from randomly chosen days in August through October, comprised 8,664 words, but boiled down to roughly 1,500 unique words when grouped by repetition.
Trump’s top five words were, unsurprisingly, “Kamala,” “Harris,” “great, “now” and “Trump.”
But making it into the top 75 most used words out of 1,500 were “comrade” in 15th place, “fake” at 23rd on the list, “war” as the 54th most used, “radical” at 61st on the list, and “lyin’” at 72.
‘The enemy from within’
Trump told his supporters in New York City Sunday they are fighting against a “radical left machine” who he said — not for the first time — is the “enemy from within.”
In an Oct. 14 interview, Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that “the enemy from within” are a “bigger problem” than migrants who are “totally destroying our country.”
“We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics … and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary, by the military,” he responded when Bartiromo asked if he anticipated trouble on Election Day.
On Oct. 12, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an ad celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket,” juxtaposing it with scenes of drag performers and a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, a physician and, as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the first openly transgender federal official. The message he posted with the video: “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!”
Trump appears to disagree with any criticism that his campaign uses negative language or themes. On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social: “While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate.”
Recently, his campaign’s personalized fundraising text messages to supporters declare Trump’s “love” for them.
‘Don’t let them eat us’
In the days following the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris, the former president posted on his Truth Social platform a seriesofAI-generatedimages depicting cats begging voters to support Trump. “Don’t let them eat us. Vote for Trump,” read one sign held by a litter of orange tabby kittens.
The string of posts followed Trump’s false claim during the debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. The rumor began to circulate among Trump supporters ahead of his matchup with Harris, and Trump continued to push the lie.
The small city in Ohio was the target of bomb threats for days afterward, to the point that the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine dispatched state troopers to 18 local school buildings.
Rowland, who spoke to States Newsroom in both September and October, pondered whether Trump’s all-in attitude on the cats-and-dogs lie would hurt the former president’s reelection prospects.
“He’s picked this meme that is just so absurd and obviously false,” Rowland said Sept. 13.
Just over a month later, Rowland told States Newsroom, “It hasn’t moved anything. If anything, it’s gone the other direction.” Polling has shown Trump and Harris nearly tied for several weeks.
Rowland said overall, Trump’s recent “lack of coherence and the negative emotions are the things that I think are most striking.”
“He never previously talked about policy in detail, but now there’s almost no discussion of policy at all. Insults have replaced it, in a way,” Rowland said.
“I juxtapose this against the most effective leaders of both parties, people like Ronald Reagan — they really made a case. Now, one could agree or disagree with it. And Barack Obama, when he was running he certainly laid out an agenda, and that’s not what I see at all (in Trump),” Rowland said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in American politics.”
Cortaisha Thompson knocks on doors on Milwaukee's southside. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
A strong, warm fall wind accompanied Cortaisha Thompson as she walked through a south-side Milwaukee neighborhood. “I like to be out talking in the community just like, interacting with people,” the 26-year-old told Wisconsin Examiner. About 20 canvassers from Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT), including Thompson, have spent months knocking on doors throughout Milwaukee ensuring voters have what they need in the election on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Calmly walking up a staircase leading to a front door, Thompson knocked and waited. After about 30 seconds without an answer, she left a piece of voter education literature in the door and moved on. At the next house a woman answered the door, saying that she planned to vote on Election Day, but that she didn’t know that early voting was an option. Early in-person voting at polling places in Milwaukee began on Oct. 22 and will run until Nov. 3.
A voting ward sign in Milwaukee County. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Whether anyone answers the door when she knocks is a toss up, Thompson said. In some neighborhoods, doors stay shut the majority of the time. Sometimes it depends on the time of day and whether most people are at school or work. Thompson, who lives closer to Racine, has also noticed how different neighborhoods in Milwaukee have different vibes. On the South Side, canvassing walks can be quieter. When Thompson canvassed the North Side, she encountered more residents willing to talk about their political views.
“I feel like I get more contacts and more energized people that’s willing to open the door and actually talk,” said Thompson said of North Side neighborhoods. Since LIT’s goal is simply voter education and not candidate endorsement, Thompson doesn’t try to convince people to vote one way or another. Especially in Milwaukee, one of America’s most segregated cities, Thompson sees how people can feel pigeon-holed. “They feel like they have to vote for Trump, or they have to vote for Kamala,” said Thompson. “I just tell them like, we’re not here to tell you who to vote for or anything. We just want to make sure you get out to vote, and get your opinion out there.”
Signs for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sprinkled the diverse neighborhood. Some homes were adorned with colorful decorations. As Thompson approached a couple of doors, where no one answered, she noticed local police association stickers. She said she enjoyed her time in Milwaukee, and even is considering moving to the city.
Each day she canvassed a different neighborhood or part of town. When Thompson canvassed in wealthier neighborhoods with residents “in those super big houses,” people often reacted with hostility to LIT, she said, “cussing at us and stuff like that.” On the South Side she felt more welcome.
Periodically, Thompson would stop to check her phone to see what house is next on the list. Every canvasser is expected to knock on 175 doors a day. A couple months ago, the daily metric shot up to 275, which limited the amount of time canvassers could spend at each door. LIT has a goal to knock on 650,000 doors before election day, and has already reached more than 620,000.
Voting rights activists and others gather at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee on the first day of early voting in July 2022. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Thompson sees “a big mix of support” for different candidates neighborhood by neighborhood. “I haven’t gotten that yet, an area that’s strictly for her, or strictly with him,” said Thompson. A Marquette University poll released on Wednesday shows Harris and Trump in a virtual dead heat, 50% to -49% among likely voters.
Similarly, the race between Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican challenger Eric Hovde showed Baldwin leading 51% to 49%, a big drop from the seven-point lead Baldwin held in September.
Many voters Thompson has encountered also seem squarely focused on the presidential election. There’s also the Republican-backed constitutional amendments on the ballot this year, which LIT is also informing voters of. “There’s people that say they don’t even go out and vote for no election if it’s not the presidential one,” said Thompson. LIT heard the same thing from voters when knocking on doors for school referendums, mayoral races, and other elections. “None of it.”
That attitude can change, though, when voters are asked about issues instead of about candidates. Thompson recalled speaking to a woman about health care access. “Her daughter got into a car accident and was in a coma and all type of stuff and they didn’t have the money to pay for her treatment,” said Thompson. “And then she started crying talking to me about it so I was like, kind of sad about it…There’s really people out here affected by not having that type of stuff. Majorly affected.” Reproductive rights was another recurring issue Thompson has heard while canvassing. Shortly after telling the story Thompson walked into a local convenience store for some water. When the store manager he realized Thompson was out canvassing voters, he offered the water for free.
Prior to getting involved in LIT, Thompson said she never paid much attention to politics. Older relatives of hers, however, were politically active and pushed her to get involved. When she did, and then started working with LIT, her whole perspective changed. “They bring a lot of stuff to your attention to make you realize, like, your vote really matters, and it really counts,” said Thompson. “Especially in times like this where it’s like if it don’t go the way you want it to go, you don’t know how it’s going to go afterward.”
This article has been edited to update the numbers of doors knocked by LIT, and to correct a misspelled name.
Vice President Kamala Harris joined a bevy of popular music stars in Madison Wednesday night at the Alliant Center to encourage University of Wisconsin students to vote. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Vice President Kamala Harris joined a bevy of popular music stars in Madison Wednesday night at the Alliant Center to encourage University of Wisconsin students and other young people to vote for her over former President Donald Trump.
Wisconsin is a key battleground state and both presidential campaigns are spending a lot of time here with less than a week to go before Election Day. The last two presidential elections were decided by fewer than 20,000 votes in Wisconsin and the vote is expected to be close again this year. The same day Harris appeared in Madison, one of the largest Democratic hubs in the state, Trump held a rally in Green Bay. Both candidates will return to Wisconsin Friday to hold dueling rallies in Milwaukee.
College students, including those from out of state, are eligible to vote in Wisconsin and could play an important role in deciding the results of the presidential election. Harris spoke directly to them.
“You all are rightly impatient for change. You who have only known the climate crisis are leading the charge to protect our planet and our future. You, who grew up with active shooter drills, are fighting to keep our schools safe. You who now know fewer rights than your mother or grandmothers, are standing up for freedom,” Harris declared from the Alliant Energy Center stage, speaking in front of a massive “Badgers for Harris-Walz” sign. “This is not political for you,” Harris added. “This is your lived experience.”
Harris encouraged people to use the last six days before Election Day to vote, knock on doors, make calls and reach out to family and friends. Early in-person voting in Madison goes through Sunday and Election Day is Tuesday.
Some of the students at the rally had already voted early for Harris. Maya Wille, a UW-Madison senior who had Harris’ face temporary-tattooed on her bicep, said she’s excited by the prospect of electing the first woman president of the United States and said Harris is “for the young people.”
Maya Wille, a UW-Madison senior who had Harris’ face temporary-tattooed on her bicep, said she’s excited by the prospect of electing the first woman president of the United States. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
“I want to be able to buy a house. I want to be able to raise a family and I think that she has policies that are going to make that a lot easier. I want gun control. I want better funding for public schools,” Wille said.
The potential impact of voting in a swing state is what encouraged Hannah Tuckett, a UW junior from New York, and Lucy Murdock, a junior from Colorado, to vote in Wisconsin this year.
“I’m from Colorado, a historically blue state. My parents are always like, it’s so much more important for you to vote here than there,” Murdock said. “Both of us voted here, rather than in our home state, because we understand that, like, this is where we’re gonna make a way bigger splash.”
Hannah Tuckett, a UW junior from New York, and Lucy Murdock, a junior from Colorado, said they voted early for Harris. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Murdock said human rights issues, including protecting women’s and transgender people’s right to health care, people’s right to marry whoever they want and addressing climate change, are the “guiding forces” behind her politics.
“I think in this election human rights are more prevalent than they have been in several years,” Murdock said.
Tuckett said voting in Wisconsin is “empowering” and she has been “inspired” by Harris and her campaign. She said the rally was also an opportunity to be in community with like-minded people and served as a “breath of fresh air” away from campus. She said certain events and political messaging on campus, including a visit from conservative radio host Charlie Kirk, have created a polarized environment.
The campaign brought a line-up of popular musical artists, including folk band Mumford and Sons, singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, Aaron Dessner and Matt Berninger of The National and singer-songwriter Remi Wolf, to perform ahead of Harris at the rally, in front of more than 13,000 attendees. The campaign is betting the artists can serve as a trusted voice, delivering the message to fans to vote for Harris and to increase enthusiasm.
Tuckett said Mumford and Sons is her dad’s favorite artist.
“I’m here, listening to them for him. He said he would have flown from New York to be here for this. I’m super excited,” Tuckett said. She said the endorsements from “not just artists, but actors, athletes, any person with some sort of platform coming out and endorsing Harris for president just shows that this election really does mean so much.”
Abrams, who has grown a loyal fanbase and who has opened for artists including Taylor Swift, spoke directly to young people while making the case for Harris. She called Harris “the right leader at a very tricky time.”
“For many of us, here on this stage and in the crowd tonight, this is only the first or second time that we’ve had the privilege of voting in a presidential election, and as we know, we’ve inherited a world that is struggling and it’s easy to be disconnected and disillusioned. Between the advent of social media in our childhood and COVID and relentlessly targeted disinformation, we’ve been through some things and it’s easy to be discouraged, but we know better,” Abrams said.
“We know unless we vote and keep our democracy intact there will be nothing we can do to fix it when it is our turn,” Abrams continued. “We have values and ideas that deserve a platform. We know that a better, greener, more fair, equitable and just future is possible. We understand that community matters, that character matters, that basic decency matters. That dignity matters. That democracy matters.”
Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams performed ahead of Harris. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Even before the rally began, attendees tapped into the current pop culture moment. A station was set up inside the venue to make friendship bracelets (a trend popularized by Swift fans) and attendees wore ‘Kamala is brat’ t-shirts — a reference to a post by musician Charli xcx. Many in the audience also wore Harris-Walz camo hats.
Emma Heisch, a freshman at UW-Madison and Wisconsin native, was making a bracelet before the start of the rally when she told the Examiner about a conversation she had with her roommates last week about the importance of celebrities joining Harris on the campaign.
“A lot of people have been saying that they think it’s unprofessional and it’s a silly tactic but I don’t think that at all,” Heisch said. “Their support reaches out to a lot of Gen Z and it can make a lot of young people, who may not have originally been interested in politics, start to show interest. And even people who may not have been very interested in coming to the rally specifically for politics in the first place might come just for a celebrity and then show interest in what Kamala has to say.”
Emma Heisch (left), a freshman at UW-Madison and Wisconsin native, making a bracelet before the start of the rally. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)
Heisch voted for the first time this year. She said reproductive rights is one of her top issues. The issue was another big point of the night with Harris receiving thunderous applause and cheers during the rally as she committed to signing a bill to restore protections for reproductive health care access if one is sent to her by Congress.
“I’m a woman and I want control over my body and I don’t think anyone should have that control except for me,” Heisch said.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, gives her “closing argument” of the campaign in a speech on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 29, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
The fallout from a comedian’s racially charged joke at a rally for former President Donald Trump continued Wednesday as the campaign for the presidency raced toward its final weekend, with Democrats on the defensive about President Joe Biden’s reaction to the joke.
Republicans claimed Biden labeled Trump supporters as “garbage,” while Democrats insisted Biden was being misinterpreted, and a battle over the placement of an apostrophe in Biden’s comment spread from the White House briefing room to campaign stops.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday further clarified Biden’s comment, made on a Tuesday evening call to rally Latino voters. Biden brought up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remark at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
“They’re good, decent, honorable people,” Biden said Tuesday of Puerto Ricans who live in his home state of Delaware. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
An initial White House transcript of the call placed an apostrophe after the word “supporters,” making its meaning about multiple Trump supporters. A later transcript placed the possessive inside the word, so it read as “supporter’s,” making it about a single supporter, Hinchcliffe.
Biden posted on X Tuesday evening that was his intent.
“Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it,” Biden’s post read. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, also told reporters early Wednesday that it was wrong to disparage people over political affiliation, while noting Biden clarified he referred only to Hinchcliffe. The flap over Biden’s comments came just as Harris was giving her “closing argument” speech on the Ellipse on Tuesday night before a crowd in the tens of thousands.
“Let me be clear,” she said. “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Latino voters in general and Puerto Ricans in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania in particular are seen as a crucial voting bloc in the closing days of the campaign, and both campaigns are trying to get their support.
Jean-Pierre said from the White House briefing room Wednesday that Biden does not think Trump supporters are “garbage.”
“What I can say is that the president wanted to make sure that his words were not being taken out of context,” she said. “And so he wanted to clarify, and that’s what you heard from the president. He was very aware. And I would say I think it’s really important that you have a president that cares about clarifying what they said.”
Trump repeatedly has said the United States is the “garbage can of the world” as a result of Biden’s immigration policies.
Rubio: Harris camp should apologize
But Trump and other Republicans jumped on Biden’s remark, immediately comparing it to 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment that many Trump supporters comprised “a basket of deplorables.” That comment was seen as damaging to Clinton’s campaign against Trump.
At a Tuesday evening Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida disclosed news of Biden’s statement.
“I hope their campaign is about to apologize for what Joe Biden just said,” Rubio said. “We are not garbage. We are patriots who love America.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Trump added. “Remember Hillary, she said deplorable, and then she said irredeemable, right? But she said deplorable. That didn’t work out. Garbage I think is worse, right?”
Harris brings closing argument in N.C.
At a Wednesday afternoon rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris echoed some of the themes she sounded in the “closing argument” speech she gave Tuesday night.
She urged voters in the battleground state to “turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has been trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other.”
She said Trump was focused on personal grievances and seeking revenge on political opponents, while she would work toward improving voters’ lives.
“There are many big differences between he and I,” she said. “But I would say a major contrast is this: If he is elected, on day one, Donald Trump will walk into that office with an enemies list. When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
First on her list would be lowering the costs of health care, child care and other expenses for families, she said.
Harris appealed directly to disaffected Republicans, saying she would seek common ground with those she disagrees with. That approach, she said, was also in contrast to Trump, who used charged language to describe his opponents and pledged to retaliate against them.
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” she said. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table. And I pledge to be a president for all Americans, and to always put country above party and self.”
Harris won another endorsement from a nationally known Republican Wednesday, with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he would vote for her despite policy disagreements.
Trump also campaigned in North Carolina on Wednesday, in Rocky Mount, a town in a more rural part of the state about 50 miles east of Raleigh.
He said his campaign was a welcoming one to all races and religions and said Harris was the one running “a campaign of hate” toward Trump and his supporters, while lobbing an insult at the vice president.
“Kamala, a low-IQ individual, is running a campaign of hate, anger and retribution,” he said, repeating a term he has used for her before.
Election integrity
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said Wednesday they won a court case in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, over early voting hours, RNC officials said on a call Wednesday afternoon.
A judge in the key swing county extended the deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot after some voters said that long lines forced them to miss the 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline.
On the press call, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump supporter had been arrested after telling people in line near the deadline to remain in line.
Party officials, including Trump’s daughter-in-law, RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump, said the result bolstered their confidence in a free and fair election.
“We want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America,” Lara Trump said. “It is so foundational to who we are as a country that we trust our electoral process and this type of work allows exactly for that.”
Lara Trump said the party was “incredibly confident” in its staffers dedicated to ensuring the election is fair.
The issue has been a major priority for Republicans since Donald Trump and others claimed, without evidence, that election fraud caused his 2020 re-election loss.
That claim was rejected in scores of courts and a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four felony counts for using the election fraud lie to inspire the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump and allies have also speculated that his political opponents would seek to use illegal means, including voting by noncitizens, this year.
But in a departure from that rhetoric Wednesday, the RNC officials voiced confidence that the 2024 results would be trustworthy.
“I think it’s really important that we get the word spread loud and clear that we are taking this seriously, that you can trust American elections,” Lara Trump said. “In 2024, we want to re-establish any trust that may have been lost previously.”
The latest Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday found that the race between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely close in Wisconsin.
Harris received 50% of support among likely voters, while Trump received 49%. The previous Marquette poll, conducted in late September, found that Harris received 52% of support and Trump received 48% among likely voters.
The poll, which was conducted between Oct. 16 and 24, surveyed 834 Wisconsin registered voters of whom 753 are considered likely to vote based on 2016 voting records.
Charles Franklin, Marquette Law School Poll director
“The race has tightened a little bit,” Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in a public forum where he presented the poll results Wednesday.
When third party candidates including Robert F. Kennedy and Jill Stein were included in the poll, Harris received 46% of support while Trump received 44% of support. Franklin said voters who are undecided and leaning toward voting for a third-party contribute to the uncertainty in this election.
“They could so easily tip the scales one way or the other,” Franklin said. “If I haven’t made it clear by now, it should not surprise anyone if Donald Trump wins, and it should not surprise anyone if Kamala Harris wins. The polling averages for the state… are just so close that polling is not going to help us at all to have confidence in who is the likely winner.”
The poll also found a large gender gap among voters with men favoring Trump 56% to 44% and women favoring Harris 57% to 43%.
Enthusiasm is also high with 66% of those polled saying they are very enthusiastic. Democrats had a slight enthusiasm advantage with 75% of Democrats saying they are “very enthusiastic” to vote compared with 66% of Republicans.
In the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is running for her third term in office, polls slightly ahead of Republican Eric Hovde, a banker from California.
Among likely voters Baldwin received 51% of support while Hovde received 49%. The results are a big change from the last poll in September, which found that Baldwin had a lead of 7 percentage points over Hovde.
Baldwin was seen favorably by 45% of poll respondents, while her unfavorable rating was 50%; 5% said they haven’t heard enough to form an opinion. Hovde was seen as favorable by 36% and unfavorable by 48% of those polled, with 15% saying they haven’t heard enough.
Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks at a rally on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, with the White House as her backdrop, gave what she called her closing argument Tuesday evening, pressing voters to support her bid over that of “unstable” Republican candidate Donald Trump.
The 30-minute speech on the Ellipse was the same location where Trump, then president, held a rally nearly four years ago before his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Harris highlighted Democrats’ core argument that another term for the former president would present a threat to the country’s future.
“This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” Harris said. “It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or ruled by chaos and division.”
Harris evoked the conception of the United States, how it was “born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant.” She said since then, Americans across generations have fought to protect those freedoms and expand them, from those who marched in the civil rights movement to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy.
“They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. “We are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement that Trump’s “closing argument to the American people is simple: Kamala broke it; he will fix it.”
In the crowd of tens of thousands of rallygoers was LaShaun Martin, 52, of Prince George’s County, Maryland, who said she is voting for Harris because the vice president is “incredibly positive.”
“She has been for all people, Republicans and Democrats,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what walk of life you come from. She really wants to represent you, and whatever it is you need to be able to be a prosperous person.”
Biden’s endorsement of Harris and widespread support from Democrats throughout the country forced the GOP to overhaul its approach to the campaign, as Democrats shifted their focus from the policies that Biden wanted to champion to those important to Harris.
In her remarks, Harris rebuked Trump and his supporters for their disparaging comments about immigrants living in the country illegally, a main element of his campaign.
“Politicians have got to stop treating immigration as an issue to scare up votes in an election,” Harris said. “And instead treat it as the serious challenge that it is, that we must finally come together to solve.”
Harris pledged to work with Congress on immigration policy as well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers and for the more than 500,000 children brought into the country without authorization. They are known as Dreamers, enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Harris touched on several of her top policy issues, including housing affordability, abortion access nationwide, a ban on price gouging at grocery stores and expansion of the child tax credit.
Reaching out to the undecided
Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler previewed the speech earlier Tuesday, telling reporters the vice president would speak directly to undecided voters’ “sense of frustration, their sense of exhaustion with the way that our politics have played out under the Trump era — and offer them directly a vision that something is different, that something different is possible.”
Trump on Sunday appeared at a six-hour campaign event at Madison Square Garden in New York City that brought bipartisan condemnation for a comedian who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
Ahead of Harris’ Tuesday speech, Trump gave remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, accusing her of trying to divide the country and seeking to distance himself from the racist and vulgar remarks made by the comedian and other speakers during the rally.
Trump did not take questions, but told ABC News earlier in the day he did not hear the comedian’s remarks.
“I don’t know him,” Trump said. “Someone put him up there.”
With the presidential race essentially tied, Harris and Trump have both focused their final campaign push on the crucial swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris promised the crowd during her speech that if elected she will protect institutions and the democratic ideals that are the bedrock of American law. She also slammed Trump’s comments referring to Democrats as the “enemy from within.’”
“The fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within,” Harris said. “They are family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, they are fellow Americans, and as Americans, we rise and fall together.”
Time to ‘turn the page’
Harris said the country must move beyond the ever-widening polarization that she described as a distinct feature of Trump’s grip on American politics.
“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other,” Harris said. “That’s who he is.”
In her pitch to undecided voters, Harris offered an opportunity to leave the Trump era behind.
“It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division,” she said. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in America and I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States.”
That leadership, she said, would seek to build on bipartisan work.
“I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your life better. I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress,” she said. “I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make and to people who disagree with me. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy.”
During her speech, protesters advocated for an arms embargo on U.S. military weapons sent to Israel amid the war with Hamas. Several senators have also called for an arms embargo.
“Stop arming Israel. Arms embargo now,” one protester said before being escorted out.
The death toll of more than 43,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to health authorities there, has fractured Muslims, Arab Americans and anti-war Democrats within the party. It spurred the Uncommitted National Movement that sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer.
After Harris’ speech, nearly 100 pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded an exit of the campaign rally.
Harris supporters gather
The campaign’s finale in Washington, D.C., was expected to draw more than 50,000 supporters, according to the local NBC affiliate. The Harris campaign estimated 75,000 spectators showed up.
It featured speeches from supporters such as a mother who was able to access affordable insulin for her son because of the Affordable Care Act; a farming couple from Pennsylvania who were previously Trump voters; and Craig Sicknick, the brother of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died following the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
“(Trump) incited the crowd to riot while my brother and his fellow officers put their lives at risk,” Craig Sicknick said. “Now, Mr. Trump is promising to pardon the convicted criminals who attacked our Capitol, killing my brother and injuring over 140 other officers. This is simply wrong.”
Craig Sicknick endorsed Harris, who he called a “real leader.”
The family farmers, Bob and Kristina Lange from Malvern, Pennsylvania, said they are lifelong Republicans, but will be voting for Harris this election.
“It’s very clear that Donald Trump doesn’t care about helping hard-working people like us,” Bob Lange said. “He’s too focused on seeking revenge and retribution to care about what we need. We deserve better.”
The couple have been featured in multiple digital ads targeting rural voters in Pennsylvania.
History and excitement
Attendees from as far as Illinois to local residents made the trek to the Ellipse for the speech.
Tiffany Norwood, 56, of Washington, D.C., said she attended the rally with her 87-year-old mother, Mary Ann Norwood, for “the history of it, the excitement.”
“I feel we need something different in the United States, and she is it,” said Tiffany Norwood, who identified herself as an entrepreneur. “Her plan for the economy, for the future, for women, for everyone. I love the fact that it’s a big umbrella that includes the melting pot of the United States.”
Some attendees weren’t old enough to vote, such as 13-year-old Grace Ledford of Champaign, Illinois.
The teenager said her first political rally felt “like a big party.”
“Kamala would be a great president because she is, for one, a woman, and she is African American,” she said. “A lot of men presidents don’t know how hard it is to be a woman, especially Trump.”
Daniel Nyquist, 79, of Rockville, Maryland, stood in the crowd wearing a hat with the words “Make America Less Hateful.”
“It’s the alternative of Trump’s theme,” Nyquist said, pointing to his hat. “He’s a big promoter of hate, and this is to counter that.”
With early voting underway and only six days until Election Day, on the streets around the State Capitol and on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, we asked people who they want to become the next president of the United States and what are the issues that matter to them.
Wisconsin is one of the key swing states that could determine whether former President Donald Trump returns to the White House or Kamala Harris makes history to become the first woman to hold that office.
At one end of the iconic State Street is the Capitol and at the other lies the UW-Madison campus, home to nearly 50,000 students.
On your way down State Street, you can see shop windows with posters of Kamala Harris while around the Capitol on Monday a “Japan supports Trump” demonstration carried Trump flags.
At the Farmers Market on Saturday there were campaign tables set up with leaflets and flags. The election is hard to escape.
In a series of vox populi interviews, voters who gave only their first names spoke with reporter James Gould.
Jim, a middle-aged man who stopped to talk, said he was voting for “Trump, definitely.”
Asked why, he said former President Donald Trump “has proven he can do the job” and is “hands down” a more capable candidate than Kamala Harris.
The main issues in this election for Jim are the “economy and immigration.”
UW student Zoe said her top concerns as she casts her vote will be “abortion rights, women’s rights and housing.”
She said women anywhere in the United States should have the “ability to get our help.”
Zoe said it is “truly difficult” for anyone in the “middle class to get affordable housing and live comfortably,” adding that Madison “has recently got so expensive.”
With all that in mind, she is voting for Kamala Harris.
Backing up that claim about the rising cost of living was another UW student, Austin. He added that anyone “working in the middle-class” is having a really hard time. Austin said he believes that “Kamala Harris has a plan to fix it” and doesn’t think Donald Trump has.
The U.S. produced more energy than it consumed, for the first time since 1957, before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office.
Campaigning for Harris, former President Bill Clinton claimed that “we’re now producing more energy than we consume for the first time since the 1950s because this administration followed what they called an all-of-the-above strategy — basically, natural gas, solar, wind, geothermal.”
Production surpassed consumption in 2019; Biden and Harris took office in January 2021.
Consumption generally began to level off in the early 2000s; production generally began increasing around 2010.
In 2019, the U.S. produced 101 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) of energy and consumed 100.2 quads.
Increased production was “largely a result of increases in crude oil and natural gas production,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported.
Production has continued to exceed consumption through 2023.
Clinton is scheduled to campaign for Harris in Wisconsin on Oct. 31, 2024.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
The track record of “citizen forecasting” of U.S. presidential election results is sort of startlingly good. (Photos: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Are you still scouring the internet for new polls and routinely checking polling averages hoping for fresh reassurances but finding precious few?
Are you poring over daily turnout reports from the Nevada Secretary of State’s office – and scanning news on turnout in other battleground states too – hoping scattered gobbets of inconclusive information will alleviate your angst, even though it is just as likely to aggravate it?
Maybe you should stop doing those things.
Alas, if you’ve read this far, you might be one of those souls – the highly engaged voter – for whom polling and turnout data at this point in an election cycle are like an automobile accident or a burning building: looking away is hard.
Sorry.
But there is a thing which, while it can’t rid you of your anxiety and fear and Sturm und Drang, might at least add a different perspective to it.
Yes, of course it’s another poll.
Or more specifically a series of polls.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a long-time highly regarded political handicapper connected with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, on Wednesday summarized a series of polls conducted during this election cycle that asked respondents not who they will vote for in the presidential election, but who they think will win.
Why? Let’s let the Crystal Ball gazers explain:
“A growing body of evidence indicates that ‘citizen forecasting’ (CF)…makes for more accurate predictions of the winner. Indeed, studies of CF in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as work on other democracies (such as Canada, France, or Germany) have demonstrated that voter expectations outperform voter intentions in terms of predictive accuracy.”
The Crystal Ball’s first survey asking respondents who they thought would win the 2024 presidential election was conducted way back in April, 2023, when Ron DeSantis still looked like a going concern, and when a lot of people hoped Biden wouldn’t run after all (he officially announced his reelection bid near the end of that month).
In the April 2023 polling, 52% of respondents said they thought the Republican candidate would win the presidential election, and 48% said the Democratic candidate would.
The second round of polling wasn’t taken until a year later, in April 2024. By that time, poor DeSantis had been vanquished, Nikki Haley had distinguished her resume by finishing second to “none of these candidates” in the Nevada Republican primary, and the main thing Democrats were saying to each other was “whoa, Biden’s super old but we are stuck with him and we are doomed,” or words to that effect.
Everybody, or almost everybody, assumed it would be a Trump-Biden rerun of 2020. Asked who they thought would win the presidential election, 50% said Trump, and only 38% said Biden, with a mysterious “someone else” or the Kennedy oddity picked by the rest.
The Crystal Ball’s project concluded with a wave of four polls in June, July, August, and September-October.
The June survey, conducted before the June 27 debate that crushed Democrats’ souls and would ultimately end Biden’s candidacy, indicated a close contest – 46% said Trump would win, 42% said Biden would.
The next survey was conducted July 20-22, a week after Trump’s ear got grazed in Pennsylvania, and coinciding, though only partially, with Biden’s announcement he would step aside (June 21). It was the only one of the polls in the series taken after the debate debacle and while Biden was still in the race, and not surprisingly 54% said Trump would win, while only 32% thought Biden would.
The project’s next polling was conducted between August 20-26, about two weeks after Harris had secured the nomination and otherwise astounded a lot of folks by turning out to be very much more of a boss than was widely thought. The script was flipped: Harris would win, said 56% of the August survey respondents, compared to 40% saying Trump would.
The fourth and last wave of polling, between Sept. 20-Oct. 2, had Harris at 55% to Trump’s 42%.
“This current citizen forecast points to a Harris victory in November,” concludes the Crystal Ball’s “Last Sounding” summary published Wednesday.
“Of course, close races are hard to call,” the summary adds, and citizen forecasting isn’t perfect. The Crystal Ball mentions the elections of 2000 and 2016 as examples.
In both those elections the person who won the presidency lost the popular vote. So this year’s surveys, in addition to asking voters who they thought would win, specifically asked them who they thought would win the electoral college, and the majority still expected a Harris victory.
And on the whole, the track record of citizen forecasting of U.S. presidential election results is sort of startlingly good.
The Sabato Crystal Ball and the American National Election Survey combined encompass a record of citizen forecast polling that stretches back to 1956. In every presidential election since then, “whenever the expectation percentage has exceeded 50%, as is the case with the Harris-Trump race, the forecast of the presidential winner has always been correct,” states the summary released Wednesday.
While the most recent polling in the series was conducted roughly a month before Election Day, that’s been the case throughout the history of the polling series, the report adds.
So Democrats can … take a breath?
Fat chance.
What might be considered a variant of citizen forecasting – betting markets – are also often viewed as being a more reliable predictor than traditional polls, and they indicate a much tighter race than the Crystal Ball citizen forecast, with Harris ahead in some, and Trump in others. (There are also segments of the presidential betting market indicating a generous advantage for Trump, though that may not reflect the wisdom of crowds as much as the machinations of crypto-bros.)
About the same time the last polling in the Crystal Ball series was being done, the Cook Political Report also asked voters in battleground states not who they were voting for, but who they thought would win. Harris was ahead in that poll too – 46% said she would win, compared to 39% for Trump. But that’s below the 50% benchmark history cited by the Crystal Ball.
And even given the aforementioned impressive historical track record of citizen forecast polling, if any modern presidential campaign cycle in the modern era has already proven to be wildly different from all the others, it would be this one.
In other words, let the Democratic hand-wringing continue.
Harris would probably approve. She seems like a leader with a zero tolerance policy for complacency.
Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and X.
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