Emma Janssen
Yard signs in an Eau Claire, Wisconsin, neighborhood. The battleground state of Wisconsin is also the site of crucial Senate and House races this year.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN – “What are we gonna do this week?” Carol asked the group of 30 or so Wisconsin residents gathered in the Eau Claire County Democratic Party building on a Thursday morning in October. “What are we gonna do to say: ‘Yes, we can win this’?”
The room, composed of mostly older progressives, was silent, unsure whether Carol’s question was rhetorical. The group had spent the past two hours discussing politics and their role in the upcoming elections, from a local state assembly race up to the presidency.
But it wasn’t a rhetorical question, nor should it have been. This room of residents recognized how important they are as ground troops for the Democratic Party, whose election map runs right through Wisconsin. The FiveThirtyEight polling average in Wisconsin has Kamala Harris leading by just 0.6 percentage points, in a “blue wall” state that is central to the Democrats’ election hopes.
Wisconsin is also the site of crucial Senate and House races, namely Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) re-election campaign and Rebecca Cooke’s bid to represent the state’s Third District in the House. Eau Claire is the largest city in that district, which is largely rural and currently represented by extreme MAGA Republican Derrick Van Orden. Both parties see promise for their respective challengers; a House Majority PAC poll from September showed Cooke ahead of Van Orden, while Republicans are so bullish on businessman Eric Hovde’s bid to defeat Baldwin that they just tossed $6.6 million more into the race.
The meeting attendees eventually piped up to answer Carol’s question, after some prodding. One participant, Susie, talked about the community she’s building at her Lutheran church, which she described as “conservative, very conservative.” She’s been subtly building coalitions with the progressive members of the church, bringing them Democratic pins and stickers. “The cat buttons,” she said, referring to pins that say “Cat Ladies for Kamala” and feature a kitten, “are very popular at church,” she told the group, to chuckles.
One of the male attendees at the Coffee Klatch, which happens once a week and was, at least when I visited, 80 percent women, told the group about his work as the district’s informal yard sign guy. Bob Matthews stood up, smiling and decked out in his Dickies overalls, and described driving out to the rural areas around Eau Claire to help locals set up their Harris, Baldwin, or Cooke signs. In some towns, he told the group, signs are allowed to be up to 12 square feet. That’s easy—he just stakes a three-by-four sign into the ground and enjoys the free breakfast or beer that the residents often offer him as thanks. But some towns require signs to be 11 feet or less, so he developed a work-around: cutting off the corners of the big signs before staking them down. As I drove out of Eau Claire a few days later, I kept my eye out for any octagonal Harris signs in front of the farms.
Throughout the two-hour meeting, ten or so people dropped in to pick up yard signs from the back of the office. Most left with a stack of signs that spanned the whole length of the ballot, from Harris down to state assembly candidate Christian Phelps. Driving through Eau Claire and the surrounding rural areas, it’s impossible to turn your head without seeing a political sign, a manifestation of what a battleground state physically looks like in the fall of a presidential election year.
Daniel DeSlover/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) speaks during a Democratic campaign rally on September 20, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin.
On one residential intersection, three different political positions were represented—one house pointed its Harris, Baldwin, and Cooke signs across the street at a house decked out in Trump and Van Orden signs, which pointed in the direction of the Democratic house as well. Further back on the Republican fence, though, were a few other signs that read, “This is a duplex!” “We are NOT All For Trump,” and “Any Functioning Adult 2024.”
Another thing you can’t escape in Wisconsin: political ads everywhere, from your social media feeds to billboards along the highway. Flyers are stuffed into mailboxes and jammed into screen doors. In the countryside was an anti-abortion poster with a photoshopped fetus and a phone number for women who need “advice.” Maybe I missed them, but I saw far fewer Trump billboards than Harris ones while I drove through the state.
SOME FOLKS AT THE COFFEE KLATCH discussed their frustration with the tone and substance of the ads they’ve been seeing. One participant noted how Democrats always seem to be on the defensive compared to Republicans, who use their ad time for “fearmongering” attacks. “What can we do to generate fear in Republicans?” Carol asked. “We’re supposed to be nice, compassionate, but that’s BS. The motivating force that’s going on right now is fearmongering.”
One of the fearmongering Republican ads the group paid special attention to is a spot on transgender health care. Ads that attempt to paint Democrats as radical supporters of transgender Americans have been flooding the airwaves in the past few weeks, and not just in Wisconsin.
One ad, paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund PAC, which is led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said that Baldwin, the country’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator, supports “sex change surgeries” for minors, a fact that has been labeled simply untrue by state media. Meanwhile, one anti-trans Trump ad has been making the rounds in all seven swing states, and particularly targets NFL and college football broadcast audiences, NPR reports. “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you,” the ad says.
Vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz has come out strongly to rebut the attack in recent days, saying that “hate has shifted to the trans community” and that the attacks were an ugly distraction. “We’re out there trying to make the case that access to health care, a clean environment, manufacturing jobs, and keeping your local hospital open are what people are really concerned about. They’re running millions of dollars of ads demonizing folks who are just trying to live their lives.”
The Coffee Klatch group seemed eager to put the question of trans rights to bed, seeing the ads as blatant attempts to spark fear among voters and distract them from other issues. One member of the group brought up regulations of trans athletes in sporting events like the Olympics, and another person recommended a book about a family raising their trans child. Soon, the conversation turned to a different gender issue.
As they discussed how they planned to mobilize in the coming weeks, the Coffee Klatch group seemed to agree that one of the demographics they needed to focus the most effort on is 18-to-40-year-old white men—the likely NFL and college football broadcast audience being inundated with pro-Trump, anti-trans messaging. “How do you appeal to them?” someone asked, and everyone spitballed their theories.
“Sexual freedom,” said Charlie.
“Guns and cheap gas,” said Dennis, once a member of that demographic himself.
“Raise them differently,” someone else said, candidly.
Emma Janssen
The Eau Claire County Democratic Party office is the site of a weekly Coffee Klatch to discuss political strategy this election season.
Some members of the group have been talking to the young men in their own families, urging them to register to vote and to think about the women in their lives who are worried about their reproductive freedoms if Trump is re-elected. “Guns, God, gas, and girls,” the group decided on as the motivators of this demographic.
Charlie told the group about a frank conversation she had with a couple of young women at a bar recently about IUDs. She said that the women were planning to get IUDs in case their reproductive rights were infringed on after the election. Young women, she said, “need to talk to the men in their life and say, ‘Here’s some condoms, here’s a banana, go practice.’ And that’s how we build a little fear, because down the road, if [Trump is] in, there won’t be real access to birth control.”
In Wisconsin, abortion is legal but highly restricted. Abortion care is banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and patients are forced to make two visits to obtain care, with a mandatory 24-hour waiting period between a counseling visit and the abortion care itself.
Young people, specifically those on the state’s 13 University of Wisconsin campuses, are a core voting bloc that Democrats are hoping to motivate this election. One of those satellite campuses is in Eau Claire. Nonpartisan voter registration desks were set up across town, both on-campus and in city establishments that attract younger audiences, like a coffee, beer, and cycling shop I wandered into.
“As for the youth vote, not only will it be Rebecca Cooke’s margin of victory in the Third Congressional District, but it will be Kamala Harris’s margin of victory in Wisconsin,” said Matthew Lehner, the chair of the College Democrats of Wisconsin and a member of UW-Eau Claire’s Intergovernmental Affairs Commission, who was registering people to vote at the shop. “You know, Joe Biden only won the state in 2020 by a little under 20,000 votes. And you think of how big UW-Madison is, you know, almost 10,000 students that come here. We are that margin of victory.”
I ALSO STOPPED IN ON A CHAMBER OF COMMERCE event with Rebecca Cooke, who was hoping to make her case to local business leaders. Throughout her campaign, Cooke has leaned into her rural and working-class roots—she grew up on a dairy farm and anchors much of her campaign’s rhetoric around the formative childhood experience of her family selling off their cows due to competition with larger dairies. As she left the event, Cooke remarked that she was going to work a shift as a waitress, the job she keeps up with alongside campaigning. (The Prospect noted in August that Cooke has also worked as a political consultant and fundraiser, something that has made its way into Republican attack ads.)
After a tough primary that split the party’s progressive and more moderate wings, the party has unified to get Cooke home. And despite being endorsed by the centrist Blue Dog PAC, she has led with an anti-monopoly message, such as in this spot about price-gouging for groceries and gas, or this longer look at the failure of Wisconsin dairy farms at the hands of Big Ag.
Cooke’s emphasis on working-class issues, like health care affordability and subsidies for small farms, might be working. Cooke is up one point on Van Orden as of the first week of October, according to a poll commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Cooke is also hoping to appeal to voters who may not typically vote for Democrats, and who want kitchen-table issues like inflation and health care elevated by their representatives.
Saskia Hatvany/La Crosse Tribune via AP
Rebecca Cooke, candidate in Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, attends a candidates’ forum on May 1, 2024, in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Reflecting on the event at the Chamber of Commerce, Cooke said that the closure of two hospitals in Eau Claire in the past few years stood out as a major issue for constituents. “I think that that has implications from a health perspective, but it also has implications from an economic perspective, as people are deciding to be able to move here and what their quality of life looks like,” she told me. Cooke hopes to expand Medicare to include vision, dental, and hearing care. “This is a personal story,” she explained: “My parents go on a once-a-year trip to Mexico, and they do that to get their dental work done, because it’s cheaper to do there than it is in our own country.”
Cooke isn’t the only Democrat running a tight race in Wisconsin. For the first time during the campaign, a recent poll showed Hovde ahead of Baldwin, who has served in Congress since 1999. Hovde has a one-point lead over Baldwin according to an internal polling memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A Hovde win in Wisconsin would likely be a nail in the coffin for the hope of a Democratic Senate.
Both Democrats and Republicans have accelerated their spending in the race. So far, Democrats have spent $93 million in the race to the Republicans’ $69 million, according to AdImpact. Despite the Democrats’ lead in overall spending, Republicans are investing heavily in the final weeks of the campaign, including with $13.1 million in ad spending direct from the Senate Leadership Fund PAC.
Meanwhile, the folks I met at the Coffee Klatch feel the weight of the election on their shoulders and will keep doing what they can until the buzzer on Election Day. They’re getting out into the streets to increase Democratic Party visibility: Before the election, the group has a University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire homecoming parade, an afternoon of holding signs on the side of the road, and a voter registration drive at Hmong New Year celebrations, a small but important voting bloc in the state.
Carol, for her part, told the group that she’s been going through her contacts, reminding people to make a voting plan. “Of the 67 [messages] that I sent out, I probably got 45 back that said, ‘Oh, thanks for the reminder! I got to get on that.’” In a state like Wisconsin, those 45 extra votes, multiplied by all the politically active people spending their mornings at party offices across the state, could very well mean the difference between a Harris victory or four more years of Trump.
