On the menu today: Not only is once true-blue Wisconsin a swing state, but it also arguably ranks among the top three most competitive and important swing states. We probably won’t see a rerun of the spectacular miss in the polling here four years ago, but there’s reason to think that Kamala Harris isn’t doing quite as well as the current neck-and-neck numbers suggest. Meanwhile, a new survey shows Donald Trump way ahead among Wisconsin Catholics, and contemplating how the world treats Taiwan compared to how it treats the Taliban.
Among Wisconsin Catholics, Trump Leads by 18 Percentage Points
Kohler, Wis. — If you’re of a certain age, the notion of Wisconsin — the land of bratwurst, cheeseheads, breweries, and cows — being a swing state and maybe one of the three most important and competitive states is jarring. This state voted for Michael Dukakis. George H. W. Bush couldn’t hit 37 percent here in 1992. Barack Obama beat John McCain here by more than 414,000 votes, and he beat Mitt Romney by more than 213,000 votes.
And yet, measuring by percentages, Wisconsin was the third-closest state that Joe Biden won in 2020 — closer than Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Nebraska’s second congressional district, New Hampshire, or Maine. The Badger State was the third closest by vote total as well, just 20,682 votes. The margin in Nebraska’s second congressional district was 22,091.
In 2020, the final RealClearPolitics average had Biden ahead by 6.7 percentage points. The final survey of the race, by Axios/Survey Monkey, had Biden ahead by ten points. Biden won by seven-tenths of a percentage point.
If the polls are overstating Kamala Harris’s lead anything like the way they overstated Biden’s lead four years ago, the vice president is toast. As of this writing, Harris is ahead by three-tenths of a percentage point in the RealClearPolitics average, and six-tenths of a percentage point in the FiveThirtyEight average.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal affirmed Democratic fears, reporting that the campaign’s private polling shows a darker outlook for the Harris campaign than the public polling: “an internal poll done by Democrat Tammy Baldwin’s Senate campaign last week showed Harris down by 3 percentage points in Wisconsin, while Baldwin was up by two points, according to a person familiar with the poll.”
Baldwin later gave something of a confirmation to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, telling the paper, “I’ve seen my internal polls. It’s very close.”
Democrats have good reason to worry about Wisconsin, and they’re pulling out all the stops. Yesterday, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz was in Green Bay, First Lady Jill Biden was in Madison, and Vermont senator and progressive octogenarian Bernie Sanders was in Milwaukee. Harris will visit Milwaukee, La Crosse, and Green Bay Thursday.
Roughly one-quarter of Wisconsinites identify as Catholic, which is about the same percentage as at the national level, according to 2020 exit polls.
It’s easy to scoff at Joe Biden’s “I’m from Scranton” and “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion” routines. And yet, when it comes to winning votes among Catholics, it probably helps to have a Catholic candidate. Back in 2020, Biden won the Catholic vote nationally, 52 percent to 47 percent, according to exit polls. (Curiously, the state-level exit poll in Wisconsin did not ask about religion.)
The National Catholic Reporter reports that Trump is doing better among Catholics now than four years ago — and significantly better in Wisconsin:
Catholic voters in seven battleground states favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 5 percentage points, but the vice president leads the Republican nominee overwhelmingly among Hispanic and Black Catholics in those swing states, according to a new poll conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.
With just more than three weeks to the election, Trump leads Harris 50 percent to 45 percent in the closely watched battleground states, a margin that could be an important factor given the closeness of the contest. . . .
The Republican nominee also leads overall among Catholic voters in five of the seven individual states, although some are within the margin of error. The former president does have larger leads in Wisconsin, where he is up by 18 percentage points, and in Michigan, where he leads by 12 points among Catholic voters. [Emphasis added.]
As Patrick Ruffini observed, “It turns out there’s a cost to making your candidacy about abortion.”
A month ago, the Democratic SuperPAC American Bridge launched a $15 million ad campaign in the “blue wall states” designed to emphasize that Kamala Harris “is not going to stop until reproductive rights are restored.” (The pro-choice crowd argues that Wisconsin’s current laws are “restrictive” — state Medicaid coverage of “abortion care” is banned, medication for abortions must be provided in person, parental consent is required for a minor’s abortion, only physicians can provide abortions, etc.)
This is another situation where the Harris campaign’s “theory of the case” feels all wrong. The most recent Marquette poll shows that the priorities of voters in Wisconsin are a lot like the priorities of voters everywhere else in the country: Thirty-seven percent rank “the economy” as the most important issue, 15 percent name “immigration and border security,” and 15 percent answer “abortion.” (Note that figure doesn’t break down what percentage prioritize it because they want to preserve abortion and what percentage prioritize it because they oppose it.)
Harris has spent a lot of time and energy emphasizing her commitment to those in the 15 percent but left a lot of blanks in her economic agenda.
This is a Democratic presidential campaign that is made to make Democrats feel good about themselves, not persuade the remaining voters who are not eager to vote for Trump but worried that Harris will just be a continuation of the parts of the Biden presidency they can’t stand.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other publication I write for, I take a look at how the world treats the Taliban in Afghanistan, and how the world treats Taiwan. The short version is that bit by bit, month by month, more and more foreign governments are restoring diplomatic relations with the Taliban and treating it like just another government, while Taiwan — an independent democracy with a human-rights and rule-of-law record that any country would envy — is getting more isolated. In December 2021, Nicaragua terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry released a statement in May claiming that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.”
In other words, a big chunk of the so-called “international community” treats the Taliban better than it treats Taiwan.
Besides the usual complaints that I’m an ignorant idiot, a few readers have argued that this is comparing apples and oranges. (You know, pal, apples and oranges are both fruit.) I’m also allegedly “exacerbating tensions between China and Taiwan” just by writing the column.