Wisconsin
Subterms
More stories
- in US Politics
Republican mega-donors asked their employees who they will vote for in survey
The Republican mega-donors Dick and Liz Uihlein, who are the third largest donors in this year’s US presidential election, have sought information about who employees at their company Uline will be voting for in Tuesday’s ballot.A screenshot seen by the Guardian shows how employees at the private Wisconsin paper and office products distributor were asked to take part in what was called an anonymous survey to track who the employees were voting for on 5 November.Below a picture of a blue donkey and a red elephant, the online survey says: “We’re curious – how does Uline compare to the current national polls?”While the button employees are meant to click says the survey is anonymous, the webpage also says that employees “may be asked to sign in”. “This is solely to verify you are a Uline employee and to ensure one submission per person. Your name is not tracked, and your answers remain anonymous.”Public records show that Dick Uihlein has donated almost $80m to the Restoration Pac in the 2024 cycle, which supports the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and other Republican candidates.View image in fullscreenOne employee who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution said the request felt like an infringement on their privacy and that people inside the company were angered by it. Another said multiple employees had privately questioned how anonymous the survey really was. There was an assumption that Democrats would not answer the survey truthfully, a source close to Uline told the Guardian.For Uline workers, there is little doubt about who their bosses want to win in this week’s election.The billionaire Uihleins are staunchly pro-Trump and anti-abortion and have had significant influence on local and national politics, including changes to state laws that will make it more difficult for states to pass pro-choice legislation or changes to state constitutions in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overruled national abortion protections.The voter survey is particularly significant because Uline’s operations are headquartered in the critical swing state of Wisconsin, which is one of three so-called “blue wall” states that are seen as necessary for Kamala Harris to win the White House. While Joe Biden won Wisconsin in the 2020 race for the White House, Trump took it in 2016, solidifying its status as a swing state.View image in fullscreenAsked whether the request for voting information might be seen as intimidating, Liz Uihlein responded in a statement to the Guardian: “This is stupid! The survey was for fun after enduring two years of this presidential election. The results were anonymous and participation was voluntary. This is completely benign.”Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said she did not believe the request was benign.“Employers should know to be very careful around pressure on employees, about whether they vote and certainly who they vote for,” Lang said.“Regardless of intentions, this very clearly could create anxiety for many employees,” she said. “Employees rely on employers for their livelihood.”Federal and some state laws protect employees from voter intimidation and coercion, including by employers. Under federal law, voters who need help at the voting booth because of a disability may choose so-called “assisters” under the Voting Rights Act. But those assisters may not be employers or union reps, Lang said.“I think that is an implicit recognition of how much power employers can have over employees and the undue influence they can wield,” Lang said.In Wisconsin, it is also criminal to solicit a person to show how their vote is cast.A spokesperson declined to answer the Guardian’s question about the results of the survey, which were due by 25 October.
Got a tip on this story? Please contact Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.com More
- in US Politics
Republicans and Democrats search for unicorns in crucial Wisconsin: undecided voters
On a warm October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, Ty Schanhofer found a unicorn: an undecided voter.Schanhofer, an organizer with the University of Wisconsin student Democratic party, had unfolded a plastic table on campus and was trying to encourage people to register in the key swing state.View image in fullscreenWhen Arin Mahapatra, a 21-year-old student from Illinois, stopped by, Schanhofer – who takes an English class with Mahapatra – jumped into action, peppering him with questions and offering reasons to support Harris.“I’m not necessarily [leaning] in a certain direction, I’m just trying to find out who exactly falls in the same line with what I value most,” said Mahapatra, who cited economic issues like the price of gas and cost of student housing as his top concerns.Truly undecided voters are rare in Wisconsin, where presidential elections hinge on the narrowest of margins.“I feel like it’s probably 2% of the voters who are undecided,” said Schanhofer. “It’s not many at all.”Winning the support of young voters like Mahapatra will be crucial for Harris or Trump to pull off a victory in Wisconsin, where students and voters under 30 have turned out in record numbers in recent elections. In 2023, students on college campuses across the state rallied to elect a liberal judge to the Wisconsin supreme court, helping shift the ideological leaning of the bench in hopes that the court would help establish abortion rights in the state.View image in fullscreenPeople like Schanhofer hope that by generating this kind of turnout among young voters, they’ll be able to turn the Wisconsin electorate in Harris’s favor.The Badger state is considered to be part of the “blue wall” – the states Democrats consistently won in the 1990s and early 2000s.But vanishingly narrow margins in the state decided the 2016 and 2020 elections, and today Wisconsin is a virtual toss-up in the polls, as are many of the other six swing states.Trade unions historically helped drive voter turnout for Democrats, but a series of anti-labor laws passed under the Republican-controlled state government in 2011 dealt them a blow. Rural areas have increasingly turned to Republican candidates, leaving cities like Milwaukee – Wisconsin’s most racially diverse – and the liberal stronghold of Madison as Democratic bastions.View image in fullscreenThis election will probably come down to turnout, with the Trump and Harris campaigns attempting to shear away voters from each other’s respective bases. For Trump, that means drawing in young men, who have increasingly drifted to the right.On 26 October, some of those voters could be found queueing up around the corner for an event at the Kollege Klub, a bar just blocks from where the campus Democrats have been tabling for Harris.For hours, the bar was only admitting ticketed attendees, who had spent $150 to see the rightwing Nelk Boys, YouTube pranksters whose podcast has featured the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate and Trump himself. The Nelk Boys promised to feature Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Maga organizing hub Turning Point USA (TPUSA), as a special guest.Eric Davis, a 29-year-old who lives and works in Madison, waited in line with his friends for more than two hours in front of the bar. Davis voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but said he’s reversing course this year.“I switched over to Trump because I just think, honestly, our economy right now is not going the way that it should,” said Davis. “I don’t believe in everything he says, but a majority of the stuff he goes with – I’m with it.”View image in fullscreenDavis, who is Black, doesn’t always like how Trump talks about immigrants, thinks the ex-president can be crass and understands why he rubs people the wrong way. But the way Davis sees it, that’s just Trump being Trump.“I don’t think he’s racist at all,” said Davis.“My whole family, they’re all liberals,” added Davis, who has not yet told his family how he planned to vote.Despite the night’s political theme, the actual gathering featured little by way of political mobilization. The Nelk Boys stood on a raised platform in the venue, throwing Trump merchandise into the crowd, but Kirk was nowhere to be seen. A stack of cards with voter registration information sat forgotten on a table crowded with beer bottles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut for Brandon Maly, the chair of the Republican party of Dane county, the night was a success.“I’ve never seen a bar in Madison packed with Maga hats, it was just incredible. I love to see it – it’s part of that psychology in Dane county, that people need to be given a permission structure,” said Maly. “You may not think it translates to votes, but it does in the sense that they’re given permission to support Trump.”Maly has no illusions about turning Dane county red.But given its status as the second most populous county in the state, he sees the area as a rich source of Republican voters – no matter how marginal their political views may be locally.View image in fullscreenHis goal, of chipping away at Democratic party margins in liberal hubs, is mirrored in Democrats’ push to fight back Republican party majorities in rural and suburban parts of the state that have historically leaned red.One of those Democratic party organizers is Deb Dassow, the chair of the Ozaukee county Democratic party, who says she feels she has the shifting political winds at her back. In Ozaukee county, which stretches north of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, Democrats have begun to make gains in the last several election cycles. In 2012, Barack Obama claimed 34% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton took 37%, and in 2020 Biden pulled 43% of the vote there.Since 2019, when the Ozaukee county Democrats opened a permanent office in the county, the local party chapter has poured resources into organizing local Democrats.“Since April, we’ve knocked 25,000 doors – we knocked 5,000 just last weekend,” said Dassow on 25 October. The local Democrats have facilitated food drives, held parties and hosted beading parties, crafting red, white and blue bracelets emblazoned with the letters K-A-M-A-L-A.Since jumping into the race in July, the vice-president and her allies have raised more than $1bn to fuel her campaign; much of those funds have poured into a broad campaign to knock on thousands of doors across the country.And not least, they are trying to turn out young people: according to a source familiar with the Harris-Walz campaign in Wisconsin, the Democratic coordinating campaign hired seven full-time campus organizers across the state and a youth-organizing coordinator before the election.View image in fullscreenThe Republican party, meanwhile, has farmed off most of its ground game to outside groups – including TPUSA and the tech billionaire Elon Musk’s America Pac. Those groups allied with the Trump campaign have sought to turn out “low-propensity” voters for Trump, in particular, targeting rural would-be Trump voters who might otherwise neglect to cast a ballot at all.The Trump campaign touts the strategy as innovative, but neither TPUSA nor America PAC boast the kinds of detailed voter lists that parties traditionally maintain to target supporters.“There’s suspicion as to whether or not this is an actual ground game,” said Brandon Scholz, a former Republican party operative who left the GOP on 7 January 2021 – the day after Trump supporters contesting the 2020 election results stormed the US Capitol. Even as an independent, Scholz maintains close relationships in the party and has followed the 2024 campaigns with keen interest.“Are these folks really here?” said Scholz. “Are they really beating the hell out of the doors? Are they really identifying and getting ready to turn out voters, or getting them out to vote early, or getting them absentee ballots?”The answers to these questions – is Trump’s ground strategy as haphazard as it seems in Wisconsin, and is the Harris turnout machine as effective as Democrats claim? – could very well determine the outcome of the election. More
- in US Politics
Candidates try to divine trends as nearly 70m Americans have cast early votes
Almost 70 million Americans have already voted in the historic US election which comes to a head on Tuesday, prompting furious arguments over what early voting trends might mean as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris prepare for their final showdown.As both candidates and their top surrogates crisscrossed the country in a furious bout of last-minute campaigning, the race remains in a virtual dead heat – both in the head-to-head national polls and in the crucial seven battleground states that will actually decide the race for the White House.But as Trump and Harris made their pitches for what must now be a vanishingly small number of still undecided voters, tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots in the election through the various processes in the US that allow early voting.With so much at stake in the election, that huge number has triggered intense speculation as to what it might that mean with both Republicans and Democrats attempting to glean information that shows their side might already have the edge as voting day nears.Harris’s campaign is latching on to some key information from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. The giant state – which stretches from New Jersey in the east to Ohio in the west – is a part of the “rust belt” dominated by former manufacturing cities that is seen as probably the most crucial region in the election.Nearly all the most likely paths to victory for both candidates involve picking up rust belt states with Pennsylvania as the biggest prize.In that state, voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots and registered Democrats account for about 58% of votes cast by seniors, compared with 35% for Republicans. That is a big lead in a demographic that usually trends towards Trump.At the same time, women have a 10-point gap over men when it comes to the early vote in Pennsylvania, according to analysis by the Politico website, using data from the University of Florida’s United States Election Project. Another analysis, by NBC, showed an even larger gap in favor of women in the state of 13 points.Harris and her team are hoping for a large showing of women in the election as they have made the loss of reproductive rights central to their campaign after the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights. Women have trended strongly Democratic in the election, while men have leaned more Republican and thus any signs of a strong turnout by women is potentially good news for the vice-president.“The gender gap is a key reason for hope among Democrats and concern among Republicans, especially when many states have abortion rights amendments on their ballots in the 2024 election,” Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, told Newsweek.But Republicans too are seeing signs of hope in the early voting trends – a sign that America’s divisive election is still proving impossible to predict even after almost two years of furious campaigning by both parties.In Arizona, a crucial swing state in the so-called “sun belt” on electoral battlegrounds, male voters have been turning out in increased numbers – a sign that Republican strategies of turning out men who have not voted before might be working. In Arizona last week, the number of new voters in Arizona was 86,000 – far more than the tiny margin by which Joe Biden beat Trump in the state in 2020 – and the biggest share of those new voters were male Republicans.Overall, Republicans have traditionally been outnumbered in early voting with more Democrats choosing to go to the polls. In part, that has been because Trump and some of his allies have assailed early voting with baseless claims of fraud and conspiracy, despite Republican professional campaigners exhorting their supporters to get to the polls before election day.In 2024, there are signs that Republicans are indeed heading to the polls early in large numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Georgia – another key sun belt battleground in the deep south – there are strong signs of a significant early Republican turnout. More than 700,000 people who voted already in 2024 did not vote at all in 2020, according to Georgia Votes, and that is seen as a sign that many of them might be Republicans as the campaign has focused on that demographic. At the same time, the top three counties for voter turnout rates in Georgia are rural areas won easily by Trump in 2020.“We’ve got a lot of voters that voted in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 … What makes me believe that they are Trump voters is that most of them are … from parts of the state that are pretty strong Republican strongholds,” Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, told Fox News.Of course, as voting patterns shift for both sides, it could also be that an advantage in early voting for either Democrats or Republicans is quickly overwhelmed on election day itself when tens of millions of voters go to the polls in person.In the end, the 2024 race remains entirely unpredictable. The Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker has shown little change over the past week, after a slight erosion in Harris support over October, Harris retains a one-point advantage in national polls of 48% to Trump’s 47%, virtually identical to last week and well with the margin of error of most polls.The battleground states, too, remain in a dead heat. The candidates are evenly tied at 48% in Pennsylvania while Harris has single-point leads in the two other rust belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump is marginally ahead in the sun belt, where he is up by 1% in North Carolina, 2% in Georgia and Arizona, and ahead in Nevada by less than a percentage point.But one wildcard for both campaigns is the Muslim vote, angered by US support for Israel in its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A poll released on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations showed that 42% of the country’s 2.5 million Muslim voters favor Green party nominee Jill Stein for president while 41% favor Harris. Trump registered 10% support.In theory, those margins of support for Stein, as in 2016, could swing some key swing states, such as Michigan, to Trump if the contest there is very close. More
- in US Politics
Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access
Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.
Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
“For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More - in Elections
Play: Election-Night Bingo
Listen up for these terms as the votes roll in. Find them on the board to be the night’s big winner.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.After months and months and months of hearing about it, the election is finally here! Every four years, millions of Americans cast their ballots for president. Then, they wait and watch for the results on election night. It’s exciting! But also kind of … a lot.The news is a jumble of numbers, some very intense maps and a bunch of politics wonks talking a mile a minute about “exit polls” and “returns.” Not the most kid-friendly introduction to participatory democracy. But like most things, the more kids understand what’s going on, the more interesting it can be.That’s where this game comes in. Think of it as a mash-up of bingo and a language scavenger hunt. LINGO!InstructionsPrint out the bingo board and the definitions of the terms on it. Skim the terms to familiarize yourself.Set a timer for 30 minutes and settle in for an evening of election excitement.Anytime you read or hear one of phrases from the board, check it off. Check your printout (or scroll below) to read the explanation, too!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
- in US Politics
Will young voters in swing states decide this election? – podcast
Archive: Full Send podcast
Follow Today in Focus Election Extra here
Sign up to The Stakes, the Guardian’s free newsletter on the 2024 US presidential election
Subscribe to the Guardian’s new newsletter focusing on the biggest Black stories from around the world: The Long Wave
Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com
Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/politcspodus More - in US Politics
Harris hails first-time and gen Z voters at Wisconsin rally: ‘I’m so proud of you’
Kamala Harris warned a crowd that time was running out at a get-out-the-vote event in Madison, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, joined by a lineup of folk and pop musicians including Remi Wolf, Gracie Abrams and Mumford & Sons.“We have six days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime,” the vice-president and Democratic nominee told the crowd, denouncing Donald Trump and issuing a dire warning about the consequences of a second Trump presidency.“On day one Donald Trump would walk into office with an enemies list,” said Harris, before launching into a speech highlighting her policy planks, including a proposal to cut taxes on small businesses and to expand healthcare coverage for families caring for an elderly parent at home. To prolonged applause, Harris rallied the crowd in support of abortion rights, vowing to sign protections for reproductive healthcare into law.As she has often during her campaign, Harris projected a centrist image, pledging “to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me”.During her speech, protesters in two different sections of the crowd interrupted her to draw attention to Israel’s war in Gaza, shouting “free Palestine” and unfurling banners.Pausing to address the demonstrators, Harris said: “We all want the war in Gaza to end and get the hostages out as soon as possible, and I will do everything in my power to make it heard and known.” She added, to cheers: “Everyone has a right to be heard, but right now I am speaking.”Harris has repeatedly visited Wisconsin, a key swing state where elections are decided by the razor-thin margins. She has paid special attention to Madison, and its suburbs, which reliably turn out overwhelming majorities for Democratic party candidates in races that generate unusually high turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, voter turnout in Dane county reached 89%.The campaign has invested in youth organizing in Wisconsin, hiring seven full-time campus organizers and a youth organizing coordinator. To broad applause, Ty Schanhofer, a first-time voter and student at the University of Wisconsin, introduced Harris and encouraged students to vote early.
Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
“I love your generation, I just love you guys,” said Harris, during the rally, praising young people for being “rightly impatient for change” and enumerating a list of challenges, including the climate crisis and school shootings, that have come to define the gen Z experience. “I see your power, and I’m so proud of you. Can we hear it for our first-time voters!”The former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes spoke at the rally too, highlighting the narrow margins that have come to define statewide elections in Wisconsin.“I want us to feel joy once again,” said Barnes, who ran for a seat in the US Senate and lost by one point to Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican who has bolstered Donald Trump’s wildest conspiracy theories – including his claims of a stolen election in 2020. Chris LaCivita, a senior staffer on the Johnson campaign, is co-manager of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.The campaign punctuated speeches including Barnes’s with musical acts to rally the crowd.“We have values and ideas that deserve a platform,” said the singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, a popular gen Z musician whose performance drew uproarious applause. “Our participation and our vote have never been more crucial.” Abrams was likely a draw for some in the audience, which leaned young tonight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe campaign also offered the elder millennials in the crowd something of their own: a performance by the British folk-pop band Mumford & Sons, whose lead singer announced to some surprise that he has voted in California, where he was born.Harris has featured a lineup of celebrity endorsers and performers at her rallies during the 2024 election cycle. In Texas last week, Beyoncé herself appeared to endorse Harris’s presidential bid, and Jennifer Lopez is scheduled to appear with Harris at a rally later this week. The star-studded series of events could give the Harris campaign a boost. When Harris campaigned in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the folk band Bon Iver – from the Eau Claire area – opened for her.The Madison crowd was energetic on Wednesday night, but with less than a week to go before election day, some Democrats at the venue seemed anxious.“I’ve been making calls for Harris,” said Mary Ann Olson, a retired teacher, who waited in pouring rain for the rally. “If she doesn’t win, and I didn’t do anything, I think I would hate myself.”Olson’s daughter, Chelsea, said she was “really stressed out”, adding: “I’m not sure I can handle four more years of Donald Trump.” More
