Red or Blue? The states deciding the 2024 US presidential election: Wisconsin

The U.S. election is coming up, with voters in all 50 states deciding who to elect as the next president.

But most states are considered "safe", either solidly Republican or Democratic, and both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have not spent time or money trying to persuade the voters there.

Instead both candidates are gunning for the main prize — seven "swing" states that will determine the election, and the presidency.

We’re all alright

Traditionally, Wisconsin has been at the heart of the region known as the Midwest and is one of the five American states that border the Great Lakes.

Wisconsin has been a U.S. territory since the 1780s but only became a full state in the 1840s.

If you know of Wisconsin, it’s probably from one of three things.

Either you’re an older millennial and watched That '70s Show, set in the fictional town of Point Place, Wisconsin; or you accidentally clicked on the follow-up sitcom That '90s Show on Netflix and kept watching.

Or maybe you’re an American football fan and know about the only nonprofit, community-owned major league, professional sports team left in the United States, the Green Bay Packers.

Packers fans are known for wearing cardboard or foam hats shaped like a wedge of cheese, leaning into Wisconsin’s reputation of being “America’s Dairyland”.

This explains why their state dish is the “Butter Burger”, a hamburger where the onions and patty are deep fried in heart-stopping amounts of butter.

Terrifying.

Tipping point

Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes, which means it has two senators and eight seats in Congress.

Of those eight congressmen, two are Democratic, with the remaining six being Republican.

It has returned at least one Democratic senator since 1986, with the other, currently being a Republican, and has been since 2010.

Wisconsin was considered a safe state for a long time, voting Democratic since 1988, except in 2016, when it voted for Donald Trump.

But while Wisconsin returned to the Democratic fold in 2020, Joe Biden only won the state by 0.7 per cent.

That narrow win allowed Biden to take the presidency; as Wisconsin was the tipping point state; that is to say that if Biden lost all the states with less support, and kept all the states with more support, he would still have become president.

The 2024 election looks to remain close, with Trump and Harris having almost nothing between them.

But the state is more important than just the presidential election.

Senate defence

The Democratic Party currently holds the Senate by a single seat, and in 2024, they are defending over 20 seats, and need to hold on to as many of them as they can to retain control.

Incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin has represented the state for 12 years, but she is now in a neck-and-neck race against the Trump-backed banker Eric Hovde.

Hovde is accusing Baldwin of being “in bed with Wall Street”, although in this case, he means it literally, as the openly gay Baldwin is in a relationship with a private wealth fund advisor, according to CNBC News.

Baldwin has hit back at Hovde for bringing her private life into the campaign, accusing him of focusing on her partner to “dog whistle” on her homosexuality, which Hovde denies.

Hovde is under fire for owning a Utah-based bank and a multi-million dollar estate in California.

Effectively, both candidates are accusing each other of being out of touch with Wisconsin.

Bordering on intolerable

ABC News reports that Wisconsin’s concerns are largely consistent with those of the rest of the nation: the economy and cost of living, abortion, and immigration.

Considering Wisconsin is about as far from the Mexican border as one can get in the continental United States, that worry about immigration seems largely unfounded.

Publications such as the Guardian highlight interviews with local residents where they admit having no experience with immigrants in the state but are voting based on anecdotes they have heard from the Trump campaign.

But the connection with immigration in Wisconsin is not completely unfounded.

Misrepresentation

In early 2024 Dan Meyer, a police chief in the city of Whitewater wrote, to Joe Biden asking for more funding and federal assistance with a burgeoning immigrant population.

The city of about 15,600 people has seen an influx of about 800 to 1,000 mainly South American immigrants in recent years, attracted to the factories in the area that were looking for low-cost labour.

Meyer told ProPublica that he was concerned that the city lacked the resources and manpower needed to serve the community, as very few of his officers could speak Spanish, hampering communication.

Most of the immigrants were from Nicaragua and were legally resident in the United States as asylum seekers, although as the ProPublica articles notes, not all of them were.

Meyer’s letter was seized upon by the Trump campaign, and Trump would tell rallies in Wisconsin and across the U.S. that the town’s housing prices, disease rates, and crime rates had all skyrocketed.

He would also characterise the migrants as “very tough” and put their numbers at 2,000, double that of local estimates.

Meyer, speaking to Politico, rejected this portrayal of his town, saying that the migrants were as law-abiding as any other group and that his request was merely to seek help, not denigrate the newcomers.

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Top image via Donald Trump/Facebook, Kamala Harris/Facebook, Green Bay Packers