Welcome to the online version of From the Political Bureauan evening newsletter featuring the latest reporting and analysis from the NBC News Politics team from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.
In today’s edition, the campaign includes reports from rural Wisconsin, where Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin faces the challenge of running with Donald Trump in the election. Plus, Chief Political Analyst Chuck Todd explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receives interest from voters.
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Tammy Baldwin is fighting to maintain its appeal in Wisconsin Trump country
By Sarah Dean
REEDSBURG, Wis. – Dairy farmer Randy Roecker is at a breaking point – and he partly blames the president Joe Bidenand therefore plans to vote for Donald Trump for the third time in November.
“Farmers are hurting like you wouldn’t believe, and I myself am about to throw up my hands and say we’re done,” said Roecker, who cited inflation as a drag on his business over the past two years.
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But while he plans to vote on whether the Democratic president will take office, Roecker also plans to vote to keep his Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin.
“I fully support her. I mean, there’s no doubt about it,” Roecker said. “And everyone I know – the farmers – everyone says she’s great for Wisconsin agriculture.”
Baldwin is gearing up for a tough re-election race against likely Republican nominee Eric Hovde, a multimillionaire bank owner, in evenly divided Wisconsin, one of the few states that will determine which party controls the Senate. But she has the advantage of incumbency and has often outperformed other Democrats statewide in rural areas, even as the party as a whole has lost significant ground in those regions in recent decades.
Baldwin is already putting more energy into rural campaigns this year as she prepares for the challenge of splitting the vote with one of the forces pushing Republican margins sky-high in rural areas. Unlike her first two Senate races, Donald Trump will also run in November in 2012 and 2018.
Late last month, Baldwin sat down with Roecker and others from the Farmer Angel Network around a kitchen table for a 90-minute conversation about farmer mental health. The event was part of the senator’s “Dairyland” tour of 19 counties, none of which were among Wisconsin’s five most populous counties.
“I think there’s been a real opportunity for me to become a champion for issues that I might not hear about if I just went to the population centers of the state,” Baldwin told reporters at a stop at the New Glarus Brewing Co. .
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Why you should keep voters interested in RFK Jr. should not be ignored
Analysis by Chuck Todd
What happens when an electorate wants change, but there is no clear change candidate on the ballot?
This question came to mind after watching one of the fascinating monthly focus groups organized by Rich Thau, the chairman of the research group Engagious, which in the latest edition gathered Pennsylvania voters who voted once for Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton and once on Donald. Trump.
The highlight of this month’s check-in was the surprising interest in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among these swing voters. In some ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise. These voters are by definition not hard-core supporters, and they certainly aren’t happy with either major party, having easily voted against both in the past two elections.
As I wrote months ago, there was always going to be a point in this campaign cycle when both major parties had completed their nominating processes and selected Biden and Trump — and yet the public was unhappy with that outcome. We are at that moment.
With no mainstream third-party alternative available for the time being, that vacuum is being filled by Kennedy. For many voters, you can see that he’s just a famous name filling a void. You can hear the lack of knowledge that many of these Pennsylvania voters had about Kennedy other than his name, and those who knew anything about him only knew a few things. Moreover, it was clear that his greatest asset was the fact that his last name was neither Trump nor Biden.
Seeing the initial interest among these voters in Kennedy’s candidacy reminds us that there was a powerful opportunity for a truly potential unity ticket—not one that professed “centrism” per se, but one that promised a four-year partisan timeout take and try to focus on tough choices to solve tough problems, like immigration.
But given the stakes of this election, it has also become clear to me that while there is an opening with the true middle or less partisan crowd, the road is very narrow. And unless partisans from one or both parties also wanted an alternative, there was essentially no path to victory.
But there is a path to relevance.
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That’s all from The Politics Desk for now. If you have any feedback – like it or not – please email us at politicsnieuwsbrief@nbcuni.com
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
