MOSINEE, Wis. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump travels to Wisconsin on Saturday for a rally focused on the economy, his first trip to the deep-red, largely rural part of the key election state.
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have been talking more about their plans for the economy ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate, with their competing proposals expected to take center stage.
Trump on Thursday pledged to lead what he called a “national economic renaissance” by raising tariffs, easing regulations to boost energy production and drastically cutting government spending and corporate taxes for companies that manufacture in the U.S.
Harris this week called for raising corporate taxes, not taxing tips and Social Security income, and expanding tax breaks for small businesses to encourage more entrepreneurship.
Both Harris and Trump have been frequent visitors to Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the last six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters conducted after President Joe Biden withdrew from office showed Harris and Trump locked in a neck-and-neck race.
Democrats consider Wisconsin one of the must-win “blue wall” states. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state by just under 21,000 votes in 2020. Trump won it by a slightly larger margin, nearly 23,000 votes, in 2016.
Trump brought his economic message to the central Wisconsin town of Mosinee, population about 4,500. It is in Wisconsin’s largely rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state. Trump won the county where Mosinee is located by 18 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020.
Democrats have been counting on massive turnout in the state’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas like Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump needs to win votes in places like Mosinee to have a chance of eroding the Democratic lead in urban areas.
The Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July, and Trump has visited the state four times before, most recently last week in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, filled the same Milwaukee arena where the Republicans held their national convention last month for a rally that coincided with the Democratic National Convention just 90 miles away in Chicago. Walz returned to Milwaukee on Monday, where he spoke at a Labor Day rally organized by labor unions.
Biden was in rural western Wisconsin on Thursday, his first visit to the state since dropping out of the race. Biden used the visit to announce $7.3 billion in investments for 16 cooperatives that will provide electricity to rural areas in 23 states. The aim is to lower the cost of badly needed internet connections in hard-to-reach areas.
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Bauer reported from Madison.
