WASHINGTON — Political experts gathered in Washington Tuesday to talk about the presidential race in Wisconsin at a breakfast sponsored by Wispolitics. They agreed on one thing: It’s unclear who will win the Badger State.
In the last two presidential elections, Wisconsin was decided by roughly 20,000 votes, and another close outcome is expected this year. The experts said Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden atop the Democrats’ ticket makes the race even harder to predict.
“The fact that we had our sitting president bow out of the race over the summer was pretty extraordinary. And so, one of the things that I think about this race currently is that we just don't know what's happening. I mean, it's very difficult to put in context this particular campaign and this race right now,” said Lilliana Mason, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“We haven't had a presidential candidate who never had to win a primary; in candidate Harris, we haven't had someone who is relatively new to the electorate going into the fall,” Mason continued. “And so, when we think about polling and public opinion, I think we should be cognizant of the amount of uncertainty that we really have when we're looking at numbers, when we're trying to understand what people are thinking, when we're modeling vote turnout, right?”
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, said Trump got “pushed into the shadows” when Biden dropped out, but that’s since reversed, and we’re seeing him in the news much more now.
“I do think we're not paying enough attention to the Trump side of the argument and the Republican side of the argument, because Republican motivation behind Trump has been strong,” Franklin said. “So there's a turnout game going on there, where the party and the campaign is focused on low propensity voters, people who don't vote in every election but support Trump, and those are the folks that they're working especially hard to reach and motivate to come to the polls for Donald Trump, and we’ll see how successful that is.”
Craig Gilbert, former chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington Bureau, said it’s “ambitious” for Harris to be defining herself as the “change candidate” who can turn the page on both Biden and former President Donald Trump.
“And that's a tricky thing to do when you're the vice president and you're talking about the person who you served as running mate for three and a half years, and if you're a Republican, you say, 'how can you do that?'” Gilbert said.
The panelists ended the conversation with a reminder to the room: Every vote counts, especially in a state like Wisconsin.
“When I was a grad student in Ann Arbor, I elected the mayor who won by one vote when I got in line to vote at 7:55 p.m.,” Franklin said.