MADISON, Wis. — With a week to go until Election Day, political party leaders in Wisconsin are doing everything they can to get their candidates across the finish line.
From closing arguments to an early voting push, both sides are trying to connect with voters using what time they have left.
With just seven days left, voter outreach can look a lot different than it did earlier in the campaign. Even though the strategies might not be the same, the ambitions are the same: Get supporters to show up.
Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler spent Tuesday afternoon “petting” out the vote on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
“Seven days out, Wisconsin, in every poll, is tied but the energy on the ground for Harris-Walz, Tammy Baldwin, Democrats down ballot, is enormous,” Wikler said.
Pumpkin Wikler, and a coalition of fellow Bernese Mountain dogs, helped turn some heads and put the focus on the upcoming election.
“There are more UW-Madison students than the margin of victory in four of the last six presidential races in the state of Wisconsin,” Wikler explained. “The students on this campus have it in their hands to save American democracy and expand freedom for everybody.”
Down the road, at state headquarters, Spectrum News met up with Brian Schimming who chairs the Republican Party.
“It’s important for us to get early voters that maybe haven’t early voted before,” Schimming said. “It’s not a Republican habit in the past.”
For Schimming, the remaining days are about finding new voters and ones who don’t always make it to the polls.
“I’m cautiously optimistic. But I’ve also been around so many elections that were so close that went one way or the other by, essentially, a couple hundred votes,” Schimming added. “So, we not going to make that mistake.”
Putting politics aside, there is at least one thing both chairs can agree on: A lot of eyes will be watching Wisconsin.
“Both parties understand how critical Wisconsin is,” Schimming said. “I always say there’s not 50 states this year. There’s only seven.”
“In 2020, it was the pandemic. We were not doing anything in person,” Wikler said. “In 2022, it was this huge struggle to protect our democracy, but it was a midterm. This is the first in-person presidential election where everyone knows Wisconsin is critical for a longtime, and what you can see is massive crowds showing up, visits constantly by our candidates.”