MOSINEE, Wis. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump heads to Wisconsin on Saturday for a rally that is expected to focus heavily on the economy. It marks his first trip to the deep red, largely rural region of the key battleground state.
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have talked more about their plans for the economy in the days leading up to Tuesday’s presidential debate, where their dueling proposals are expected to take center stage.
Trump vowed on Thursday to lead a “national economic renaissance” by raising tariffs, cutting regulations that increase energy production and drastically cutting government spending and corporate taxes on companies that produce in the United States.
Harris this week called for raising the corporate tax rate, leaving taxes on tips and Social Security income, and expanding small business tax breaks to boost entrepreneurship.
Both Harris and Trump have visited Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the last six presidential elections have been decided by less than one percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters, conducted after President Joe Biden withdrew, showed a close race between Harris and Trump.
Democrats consider Wisconsin one of the must-have “blue wall” states. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes. Trump won it by a slightly larger margin, nearly 23,000 votes, in 2016.
Trump took his economic message to the central Wisconsin town of Mosinee, home to about 4,500 people. It is located in Wisconsin’s mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican district in the purple state. Trump carried Mosinee County by 18 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020.
Democrats have relied on massive turnout in the state’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas such as Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump needs to pick up the vote in places like Mosinee to have a chance to cut into the Democratic advantage in urban areas.
The Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July, and Trump has made four previous stops in the state, most recently in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse last week.
Last month, Harris and his running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, packed the same Milwaukee arena where Republicans held their national convention 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 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 a $7.3 billion investment in 16 cooperatives that provide electricity to rural areas in 23 states. The purpose is to reduce the costs of urgently needed Internet connections in hard-to-reach areas.
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Bauer reports from Madison.
