Barack Obama was barely three minutes into his speech inside a Madison, Wisconsin, arena on Tuesday when he delivered his call to action—“I am asking you to vote”—a plea so eagerly anticipated by the thousands in attendance that they erupted in cheers before he could finish the line.
Kamala Harris’s campaign had dispatched its most valuable surrogate to Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital on the swing state’s first day of early voting, with just two weeks to go until the election. Before this crowd in Dane County, though, Obama’s exhortation—maybe even his entire appearance—seemed superfluous.
As Michael Wagner, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus, put it: “A lot of people live here, and everybody votes.” He was exaggerating, but only slightly.
Within the battleground states that will determine the presidency, no city turns out its voters more reliably than Madison, and no county turns out more reliably than Dane. Four years ago, a whopping 89 percent of Dane’s registered voters cast ballots in the presidential election—well above the national average—and more than three-quarters of them went for Joe Biden. He received 42,000 more votes in the county than Hillary Clinton had in 2016—and twice his statewide margin of victory. Harris might need even more. In the scramble for every last vote in a deadlocked campaign, the vice president is betting that she can beat Biden’s margins among the white, college-educated suburbanites who have swung hardest toward the Democrats in recent years.
Along with Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin is one of three “Blue Wall” states that offer Harris’s simplest path to 270 electoral votes, and recent polls have it essentially tied. That is not unusual: Only twice this century has a presidential candidate of either party carried Wisconsin by more than a single percentage point.
To win Wisconsin, Harris likely has to turn out new voters from Madison and Dane to offset possibly steeper Democratic losses in the state’s rural areas, as well as a potential dropoff among Black and Latino voters in Milwaukee. Republicans are gunning for the area, too; Donald Trump held a rally near Madison earlier this month, and despite the Democrats’ dominance in Dane, the state’s second-most-populous county is also home to one of Wisconsin’s largest groups of GOP voters.
But Democrats still have a much higher ceiling in Dane. The county is the fastest-growing in the state, thanks to expanding local health and tech sectors. Dane’s population has grown by 50,000 since the 2020 census, the county’s Democratic Party chair, Alexia Sabor, told me. “The new growth is more likely to be younger, more likely to be college-educated, and more likely to be at least middle-class,” she said. “That all correlates with Democratic votership.”
Strong turnout in Madison and Dane helped progressives flip a pivotal state Supreme Court seat in a special election last year. In August, Madison set a 40-year voting record for a summer primary, and Dane County cast more ballots than Milwaukee County, which has nearly double Dane’s population. Enthusiasm has only increased in the months since. The state party asked the Dane Democrats to knock on 100,000 doors by November—a goal they achieved before the end of September. Sabor’s office received so many emailed requests for lawn signs that she had to set up an auto-reply message.
A couple of hours before the Obama rally, which also featured Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, I met Sabor at a coffee shop across the street from an early-voting site in Madison. Neither of us could find parking, because so many people had showed up even before the polls opened. Sabor said she wouldn’t be going to the rally. Her time was better spent elsewhere, she told me: “There are more doors to knock.”
Chris Sinicki has a tougher job than Sabor. She’s the Democratic chair in Milwaukee County, whose eponymous city has been losing population and where enthusiasm for Harris is a much larger concern than in Dane. In 2008, turnout among Black voters in Milwaukee helped propel Obama to the biggest presidential landslide in half a century in Wisconsin—he won the state by 14 points. Black turnout stayed high for his reelection in 2012 but has fallen off since.
Still, Sinicki was upbeat when we spoke—at least at first. The excitement among Democrats was “off the charts,” she told me. “I am feeling really positive.” But when I asked her why the Harris campaign had sent Obama and Walz to Madison rather than Milwaukee, her tone changed. “Madison doesn’t need the GOTV stuff. They vote in high numbers,” Sinicki said. “We need that type of muscle here in Milwaukee. We need big rallies.”
She wasn’t alone in questioning the decision. A few Democrats I met at the rally, although they were excited to see Obama, wondered why he was there. “It was an interesting political move,” Dakota Hall, the Milwaukee-based executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, a progressive political group, told me when we met in the city the next day. “I don’t think we need Obama to go rally Madison as much as we needed him to rally Milwaukee voters.”
The Harris campaign says it hasn’t ruled out sending Obama to Milwaukee in the closing days of the race. It pointed to less notable surrogates who have campaigned for Harris in the city, including the actors Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, as well as Doc Rivers, the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. On Friday, however, the campaign announced that Harris would return to Wisconsin next week—for a rally in Madison.
Wisconsin Democrats remain bitter about 2016. Hillary Clinton spent crucial time in the final weeks campaigning in states she would go on to lose by several points—including Arizona, Ohio, and Iowa—and did not step foot in Wisconsin, which she lost to Trump by 22,000 votes. But they have no such complaints about Harris. The vice president has campaigned heavily across Wisconsin; earlier this month she visited the small cities of La Crosse and Green Bay. The night before Obama’s Madison rally, she held a town hall with former Representative Liz Cheney in Waukesha, a GOP stronghold where Harris is hoping to win over Republicans who have turned away from Trump. Waukesha’s Republican mayor endorsed the vice president a few days later.
“In Wisconsin, you only win with an all-of-the-above strategy,” Ben Wikler, the state Democratic chair, told me in Madison. “We need every Democrat to turn out. We need nonvoters to vote for Harris-Walz, and we need to bring some Republicans.”
Although Madison scored Obama, the Harris campaign is giving plenty of love to Milwaukee as well. The vice president held an 18,000-person rally in the city in August—at the same arena where Republicans had convened to nominate Trump a few weeks earlier—which until last week had been the largest of her campaign. She returned for a smaller event this month, and sent her husband, Doug Emhoff, to campaign in the city on Thursday.
“This is very different from 2016,” Gwen Moore, Milwaukee’s representative in Congress, told a small group of reporters near an early-voting site on Wednesday. “We’re very happy.”
Moore appeared alongside two other prominent Black Democrats—Milwaukee’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, and its county executive, David Crowley—who tailored their messages to citizens who might be disinclined to vote. “While you might not be into politics, politics is into you,” Johnson said. “There are so many people who are counting Milwaukee out.”
Hall, the progressive activist, credited the Harris campaign for paying attention to Milwaukee. But he worried that the vice president’s truncated candidacy and the lack of a full Democratic primary campaign had left less engaged residents—especially younger Black and Latino men—unsure what she would do as president. “People need to hear more concrete details,” he told me. “You have a candidate who, for the most part, is unknown to younger voters.”
In Milwaukee, Harris’s challenge is not only mobilizing Black people to turn out, but persuading them to vote for her. Polls across the country have shown Trump winning a higher share of Black voters than in the past, a trend that’s concentrated among young men. With an eye on that constituency, Trump is planning a large rally in Milwaukee later this week. “I don’t know that we realistically expect her to get more of the male vote” than Biden did, Moore told me. “There are Black people who are Republican, and we accept that, period.” She said that the many negative ads Republicans are running against Harris have likely turned off a portion of Black men. “What’s more likely is that they won’t come out to vote at all,” Moore said.
Behind Moore, dozens of voters—most of them Black—stood in a line that snaked outside the polling place for the second day in a row. The turnout delighted Democratic officials, and the bulk of the voters I interviewed said they were voting for Harris. But not all. Michael and Mark Ferguson, 44-year-old twin brothers, told me they had backed Biden four years ago but were firmly behind Trump this time.
Michael, a correctional officer, said his top issues were immigration and the economy. “I don’t believe Kamala Harris is a strong leader,” he told me. “She got every appointment handed to her. She didn’t earn it.” A president who’s afraid to go on Fox News, Ferguson said, couldn’t be trusted to deal with tough foreign leaders. I pointed out that Harris had recently sat for a Fox interview. “Yeah,” he replied, “and she stunk it up.”
To try to compensate for the defections of onetime Democrats like the Fergusons, the Harris campaign is looking to Dane County. In addition to the thousands of largely Democratic voters who have recently moved in, there are the nearly 40,000 undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who lean left and vote at much higher rates than the national average for college-age citizens, and at higher rates than their Big Ten (and swing-state) rivals in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Thanks to Wisconsin’s same-day voter registration, out-of-state students can easily cast ballots soon after they move to Madison. In a few small wards near campus in 2020, voter turnout exceeded 100 percent because more people voted than had previously been listed as registered. Many other precincts reported turnout exceeding 90 percent that year. (Officials in Madison and Dane report turnout as a percentage of registered voters, a smaller pool than the voting-age population used by political scientists; by either yardstick, turnout in the area greatly surpasses the national and state averages.)
A large contingent of UW Madison students attended the Obama rally. I met a group of three 20-year-olds who grew up in blue states but planned to cast their first votes—for Harris—in Wisconsin. Not all of their friends were doing the same. “Trump has a hold over our age group and demographic more than I expected,” Owen Kolbrenner of California told me. Trump’s unseriousness appealed to some guys they knew. “Some of our friends think the whole thing is a joke,” Kolbrenner said. “It’s kind of impossible to rationalize with them.”
During his speech, Obama told the crowd, “I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now. Go vote!” Nobody took him up on the offer, but after he left the stage, some attendees headed straight for an early-voting site on campus, where the line stretched through multiple rooms. Across Wisconsin that day, officials said high turnout strained the state’s election system and caused slowdowns in printing ballot envelopes. In Madison, even more people voted the next day, and by midweek, the city had nearly matched the totals in Milwaukee, its much larger neighbor. At the university’s student union, Khadija Sene, a lifelong Madison resident, was standing in line with her family, waiting to cast her first-ever ballot for Harris. She told me, “Everybody that I know is voting.”