MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — Voters and local candidates in Wisconsin have a message for President Joe Biden: It’s not just Democratic elites who are freaking out about your mental acuity.
Biden on Monday suggested it was simply the “the elites in the party” raising doubts about his political viability after a halting, incoherent debate performance last month. In fact, questions about his age are dominating the political conversation in and around Milwaukee and Madison, crucial turf for Democrats in November, according to conversations with roughly two dozen Democrats and independent voters over the course of the past four days. The concerns come as a new AARP poll has Biden down five points to former president Donald Trump in the critically important swing state, and as Republicans prepare to formally nominate Trump in Milwaukee next week.
Even the president’s most loyal supporters — voters, local party activists and candidates alike — say that the debate fall-out has made it tough to focus on anything else. As a result, it’s become much harder for Democrats on the ground to deliver what they hoped would be a winning message in the swing state — on the Biden administration’s success reviving the local manufacturing economy and commitment to protecting abortion rights.
There’s little consensus, however, that Biden dropping out of the presidential race would improve the party’s odds in November.
Avery Renk, a Democratic candidate for a Wisconsin Assembly seat outside of Madison, said in an interview Sunday that it was too late for Democrats to pick another candidate and that they should “stick with Joe.” Still, the debate “definitely had an impact,” Renk said, as he mingled with prospective voters at a picnic hosted by a local farmer in his district.
While Biden’s age has long been a concern for voters nationally, “before the debate there was a lot of chat about me, about my opponents in the Democratic primary for the Assembly,” said Renk. ”Since the debate there’s been a lot of chat at [voters’] doorsteps about Biden, and everything I hear is, ‘he’s too old.’”
That was certainly what Wisconsin Assembly candidate LuAnn Bird encountered as she went door-to-door in the middle class neighborhood of Highwood Estates, in the suburbs of Milwaukee, on Monday.
“After the debate, everyone is saying ‘oh my gosh he’s in cognitive decline, we didn’t see this,’” Brandon, a middle-aged real estate salesman who would only share his first name, told Bird as he stood at his front door. “I’m like, how can’t you see [the decline]? It’s obvious.”
“We know Joe is old,” Bird told the man, who said he’s undecided on his presidential vote, despite supporting abortion rights and socialized health care.
As she would do many more times that afternoon, Bird tried to reassure Brandon with a story about meeting Biden at a labor event in Milwaukee, before steering the conversation away from Biden’s performance to the threat Trump poses to abortion rights and the democratic process.
“If Trump gets elected, [women’s rights are] only going to go backwards,” she told voters again and again, finding herself repeatedly drawn into the national political debate despite the local nature of her own neck-and-neck Assembly race, in southeastern Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs.
Biden’s age and visible frailty have overwhelmed the policy arguments that he and his advisers hoped would drive the campaign in places like Wisconsin. The president and his congressional allies — like Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is also running for reelection this year — tailored much of their economic agenda to win back industrial states in the upper Midwest. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan all swung to Trump in 2016 on a wave of discontent against global trade deals that shifted many factory jobs overseas.
Biden flipped those states — narrowly — in 2020, while largely echoing Trump’s protectionist trade rhetoric. As president, he expanded Trump-era tariffs on China, came out against the sale of iconic U.S. Steel to a Japanese rival, and abandoned the trade elements of his core economic proposal for Asia, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — all at the urging of Baldwin and other at-risk Senate Democrats from the Rust Belt.
But even voters who say Biden’s economic policies are working say that the debate performance is muddying the waters.
“Our production floor is full and we’re always hiring new people, all year. So I think it’s going a lot better than it was,” said one Milwaukee voter who works for a manufacturer making cereal packaging machines, and was granted anonymity in order to speak freely. Many of her colleagues “are blind” to that economic reality, she added, because “they want to follow whoever is loudest.”
The debate performance has been so damaging that it’s even distracting voters at factories funded by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, including one that the president himself visited just last year.
“I thought [the debate] was a joke, to be honest,” said Paul Hawver, a wind turbine repair technician in training at Ingeteam, a Milwaukee manufacturer of renewable energy technologies, adding with a laugh that he “needed a beer” to watch it.
The anxiety over Biden was highlighted — perhaps inadvertently — by Baldwin’s campaign events over the past week. The senator skipped Biden’s campaign stop in Madison on Friday, citing a “scheduling conflict,” and barely acknowledged the president in her stump speeches, even as she touted the administration’s industrial policies, like manufacturing subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and Buy American rules she got inserted into the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
“In the Biden administration, I got permanent Buy American language in the bipartisan infrastructure bill in the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said to applause from a crowd of about 40 at the 2nd District Democratic picnic outside Madison on Sunday.
That was the closest Baldwin came to mentioning the president by name at two separate campaign events over the weekend — the other one north of Milwaukee — even as she touted a visit with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. And at the latter event Sunday, as many establishment Democrats in Washington scrambled to prop up Biden’s candidacy, Baldwin refused to say whether she thought the party should switch Biden out for someone else.
“We don’t know what the future holds,” she told reporters, “but I am definitely focused on, first of all, winning my own reelection.”
The Baldwin and Biden campaigns downplay the senator’s moves to distance herself from Biden, with the senator pointing to campaign ads in the past that mentioned the president by name. A Biden campaign official, meanwhile, said that Baldwin was more than 100 miles away on a separate campaign visit and has pledged to appear with the president in the future. But to local Democrats the message of her absence was clear.
“It’s really unfortunate” that Baldwin skipped out on the Biden event, said Renk, the Assembly candidate outside of Madison. “But Tammy’s got a race to win and she’s got to get the vote out here and it’s going to be really tough because that excitement is just not there right now with the top of the ticket.”
Still, Renk and nearly all the Democrats who expressed concern about Biden over the weekend also appear resigned to the fact that he will hang on as the nominee, with many concerned about the chaos that could ensue if the party tried to switch him out so close to the election.
“It’s almost too late for that,” said Jim Steffens, a retired union letter carrier and Democratic voter outside Madison. Vice President Kamala Harris “would be the likely next person up and I don’t know if she would do any better,” he added.
Some Biden loyalists, meanwhile, have internalized the campaign’s narrative that he just “had a bad day” due to fatigue and illness.
“It broke our heart to see it,” Assembly candidate Maureen McCarville said of Biden’s debate performance at the Sunday picnic outside of Madison. “I get sinus infections and there are days when I can’t crawl out of bed, and I’m not anywhere near his age.”
Many Biden loyalists were eager to turn the conversation back to Trump, who they feel has escaped scrutiny from the media amid the anxiety of Biden’s debate performance.
“They’re both old men,” said Magnolia Taylor, a wind turbine assembly finisher at Ingeteam, noting that Biden has “been through a lot” in recent weeks, like the conviction of his son, Hunter, on gun charges. “Everybody has a bad day,” she concluded.
And most Democrats in the state pledged to fight on for Biden through November, saying that after the debate performance, their best hope is for a reverse-coattails effect, where the activism of down-ballot candidates convinces voters to hold their nose and vote for Biden as well. With a new legislative map making more state-level seats competitive, that’s the strategy candidates like Bird and Renk are clinging to amid the electoral anxiety this summer.
“Voting for anyone else but Biden — regardless of how you feel about him — is a vote for Trump,” Bird cajoled one undecided voter on Monday, who said she is a Democrat but remained “indifferent” about the presidential election. “So we just have to roll with this for this year, that’s how I’m looking at it.”
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