By Kim McDarison

With 31 days before the November election, several national figures from within the Democratic Party arrived in Fort Atkinson Saturday afternoon to share a microphone with U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, and kickoff a Jefferson County canvassing event.

While she was there, the incumbent senator asked some 75 people assembled under a tent at the Fort Atkinson office of the Jefferson County Democratic Party for their vote. She is racing against Republican candidate Eric Hovde to retain her senate seat.

Seated behind her, and delivering speeches of their own about Baldwin’s record, the party, and its goals, were U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, of Colorado, who also is a former superintendent of the Denver Public School System, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Ben Wikler.

Event-goers were welcomed by Jefferson County Democratic Party Chairperson Kelli Rowley, who thanked canvassers for their work Saturday morning, and their work anticipated to continue Saturday afternoon. She next turned the microphone over to Wikler.

Standing before the group, Wikler described the upcoming elections as “a huge moment in the history of this country and in the history of this state.

“We are the state that tipped both of the last two presidential elections. This time, we can be the state that tips the presidential election and ensures a victory in the Senate majority, and because of those two things, future progress in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the House majority, and finally, after 14 years of fighting, we have (Wisconsin Assembly and Senate district) fair maps.” 

His statement brought a round of cheers.

Each of the aforementioned goals, and the election, he said, were best described as “a toss-up.”

Addressing the canvassers in the group, he said: “Pollsters call that the margin of error, we call that the margin of effort.”  The party’s candidates would win this election by “outworking the Republicans,” he said. 

“The richest people in the world are trying to buy this election for the GOP,” Wikler claimed, adding that “Elon Musk is funding the Republican ‘get out the vote’ effort, in our state.”

Further, he said, “the biggest campaign donors in the country — Diane Hendricks, and Dick and Liz Uihlein — they poured $6.3 million in the last six weeks into winning state legislative races in the state of Wisconsin. They’re coming for us.”

He called the Republican party’s TV ads “scorched earth, horrific, vicious, deeply dehumanizing stuff.”

While the Republican party floods the area with TV ads, Wikler said, they are not here, in the state, on the ground. 

“We are not seeing them knocking on doors and organizing in the way that we are. And that means that for us, we have a chance to outwork them and tip this election. We know that four of the last six presidential races here have come down to less than three votes per precinct across our state. We know Tammy Baldwin has won landslide victories in our state, two of them, but we’re going to be ready for them to come and try to grab this, the way that they won in 2016, on the back of Trump’s turnout, and we are not going to let them do it,” he said. 

Said Wikler: “We know that everything that we all care about, the fundamental freedoms, the idea of equal opportunity for everyone, for great public schools for our society, that regards every person with dignity, and a society where the people decide who’s in charge, and not the other way around, all that is on the line.” 

Describing the importance of canvassing and Wisconsin as a battleground state, he said: “We live in a place where our work, and the votes that people cast, are going to affect the future of humanity more than in any other place.” 

Additionally, he said, “We know that future generations will remember what we do in the next month in Wisconsin, as a turning point, in the fight both for our state and for the sacred idea of America, and it’s all on the line in what we do right now.”

He closed his remarks by leading a chant, with Wikler saying: “When we fight …” and the crowd responding: “We win!”

Following his remarks, Wikler introduced Baldwin.

Baldwin

Taking the microphone, Baldwin stood before the group as it rose to deliver a standing ovation.

Said Baldwin: “We know we are the battleground state. We know that we were the tipping point for Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won by seven-tenths of one percent. We were also the tipping point for Biden, in 2020, when he won by six-tenths of one percent.

“If you look at this election cycle, it is really clear … it’s really on their side about folks trying to buy the state. I don’t know if you remember, but the Republicans chose Wisconsin for their Republican National Convention, and when Trump took the stage, he said: ‘look Wisconsin, I’m trying to buy your vote. We’ve just spent a quarter billion dollars in this convention.’ He literally said, ‘Wisconsin, I’m trying to buy your vote.’”

Baldwin offered remarks about her opponent in the senatorial seat race, calling him “deep-pocketed,” and a resident of California, where, she said, he owns a $3 billion bank and a $7 million dollar home.

“He’s been named among the most influential residents of Orange County, three years in a row. Now, we have a Green County, in Wisconsin, and we have a Brown County, in Wisconsin; we do not have an Orange County in Wisconsin,” Baldwin said.

Citing the record, and the differences between herself and her opponent, Baldwin said: “He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, to strip healthcare coverage away from millions of Americans. I helped write the Affordable Care Act. It was my amendment, it was my provision, that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance …”

Further, she said: “Eric Hovde celebrated when the ‘Dobbs’ decision came down. And he owns the chaos that has ensured, especially for a state like Wisconsin that has an 1849-era criminal abortion ban, where services are not available in 69 out of our 72 counties.

“I lead the effort, I am the lead author of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify ‘Roe’ at the national level.”

Additionally, Baldwin said, as recently as last week, Hovde said he would “cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Baldwin described both programs as making a “meaningful difference” in the lives of seniors.

“My opponent, by the way, of seniors, even said that people in nursing homes should not be able to vote. He literally said that if you are here in a nursing home, you have five, six months to live, you are at no point to vote. He literally said that. So the differences couldn’t be more stark,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin, too, talked about outside money coming from Republican groups to influence the senatorial race. Of her opponent, she said: “We estimate right now that he is putting more than $20 million of his own money into this race. He is trying to buy Wisconsin. He is trying to buy a Senate seat.

“If that weren’t enough, as the national Republicans watch this race get closer and closer, Mitch McConnell announced on Monday this week, that he is sending $17 million more from the super PAC into Wisconsin, to spend in just five weeks, now four weeks. They are trying to buy a Senate seat.”

In contrast, the incumbent senator said that her campaigns use “people power.”

She added: “I don’t worry one bit about the money that they are pouring in because I have a secret weapon, and that is all of you.” 

She noted that the day’s event was a canvassing kickoff for the Jefferson County party chapter.

She asked: “How do you win local elections?” and she answered: “You knock on doors.” 

She said as an aftermath of the state’s former gerrymandered maps, “some parts of the state have not had a Democrat knocking on their door in 14 years.

“That’s all changing this time.”

Additionally, she said to the audience: “I ask for your vote.” 

In her closing remarks, she said: “Our democracy, our freedoms, are on the line.” 

Baldwin, upon completion of her remarks, invited Bennet to address attendees.

Bennet

Addressing event attendees, Bennet said: “I am here today because the majority in the United States Senate runs through Wisconsin. The majority of the Senate runs through Jefferson County, and that’s what brought me here, but that’s only part of the reason. You may not know this, but the Senate is filled with pathological people, many of them don’t know that they serve; they don’t know that their job is to represent the people who they are elected to represent, and you might not know that because you have been so capably served by Tammy Baldwin all these years.”

Bennet noted Baldwin’s involvement with passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), citing, the provision which allows children to remain on their parents’ insurance policy until they turn 26.  He called the amendment “the most popular provision probably” of the ACA.

“Donald Trump said the provision is stupid,” Bennet said.

He additionally cited Baldwin’s commitment to “protect our veterans from opioids.”

Bennet next turned his thoughts to the overall election, saying: “I want to tell you why this election really matters to me: Before I was in the Senate, … I was the superintendent of the Denver Public School System, and kids in my school district were like kids in urban school districts all over America.”

He described students as “kids living in poverty with parents working two and three jobs,” and, he said, “no matter what they did, they couldn’t lift their kids out of poverty.

“Much to my surprise,” he said, “I ended up in the Senate, where I rewrote the child tax credit, because I believe in this, the richest country in the world, we should end childhood poverty in the United States.”

Bennet continued: “Kamala Harris and Joe Biden got elected president, we passed that child tax credit, and we cut childhood poverty in America in half as a result, and now Donald Trump wants to pass tax cuts again to the wealthiest people in America, which is how we got to where we are to begin with.” 

He shared some thoughts about the presidential debate held between Trump and Harris last month, saying of Harris: “She did something that nobody has done. She eviscerated Donald Trump.” 

Bennet offered his view of the issues facing Americans.

“Here’s the issue,” he said: “Donald Trump is a symptom of our problem. He’s not our fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we’re living in a world of 40 years of trickle-down economics and the result has been that the bottom 50% of Americans have less wealth today than they had in 1980. Donald Trump’s going to make that worse. Kamala Harris already is turning the page on trickle-down economics because of the work we did with Tammy’s leadership to pass the first Infrastructure (Investment and Jobs Act) bill since Eisenhower was president of the United States.

According to Baldwin’s website, the legislation passed in 2021.

He additionally cited Baldwin and the Senate’s efforts to “bring back the first industries since Reagan sent everything to Southeast Asia and China,” mentioning specifically the return of the Sony semiconductor industry “to Wisconsin and to the United States of America.”

“And, he said, “to overcome the pharmaceutical industry to cap drug prices for seniors who require Medicare to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the American people. That was Tammy who did that.

“So that’s what we have to address. We have to unify this country again,” Bennet said, concluding his comments by addressing voters and canvassers in the group, and saying: “You didn’t choose to have all roads run through you, but they are. The pressure is on you.” 

Bennet next introduced Weingarten.

Weingarten

Animated as she delivered her comments, Weingarten said that she is a New Yorker who has spent a lot of time working with the U.S. Senate, House and U.S. presidents over the course of some 40 years.

She described herself as a teacher, a lawyer and a unionist. She said she also was a high school AP Gov. teacher who had taught in a tech ed school, one, which, she said, had to fight to stay open. She said she had a “very special focus in wanting to make sure that education is project-based, and experiential-based,” and that it provide avenues through which kids “have choices in a high school to go and do what they want to do, whether it is in typical work or whether it is in college. And that’s one of the things that we talk about a lot — about why don’t we make high school, and school, a place where parents want to send their kids? Where educators want to work?” she asked, and in so doing, she said, providing a place where kids can thrive.

Looking at “this generation of the Senate,” she said,  and Baldwin in particular, she noted that she saw that “they care about you and me.”

She elaborated: “The Senate was always the place where the civic leaders of the country used to be elected. After Citizen’s United (a 2010 Supreme Court ruling which reversed campaign finance restrictions, enabling unlimited expenditures of funds by corporations and outside groups on elections),” she said billionaires, “on the Republican side,” used the ruling to “get elected.” 

“What Tammy has brought to the United States Senate is a basic humanity. And you see it also in the way in which Kamala Harris speaks, and the way Michael (Bennet) just spoke, and the way (Democratic vice presidential candidate) Tim Walz speaks. They speak using the ‘I’s’ of you and I, of what regular people across this great country need to be part of the middle class — what they need to make sure that the next generation is better off than our generation, and my parents’ generation.”

She continued: “What’s happening right now in the country is we are in the midst of a fight of hope versus fear, of aspiration versus anger, of democracy versus demagoguery, of opportunity versus obstacle. When I say freedom, it’s freedom of failure as well.”

The race can be won in Wisconsin, she said, because “the GOP, right now, under Donald Trump, has nothing to sell but fear.”

She cited comments from Harris, saying that to gain intergenerational wealth, “we need to make sure that first-generation homeowners actually have $25,000 so that they can actually borrow to get a mortgage, so that they can get that first house, or first-generation small businesses have a $50,000 deduction, so they can do what entrepreneurs all over America have always tried to do.”

Additionally, she said, the middle class is served when teachers, and other workers, “have a decent wage. 

“My point is there is nothing, to me, that is revolutionary about what the Democrats are fighting for. Why is it so hard?

“Why do the  Uihleins and the Trumps want tax cuts for the rich rather than broad-based opportunity? Why are they trying to stop us from teaching honest history? Why are they trying to ban books? Why do they not like critical-thinking, problem solving or even actually having public education? Why? Freedom versus fear, hope versus fear, and so in this next month, they will do everything to keep the power that they think they have. Because we know that if Tammy is reelected to the Senate, and we keep the control of the Senate, and Kamala is elected to president of the United States, then we will unwind those tax cuts and get the child tax cut permanently, and save people’s pensions, … and have an education system where anybody who wants to go to college can go to college, … and bring more manufacturing in. That’s the promise of America. That’s the tipping point right there.” 

She concluded her comments by saying: “Lies and fear — that’s the last point I want to make. As teachers, we all know — and I met a bunch of teachers here — we all know what happens in a classroom. It’s not what’s said, it’s what’s heard. And every teacher in this room is going to say the same thing I’m about to say, which is: we meet our kids where they are, and we lift them, and we bring it. That’s in person. That’s what you’re doing as organizers and as door knockers — telling people that they matter, that’s how we win.”

Additional comments from Baldwin

Following Weingarten’s speech, Baldwin offered Fort Atkinson Online and WhitewaterWise an opportunity to conduct a short interview.

Our questions posed during the interview, and her answers, follow:

Q: You have been campaigning. There was a mood before Kamala Harris stepped into the race, and there is a mood after Harris stepped in, tell us about the change in the mood.

A: Well, I think there was a lot of worry, after Biden’s debate performance, whether he had the vigor for this campaign. And as soon as he did the most patriotic thing you can imagine, and stepped aside, the energy and the excitement is like nothing I’ve seen. And I see it reflected to this day, in the number of people who are showing up to canvass kickoffs and to all sorts of events that campaigns have, and I hear from a lot of people: this is the first time I’ve ever knocked on doors. I just turned 18 and I want to be a part of making history. So I’m still feeling it, and seeing it.

Q: The electorate, it seems like, in the cities Wisconsinites are very Democratic, and in the rural areas, we are somewhat red. You go to both environments. Do you find that you can make some kind of change in the red areas? Are you getting people to draw closer to what you think should be the overall belief system?

A: Yeah, well, first of all, I was going to mention this to the canvassers, but last time I ran, in Jefferson County, I lost Jefferson County, so it would be a red county on the map, but it was 52-48. You don’t have to win every county, but it’s really exciting to see more and more people — either ticket-splitters or they are voting Democrat. But your basic question, look, I think showing up everywhere is vital, and I show up in red counties, purple counties, blue counties, and rural, suburban areas because I want to meet people like they are; I want to listen to them, and I want to take what I learn back to Washington with me so I can work on solutions. I just got the Farm Bureau endorsement this week. They say it’s the first time in over 20 years that it’s gone to a Democrat. I have to think that word is getting out in rural areas, in our agricultural communities, that I’ve been fighting for them since the moment I became their senator. Whether it’s the Dairy Business Innovation Act or working on rural healthcare, especially mental healthcare access, whether it’s trying to protect our farmland from foreign investment acquisition, all of those things, I think word’s getting out.

Q: We are a swing state, and we’ve been in this position before. There is a young man here from Germany covering this event today because this is where the political debate is. As you go to all these various places, can you tell: How close is it?

A: So the polls are a reflection of a point in time, but I think, basically, it’s going to come down to turnout: who’s most motivated to get out to the polls. Can we pull some people that aren’t regular voters, and get them involved, and that’s where that excitement and energy factor comes in. I’m hoping that we will.