Inside the auditorium at a Wisconsin technical college Monday, Joe Biden was outlining his latest student loan relief effort—a plan that could not only give more than 30 million Americans the “freedom to chase their dreams,” but that could also, in theory, appeal to the young voters he needs in order to win this key swing state in November. Outside, meanwhile, some of those same young voters were gathered on the street accusing him of war crimes and shouting for him to “go to hell.”
“Hey hey, ho ho, Genocide Joe has got to go,” demonstrators shouted outside on the Truax campus of the Madison Area Technical College, in Wisconsin’s capital city. “Stop the war machine!”
It was a relatively small demonstration compared with some he’s faced: Later that day, more than 100 protesters shut down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where the president was holding a fundraiser in a city that will play host to the Democratic convention in August. But the 50 or so who demonstrated in Madison on Monday nevertheless seemed to reflect a larger contingent of Wisconsin voters who disapprove of Biden’s policy on Israel, which he has supplied with military aid as the country continuously bombs Gaza, where more than 33,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed as of this week. (“The president believes in making your voice heard, and participating in our democracy is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt tells Vanity Fair in a statement. “He shares the goal for an end to the violence and a just, lasting peace in the Middle East. He’s working tirelessly to that end.”)
Biden’s trip to Wisconsin—the second in recent weeks—came a week after more than 8% of primary voters in the state cast “uninstructed” ballots in protest of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war. He still enjoyed a commanding victory in the Democratic primary, winning out with a higher percentage of the vote than Donald Trump did in the Republican primary. To Democrats, this signaled that the party is more unified behind Biden than the GOP is around Trump, who ceded nearly 13% of the vote to Nikki Haley, even a whole month after she suspended her candidacy. “On the Republican side, we saw voters rejecting Trump for who he is,” says Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. On the Democratic side, there’s “a much higher level of unity among Democrats. And the protests were based around a current policy, where the president’s objective is to reach a just and enduring peace in the Middle East, which is exactly what the protest voters are calling for.”
“We have a much more addressable challenge on the Democratic side,” Wikler tells me.
But it’s still a significant challenge. Wisconsin’s protest vote last week more than doubled the margin of Biden’s narrow 2020 victory. In Madison, the college town and liberal bastion that Biden visited Monday, the “uninstructed” share was even higher. According to The Daily Cardinal, a student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, results in 20 wards on or near the campus nearly quadrupled the state average. The “uninstructed” vote in the Badger State didn’t quite rise to the level of the “uncommitted” vote in Michigan, another battleground, which is home to the largest percentage of Arab Americans of any state in the country. Yet it underscored a major vulnerability for Biden’s reelection campaign—particularly among younger voters, a majority of whom appear to disagree with his mostly steadfast support for Israel.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Wisconsin to Biden’s reelection bid; the state proved decisive to Trump in 2016 and to Biden in 2020. But it’s also part of the “blue wall” in the Midwest that the president is counting on this fall—in what is likely to be an even closer election than last cycle. “Wisconsin is the must-win state in American politics,” Wikler says.
Democrats have had some cause for celebration there recently: Biden turned the state blue again in 2020. Voters in the 2022 midterms also reelected Democratic governor Tony Evers, whom the president Monday described as “one of the best governors in the United States.” And, in 2023, the Wisconsin Supreme Court—which got a liberal majority after the election of Janet Protasiewicz months earlier—struck down the partisan gerrymander that Republican Scott Walker, the state’s former governor, signed in 2011. “It is a new day in Wisconsin,” Evers later said of that ruling.
But Trump, seeking to replicate his 2016 upset there, has set his sights on the state: The GOP is hosting its convention this summer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. He has run even with—and in many cases has led—Biden in polls of state voters. And last week, the day of the state’s primary, he held a rally in Green Bay, where he continued to spread lies about the 2020 election that fueled both a fake-elector plot to throw out Biden’s win as well as a partisan “audit” into the results that dragged well into 2022. “We won this state by a lot,” Trump insisted from the rally stage last week.
It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s timeworn grievances from 2020 will win over a majority of 2024 swing-state voters, who have proven to be more animated by the issues Biden has made central to his campaign—including abortion rights, democracy, and shoring up the middle class. “Trump is far out of step with the people of Wisconsin,” says Brianna Johnson, Wisconsin communications director for the Biden campaign. Still, the matchup is almost certain to be a nail-biter. The state is “gonna split down the middle,” a Biden supporter, hoping to get a glimpse of the president in Madison on Monday, predicted, as a man waved a Trump flag from the bed of a pick-up truck in the parking lot. Even a relatively small number of defections from Biden’s 2020 coalition in a battleground like Wisconsin could upend his prospects.