Joe Biden wanted a show of strength and found it in a union hall in Wisconsin — a state Democrats learned the hard way that they can’t ignore, and one where the president sent his strongest signal yet of a reelection bid.
The trip this week, on the heels of the State of the Union address, plucked Biden from the bruising fray of Washington and dropped him in front of a friendly crowd near Madison, a heavily Democratic part of a swing state that will help crown the winner of the 2024 election.
Biden has given every signal that he plans to run again; and if, at age 80, he’s harboring any misgivings, he received only encouragement in Wisconsin. Hundreds of people packed the union training center in DeForest, just outside Madison, to cheer him on, and labor leaders there praised him as the most pro-union president they’ve known.
The trip intended to shore up two blocs ahead of a potential rematch with Donald Trump: Wisconsin itself, where Trump shocked Democrats by winning in 2016 before Biden narrowly won it back, and the labor movement, whose leaders remain Democratic loyalists but whose rank and file flirted with Republicans.
“I think he should run,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which hosted the event. “He’s like the Energizer Bunny. He’s moving, moving, moving, and I see no signs of this man, this president, slowing down.”
Wisconsin and its 10 electoral college votes once comprised a so-called blue wall, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, until Trump swept all three away in 2016. Hillary Clinton didn’t hold an event in the state known as America’s Dairyland, a miscalculation that Biden seems hellbent on avoiding.
Wisconsin’s economy is also a case study for the US, where a strong jobs market and ongoing inflation casts uncertainty over the chances of a recession.
The unemployment rate, at 3.2% in December, is below the national level — but, in some locations, it’s even lower, including just 1.6% in Madison in December. The state had the biggest increase in job opening rates of the country in November, according to the latest government data available.
Inflation in the Midwest has abated, helped largely by a decline in gasoline prices. But food prices continue to eat away at buying power — up 11.4% in December from a year earlier in the region. One measure of manufacturing in the southeast Wisconsin and northern Illinois region — ISM Milwaukee — showed a contraction in three of the past four months. Besides higher rates and a slowdown in production, respondents in a December report cited inflation and persisting material shortages as major issues.
Wisconsin's boom is not felt in all industries. In its renowned dairy sector, for instance, a glut of supply and slumping prices has heaped pressure on family farms that are fighting for survival.
Tina Hinchley and her family farm just outside of Madison, with about 240 head of cattle — and names like Nibbles, Sugah, Seattle — each of which generate up to 21 gallons of milk a day.
They augment their income by running tours and growing cash crops, but face an ever-evolving series of headwinds including oversupply, low prices and a lack of labor that has forced them to invest in technology to replace labor farmers typically can't otherwise find or afford.
"It is extremely challenging," she said. "We are addicted to working ourselves to death."
Hinchley is a Democrat who generally backs Biden, but says his age is a factor and she’d consider backing a moderate Republican woman next year, citing Nikki Haley as an example. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s United Nations ambassador, is expected to announce this month that she’s running for the Republican nomination.
“I don't know if Biden is going to be the best choice next year, or next election cycle, because he's so old,” Hinchley said. “He's got a good heart, he's got all sorts of stuff going for him, but the age is an issue.”
Wisconsin has seen a shift in voter allegiance similar to other swing states, where Ronald Reagan-era suburban Republicans have skewed more Democratic while rural areas have grown more deeply Republican. It makes Wisconsin a so-called purple state overall, but it’s a quilt of places that lean heavily one way or another.
“Democrats just need turnout, turnout, turnout in Madison and Milwaukee,” said Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The state has a favorable view of Biden but he’s not beloved, Wagner said.
Yet several people involved in politics said they expect 2024 to be contentious, regardless.
“I just think it’s going to be another dog fight,” said Scott Walker, a former Republican governor of the state, stopping short of predicting Biden would lose there.
“Elections are about the future, not about the past. So to the extent, if circumstances are similar, if there’s a Republican nominee who’s got a plan for the future, I think he or she is in a pretty good spot to be competitive against Joe Biden or whoever the Democrat is,” he said. Walker, who briefly ran for president himself in the 2016 race, hasn’t yet backed Trump or any other Republican for the nomination.
He said it’s possible Trump — whose early campaign has been punctuated by grievances about past ones — can run there on a forward-looking message, but warned any nominee about getting “hung up on the past.”
The president reprised elements of his State of the Union speech at the union hall near Madison, saying that the US needs a blue-collar effort to rebuild the country. He lamented the 2008 closing of a General Motors plant in nearby Janesville, and how “once-thriving cities and towns became shadows of what they used to be.” And he touted gains in manufacturing. Wisconsin has the second-highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in the country, behind only Indiana.
“What he did in the speech last night is exactly what we want to hear,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “Absolutely one of the best State of the Unions that I’ve seen. Joe Biden put workers first in the speech.”
Biden has said he intends to run again — an intention so plain that his outgoing chief of staff publicly said he looked forward to supporting the 2024 campaign.
In an interview with PBS NewsHour, conducted at the Wisconsin union hall on Wednesday, he said his State of the Union speech would dispel concerns about his age. “I heard that people are saying, `Well, just watch Biden, my God, age is not an issue any more,’” he said. When told it sounds like he’s running, he said: “That’s my intention, I think. But I haven’t made that decision firmly yet.”
In the Madison area, Biden found only encouragement.
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t” run, added Satya Rhodes-Conway, Madison’s mayor. She praised Biden for the administration’s work with cities and states, and for tailoring an economic strategy to jobs and pocketbooks. Asked how she thinks Biden is positioned for 2024, she said it’s not clear but that last autumn’s reelection of Governor Tony Evers, a moderate Democrat, bodes well.
“I do think that folks don’t maybe understand the Midwest,” she added. “We get talked a lot about as a swing-state and this and that and the other, but people are just trying to live their lives and do good things. And, again, I think the president gets that.”
