Marco Bello/Reuters/Reuters
Former President Donald Trump attends an awards ceremony at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 24, 2024.
CNN
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Donald Trump is scheduled to return to the campaign trail Tuesday with events in Michigan and Wisconsin, two key Midwestern battleground states that he won eight years ago and that have vexed Republicans ever since. continuing.
The former president is scheduled to first appear in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is expected to speak about the U.S.-Mexico border. From there, President Trump will head to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for his first rally in the Badger State since his third bid for the White House.
The visit comes amid a marked slump in Trump’s campaign activities in the weeks since he was nominated as the Republican presidential nominee. President Trump has held two campaign events since Super Tuesday, which coincided with a surge in President Joe Biden’s political activity and his own visits to Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Trump has made a spate of social media posts in recent weeks attacking his Democratic rivals and the judges and prosecutors overseeing various cases against the former president.
Trump’s surprising 2016 victories in Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, shake up the so-called “blue state wall” that Democrats have relied on in every election dating back to 1992. occurred. Trump’s particular success with blue-collar voters has given Republicans optimism for a Republican victory. Political realignment could potentially turn the Rust Belt red for the foreseeable future.
Instead, Republicans have struggled to replicate Trump’s initial success in subsequent elections, including in 2020, when Biden narrowly won all three states en route to victory. Democrats at the time also took control of the governorships of Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped Pennsylvania’s Senate seat in 2022, which would prove crucial to maintaining control of the chamber.
Still, the days when Democrats could comfortably expect these states to perform well in national elections are over. Early polls suggest Michigan and Wisconsin will be a challenge for Mr. Biden and an opportunity for Mr. Trump to win over upper Midwest electors.
Biden won Michigan in 2020 by a margin of more than 150,000 votes. The margin narrowed even further in Wisconsin, where he won by about 21,000 votes, or about 0.7 percentage points.
In both states, efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the use of fake electors, have disrupted Republican politics, sometimes with support from President Trump. The former president attacked Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in 2022 for refusing to decertify the state’s presidential results, which he did not have the authority to do.
On Monday, President Trump continued to promote lies about the results in Wisconsin, saying on a local radio show that the state did better in 2020 than in 2016, a claim disproved by the results.
Brianna Johnson, the Biden campaign’s Wisconsin press secretary, immediately seized on the remarks, saying that Trump “encouraged rioters to assault police officers and violently try to overturn an election they knew they had lost.” “He spread the same lies that he did.”
“Mr. Trump is reminding voters that he has nothing to offer but resentment, revenge, and retribution, and he has no vision or plan to make life easier for Wisconsin families,” she said in a statement. Stated.
One of President Trump’s senior advisers described Wisconsin as a “must-win state” in 2024, adding that this term would create a “powerful, volunteer-led” organization, and the campaign said it would lead to Trump’s victory. He claimed to have learned from his mistake four years ago. Razor-like defeat there.
However, the Trump campaign has yet to air a single ad in the state. Republicans have been slow to invest in key battlegrounds as they scramble to make up for funding gaps with Democrats. And Trump himself has not been seen in the state since August 2022. But Johnson insisted that the Wisconsin Democratic Party “never stopped reaching out to voters even after winning important victories in 2022 and 2023.”
But the state party’s most significant recent loss was to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who ran for reelection two years ago against veteran Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, now a top adviser to President Trump. was supported by.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to court voters in Michigan and Wisconsin are already taking shape, focusing on immigration and crime, themes that drove Mr. Trump’s surprising performance in 2016.
In Michigan, the Trump campaign spoke out about Biden’s “bloodshed at the border” and warned about the future of the auto industry and the country under Biden’s second term, a recent development that drew much criticism from Democrats. He said that he would bring his words back to the surface. A person familiar with his planned remarks told CNN that he intends to raise the profile of violent crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally.
On Monday, President Trump invited the family of Ruby Garcia, who authorities say was killed by an undocumented immigrant with whom she was in a relationship, to an event in Michigan.
“If her family wants to be there, we’d love to have them there,” Trump said in an interview with a local Michigan radio show. “It’s an honor.”
Michigan is about 2,500 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, but Republicans there have pushed immigration to the forefront. Ahead of Trump’s visit, state Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra said in a news release that families living in suburban West Michigan are worried that “the worst problems of our southern border are now in our backyards.” We are facing the facts.”
In a recent CNN poll, 15% of Michigan’s registered voters said immigration was their top priority, followed only by the economy and “defending democracy.”
Ahead of the former president’s visit, the Biden campaign launched a new ad Tuesday focused on abortion rights in the Wolverine State. They also noted that President Trump helped invalidate a bipartisan Senate agreement that would have resulted in more investment in border security.
“Donald Trump ordered his MAGA allies killed because he thought it would help him politically,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Alyssa Bradley said in a statement. “He actually doesn’t care about border security.”
CNN’s Kate Sullivan contributed to this report.
