On paper, Vice President Kamala Harris should be feeling hopeful about Wisconsin.

The last 40 public polls included in The New York Times polling average of the vital battleground state show her leading in 28, tied in four and trailing former President Donald Trump in eight.

Harris Leads in Wisconsin

Harris, who was set to hold a rally in Madison on Friday evening, was up by 4 percentage points in the latest survey from Marquette Law School, widely considered the gold standard of Wisconsin polling. The Times polling average has shown her leading every day, albeit narrowly, since Aug. 6.

And yet, in what has appeared to be Democrats’ strongest battleground state even when President Joe Biden was still in the race, Democrats, Republicans and even the state’s pollsters can agree on one thing: They don’t fully trust the polling and don’t believe Harris is ahead by as much as some of the surveys say.

“My numbers are my numbers, but I think in terms of putting it into context, 4 points would be a surprisingly strong finish for Harris,” said Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette Law School poll and began a new survey of the state this week. “That would be a huge margin for Wisconsin.”

Related Story: Harris Hits Core Campaign Themes in Emotional Forum With Oprah Winfrey

Indeed, just about anyone involved in Wisconsin politics can recite the state’s history of close calls. Four of its last six presidential races were decided by fewer than 25,000 votes — less than 1 percentage point. When Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, won reelection two years ago by 3.4 points, it was considered a blowout. On that same ballot, Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican, defended his seat by fewer than 27,000 votes, 1% of the vote.

Even though the Democratic Party and its allied candidates have won 12 of the last 15 statewide elections in Wisconsin, there remains a widespread sense that polling data should be viewed skeptically and that voters who support Trump are quietly waiting to vote in large numbers.

“After Hillary’s first debate in 2016, she was the clear winner back then; there was no question about it,” said Sarah Godlewski, the Wisconsin secretary of state, who served as Hillary Clinton’s deputy political director for the state that year. “The voters that Donald Trump is going to turn out are going to be first-time voters that we have no data on and don’t even know about. You can’t poll people that you don’t even know about.”

Polls Show Race to Be Close

Many polls show the race to be extremely close. Two released this week, from Marist College and Quinnipiac University, found Harris with a smaller lead, just 1 point. A survey from Emerson College and The Hill, a Washington newspaper, showed Trump up by 1 point.

Still, Wisconsin Republicans have often been on the defensive lately. Their state party is a shell of the powerhouse that swept into office in the 2010s and made household names out of Gov. Scott Walker, Speaker Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus, who went from state party chair to Republican National Committee chair to White House chief of staff. Much of the party’s get-out-the-vote effort is now being run by independent groups to which the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game.

Yet there is optimism that things may be OK for Trump and Wisconsin Republicans.

“I’m never overconfident,” Johnson said in an interview Wednesday. “But I never believe the polls.”

Related Story: Voters Split on Whether Harris or Trump Would Do a Better Job on Economy: ...

Johnson, who was a leading proponent of false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, said his optimism was based on a doubtful supposition that the 2024 contest would be on the level. He said he was worried about noncitizen immigrants voting — though not as worried as he was that they would vote in other battleground states.

(Only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote in American presidential elections, and there is no evidence that noncitizens, let alone immigrants living in the country without legal permission, participate in elections beyond a sparse number.)

“It’s as obvious as the nose on anybody’s face that Democrats want to make it easy to cheat and make it easy for illegals to get registered and to vote,” Johnson said. “When Republicans win, I think it’s legitimate, because we don’t cheat.”

Some Credence to Democratic Fears

Brian Schimming, the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said there was some credence to Democratic fears about a hidden group of potential GOP voters waiting in the shadows to vote for Trump. Republicans now have 41 offices across the state, he said.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of people in this state that think like us, act like us, believe like us and live like us, and they don’t vote,” Schimming said. “I’ll always ask people in a crowd if they know that person, and all the hands go up.”

Harris was planning to arrive in Madison after a Friday morning stop in Atlanta to emphasize Trump’s opposition to abortion rights.

Related Story: Election 2024 Latest: Trump and Harris Campaign for Undecided Voters With Just ...

“In Madison, the more you stress the threat of what Donald Trump can do, it’s probably better,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat who represents the city. “You have more people who care about democracy here than elsewhere, where cost of living and other issues resonate more.”

But Democrats in the state have long memories of not only 2016, when Trump won, but also of 2020, when a poll from The Washington Post and ABC News two weeks before the election showed Biden with a 17-point lead in the state over Trump, in a race that was ultimately decided by less than 1 point.

“The hope,” said Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chair, “is that we don’t have a giant polling miss when the polls say that we are 1 point up.”

–

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Reid J. Epstein/Todd Heisler
c. 2024 The New York Times Company