Rural Wisconsin vote in the news as election approaches

I saw three stories this week out of rural Wisconsin, and all did justice to the complexities of voters there, in a state that went to Trump in something of a 2016 surprise:  

Here's the first from the Los Angeles Times, dateline Trempeauleau, population 1529.  The headline is "As COVID-19 ravages Wisconsin’s small towns, hostility toward Trump intensifies," and journalist Michael Finnegan introduces us to 81 year old Doris Deutsch, a retiree.  

The pandemic is rampaging through the small towns of this battleground state just as the presidential campaign draws to a close, a sign of trouble for President Trump. Deutsch is one of more than 1,000 people in her dairy-farm county who have been sickened by COVID-19, most of them since Labor Day.

A devout Catholic who displays a “Make America Kind Again!” sign on her front lawn, Deutsch had ample complaints about Trump even before the virus struck. Now, his chronic flouting of public health expertise is only heightening her determination to get him out of office.

“I don’t know if he could have stopped the whole thing, but what a difference if he had stepped up to the plate,” Deutsch, a Democrat who used to sell antique telephones, told a visitor to her small red house overlooking the river. She’s voting for Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump’s narrow win in Wisconsin was a key to his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton. To carry the state again, the Republican president will need to match, if not exceed, his lopsided victory margins in the state’s rural counties. But the intensity of his opposition makes that a tall order.

“The mobilization, that’s no joke. People who do not like Donald Trump have really gotten their act together in Wisconsin,” said Katherine Cramer, the author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”

The next two stories are back to back by Reid Epstein of the New York Times.  The first is dateline Minocqua, Wisconson, population 4,859.  The headline there is "How Virus Politics Divided a Conservative Town in Wisconsin’s North," and it focuses on the race for a state assembly district.  The competitors are two men in the hospitality industry, both restaurant/pub owners.  Epstein compares the campaign strategy of each to the corresponding presidential candidate.  

The second is out of the area near Green Bay.  Again, Epstein reports, this time under the headline, "In Critical Wisconsin, the Fox Valley May Decide the State’s Winner."  The dateline is Little Chute, population 10,449, and here's an excerpt:  

Packed amid former paper mill towns, Little Chute sits at the heart of the Fox Valley, a three-county stretch from Green Bay to Oshkosh that is the most politically competitive region in one of America’s foremost battleground states.

Democrats tend to focus their Wisconsin campaigns on turning out voters in the liberal cities of Milwaukee and Madison, while Republicans concentrate on the conservative suburbs ringing Milwaukee. But it is often the Fox Valley where statewide elections are won or lost.

And this year, there is a new wild card, the coronavirus, which is rampaging through the Fox Valley, with new case counts averaging nearly 600 a day.

* * *  

The combination of old factory towns and rural voters who have migrated to the Republican Party, college towns and small cities becoming increasingly Democratic, and Catholic voters inclined to back Democrats as long as they aren’t too strident on abortion rights has made the region that includes the state’s third-, fifth- and sixth-largest counties the ultimate presidential battleground.

 Worth noting that Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican is from Oshkosh.  

And here's a Washington Post story from a few weeks ago about rural voters, dateline Creston, Iowa, population 7,834.