U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren says Vice President Kamala Harris is “out there finding every way she can to talk to people” as the campaign targets key battlegrounds on Labor Day.
“We talk about a race, this one is literally a race,” Warren said on WISN’s “UpFront,” produced in partnership with WisPolitics. “She has not been a candidate for a year, or even four years, like Donald Trump has. She has been our presidential candidate for something that can be counted in just a handful of weeks. And what she’s doing, everything she can to reach people all across the country.”
Warren spent two days in Wisconsin last week campaigning for Harris and stressing the abortion issue as the campaigns push for independent voters.
“Look, there are a lot of important issues, but we cannot forget the fact that 40% of women today live in states that effectively ban abortion,” Warren said. “So it is an important issue. Those are our sisters, our cousins, our friends, our aunties, our nieces. It is only one of the issues, though, that the Harris-Walz campaign is working on.”
Warren defended Harris’ campaign stance on issues ranging from immigration to the economy and countered critics who question why the administration can’t enact the changes she’s proposing now.
“Republicans have blocked it,” Warren said, referring to immigration changes. “And the reason the Republicans have blocked it is because two days before they were ready to vote, Donald Trump said don’t vote for that because he thought that chaos on the border would actually help him in this election.”
Warren said she anticipates being back in Wisconsin before Election Day.
“I think I’m one of the messengers, and that’s what I want to be,” she said.
Ann Jacobs, a Dem and chair of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, is pushing back at GOP criticism, including from vice presidential nominee JD Vance, after the commission voted to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wisconsin’s ballot.
“Read the law,” Jacobs told “UpFront.” “It’s not a discretionary choice for the commission. The law literally says that any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot may not decline nomination.
“That law literally says that once you have submitted your nomination papers and qualified for the ballot, the only way you can be removed from the ballot is through death,” Jacobs added. “And since RFK Jr. is, to my knowledge, still alive, he cannot be removed from the ballot, even though he asked to be removed from it.”
Jacobs said any change would have to come from state lawmakers.
“That’s a really interesting question,” she said. “I think there’s a logic to why once you’ve submitted your nomination papers, you can’t just undo it. And some of that, I imagine, is because if you sign one person’s nomination papers, you can’t sign someone else’s. So perhaps it’s a way of preventing people from gathering signatures just to prevent someone else from getting on the ballot. But those are the sort of policy decisions that are tasked with the Legislature and the commission doesn’t really have a dog in that fight.”
Brian Reisinger, the longtime political operative and consultant, is out with a new book profiling his family farm in “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold Story of the Disappearing American Farmer.”
“Growing up I always knew that I was really, really lucky to have grown up in a place like a Wisconsin farm, just the center of not only so much in our economy, but our culture,” Reisinger told “UpFront.” “And I knew it was slipping away. I always had the sense there were fewer farms. I knew it was special in that way, but I didn’t know why it was slipping away.”
Reisinger says the issues facing Wisconsin farmers is a key part of the battle for president in the western and rural part of the state.
“The costs of goods and what’s going on in farm country are more central in this campaign than maybe any time in my lifetime,” Reisinger said. “And part of it is because the Democrats are making a bigger play with Tim Walz and his farming community ties. And the question that the Democrats will face is, does his ties going back to farming communities give him that credibility or does his time also governing an entire state that includes places like Minneapolis? Has that made it so that he maybe doesn’t have the ability to sell that? That’s going to be a test for Democrats.
“The test for the Republicans is can they take their rural dominance and can they build that up enough and can they extend it also into small towns and exurban areas and a little bit in the suburban areas and begin to wind back a little bit broader slice of the electorate to build on to,” he added. “So they both have their tests. The reason that it is so unknown is not just because Wisconsin is the tightest state in the country, but it’s also because these issues go so deep. When I investigated these issues, I found failures by both parties going back decades. And you might not have people in local communities talking about every single one of those issues, but the deep distrust of both parties.”
See more from the show.
See a Reisinger book excerpt at WisPolitics.
