GRAFTON, WI – Under candy-colored fall leaves and a bright blue sky, state Senate candidate Jodi Habush Sinykin and her best friend and campaign aide Carrie Steinberg were doing what had become their routine the last seven months: knocking on doors.
In the conservative area of Grafton, a village inside Wisconsin’s electorally crucial WOW counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, they diligently followed their mobile app house to house last week to try to speak with persuadable voters of all beliefs. They were hoping to find the women populating their list in the newly drawn district — potentially Republican, but disenchanted by the party’s strict actions on abortion and repulsed by former president Donald Trump. Instead, the voters who were opening the doors were only men.
“We need more wives!” Sinykin yelled out, exasperated but joking, after the fifth house.
She might be much further down the Wisconsin ballot than the woman battling to become America’s next president, but Sinykin and Vice President Kamala Harris share a similar route to victory: curry enough favor with educated suburban voters to beat the men they’re running against.
Both Sinykin and Harris need the strategy to pay off. Wisconsin is as close to a must-win for Harris as any state, with campaign officials privately understanding that her best chance to win the Electoral College is to win all of the Blue Wall — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — plus a sole electoral vote in Nebraska.
The suburbs of Wisconsin, once Republican strongholds, have trended more purple in recent years, destabilizing traditional political fault lines that once shut out moderate Democrats like Sinykin and the newly remade Harris. New voting maps, spurred by a new liberal majority state Supreme Court, have given state Democrats like Sinykin a fighting chance. And abortion politics could be particularly potent for Democrats in a state that spent more than a year in limbo because of a ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“I have definitely seen the change and the trend blue, drawn and driven primarily by women who feel uncomfortable and unsafe with those very anti-choice policies,” Sinykin said in an interview at the local Democratic Party office, nestled covertly in a below-lake-level strip mall — unlike the GOP local office, which is featured prominently on the main road.
She says both Democratic and Republican women have come up to her and thanked her for focusing on abortion. And her campaign for the state’s 8th Senate District — which now takes a bite out of each of the much-obsessed-over bellwether WOW counties — is widely believed to be the most competitive state Senate race in Wisconsin, and the most expensive too. “This is not a time for women to stand idly by.”
Sinykin and her scrappy team, guided by the revered Marquette Law School poll, believe she needs about 6% crossover from Republicans to win.
Harris’ campaign is in a similar position. Asked which state the campaign feels worse about between Michigan and Wisconsin, two people close to the Harris operation quickly said “Wisconsin.”
“Michigan has a lot more Democrats,” one quipped.
In recent weeks, Harris has had an almost laser-like focus on women in the suburbs, trouting out moderate economic policies while castigating Trump as a threat to democracy in an effort to target the “Nikki Haley voter.” Haley managed to reach double digits in each WOW county during the GOP primary.
To punctuate her point, Harris has traveled across the battleground states with former Congresswoman and anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney, calling Trump a fascist who even other GOP members say shouldn’t be back in the Oval Office.
“I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said last week, sitting side by side with Harris in a suburb outside Detroit.
Two senior Democrats told NOTUS that the pivot to heighten Cheney’s role on the trail has been led by former Obama strategist David Plouffe. One said it’s also the brainchild of Stephanie Cutter, another former Obama aide who has worked with Harris in recent years. A campaign official said that the “whole campaign leadership” supported using Cheney as a surrogate.
Trump repels about 13% of Wisconsin Republicans, according to pollster Charles Franklin, citing numbers from his renowned Marquette poll from September. The university’s last survey ahead of the election is set to be published Wednesday. Nearly half of that 13% said they were undecided, providing Harris — and Sinykin — with a decent pool to try to persuade.
“The Republican Party is not nearly as unified in opposition to abortion as Democrats are unified in favor of abortion,” Franklin said in an interview. “And Republican women are more in favor of abortion rights than Republican men are. And so that is a plum target for Democrats to try to peel off some Republican votes.”
But it’s unclear whether the efforts are actually working in a substantial way. When pushed to choose, Franklin said, a majority of the undecided GOP respondents who don’t like the former president still ultimately chose him. Publicly available data shows Harris’ crossover rates similar to Biden’s in 2020, per a Washington Post analysis.
“It does look like there’s a little bit more Republican crossover to her than there is Democrats crossing to Trump,” Franklin said, noting Harris had around 6% crossover to Trump’s 3%. Still, he said, the numbers show “just how hard it is for partisans, even when they don’t love their candidate, to do that crossover vote.”
The campaign, when asked to respond, pointed to rosier numbers. It cited an ABC/IPSOS poll that found Harris’ support from suburban voters had increased by about 10% in the last month.
The vice president has also received some high-profile local endorsements, including from Republicans state Sen. Robert Cowles, Waukesha Mayor Shawn Reilly and conservative pundit Charlie Sykes.
Still, some nervous Democrats wonder whether the outreach to Republicans is prompted by softer numbers with Democratic-base voters, like people of color, or if the party is just so confident in its base that the Harris campaign feels free to extend beyond traditional fault lines.
“I think it’s a both and,” said one senior Democrat, who described Plouffe as a “belt and suspenders” type of operative. Plouffe’s thinking, they said, is “how do I shore up my maybes and play to the evidence” that white suburban right-leaning women can be moved on abortion.
But there are some close to the campaign who greet the risky strategy with a side-eye, to put it kindly.
“I can’t believe we’re banking our entire existence as a society on white women,” one Democrat close to the vice president said.
One local Wisconsin operative simply said: “She needs the Black community to show up for her. So I would like her, in the battleground states, to be spending some more time with the Black community.”
Harris’ team pushed back on that assessment, noting the litany of Black celebrities and electeds who have been surrogates in the state, as well as investments to turn out the Black community, including placing the campaign’s state headquarters in Milwaukee.
The Harris campaign — propped up by the state party, which Democrats nationally view as perhaps the best party operation in the country — has invested heavily in Wisconsin. The campaign says it’s knocked on more than 1 million doors with more than 20,000 volunteers. It’s opened over 50 offices in Wisconsin alone, and the campaign and its allies have spent nearly $94 million, per a CNN analysis. Future Forward, the secretive Democratic super PAC, is spending $35 million in Wisconsin, including $9 million this week, per a Democrat tracking media buys.
Harris’ visit to Wisconsin on Wednesday is set to be her eighth since she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Her first rally after announcing her candidacy was in Milwaukee County, as was a subsequent 18,000 person rally.
The state is also home to a close race between longtime Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde, a wealthy businessman, that state Democratic officials hope will help turnout. Privately, Democrats in the state believe Baldwin will finish at least two points ahead of Harris. The race at the top of the ticket is tied, most Democrats on the ground believe. And they don’t expect the Marquette poll to have either candidate outside the margin of error.
But they still have hope. For one, Democrats say the GOP has a diminished ground game. The Trump campaign, which has outsourced much of its door-knocking operation, and the state GOP, which has struggled since former Gov. Scott Walker’s defeat in 2018, both lack the kind of infrastructure Democrats say they have, according to party officials.
Ben Wikler, the wunderkind state Democratic Party chair, said the party has only enhanced its grassroots organizing efforts since 2018. And after the COVID-19 pandemic, the party boosted its virtual organizing and added an app for person-to-person connection. Those three-pronged efforts, as well as nearly constant trench warfare campaigns over the last three years, has left the party “battle-tested” as one operative put it.
And then there’s the abortion ban, which caused doctors to flee the state and led to more women running for office.
“There are a bunch of candidates in both the Milwaukee suburbs and in Green Bay and the Madison suburbs who are folks absolutely dedicated to ensuring that there’s not another abortion ban in Wisconsin,” Wikler said. “That translates to energy that will affect the presidential race.”
Sinykin is clear-eyed that in her area, a total focus on just abortions wouldn’t fly — even Liz Cheney is technically still against wide-ranging abortion access. So, she said, her message to women is much broader.
“I wouldn’t say that my focus is on abortion. It’s on women’s reproductive health care access,” she told NOTUS, laying out the cacophony of women’s issues. “I can’t speak for the Democrats in general. I just can speak for myself as a person, as someone who lives in this district and am responsive to the people that I’m talking to at the doors”
In recent days, the Democrats’ messaging on reproductive rights has turned toward convincing men that they are also impacted. But Sinykin said she made that pivot long ago in response to what she was seeing at the doors.
“I always ask, ‘What’s top of mind?’ And literally, for so many men, it’s reproductive health care. They’ll say abortion. They’re either dads or they are husbands of wives who have gone through miscarriages. They do not want politicians making these decisions,” she said.
In Grafton, Seth, who said he’d been a registered Republican for 20 years, said he wasn’t voting for Republicans again. “It’s gone too far,” he said. (In the most Wisconsin fashion, Seth had sold Sinykin’s campaign manager his Subaru and was an ardent Taylor Swift fan, with his own license plate reading “LUVTAY.”)
Those positive interactions with Republicans are still brushing up against concerns from Democrats and pollsters that the party is not picking up another wave of the “shy Trump voter” that threw off polls in both 2016 and 2020. The low-propensity voters are either pollster-averse or don’t publicize their support of the controversial GOP leader. And a fear that they’re being undercounted hangs like a cloud over the state.
Others downplay that phenomenon, saying that since Trump is more popular now than ever, the stigma of supporting him is gone. Sinykin got some evidence of that after she finished door knocking in Grafton to find her friend Carrie Steinberg’s car covered in Trump mailers.
“In 2020, there were people who were sort of sheepish about saying whether they were for Trump or not,” said Bill McCoshen, a GOP lobbyist and strategist in the state. “Not this cycle — people are pretty proud about it and have no problem telling their friends and neighbors who they’re supporting.”
Instead, many Democrats in Wisconsin and all over the country believe it’s the secret Harris voter — who doesn’t want to put signs out or publicize their support for her in more conservative areas — who will help propel the vice president over the finish line.
Still, the Harris campaign and its allies have tried to burrow deep in places that were traditional GOP strongholds, like Kenosha, which sits 40 miles south of Milwaukee and which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.
A source familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking said it’s been “throwing everything at the wall,” in part to target low-propensity voters, including in that area which is known to have low turnout.
“Low-propensity voters are the biggest question mark. They’re the hardest to predict and hardest to know if what we are doing is working,” the source said.
The campaign believes from early voting data that they’re doing better than the Trump campaign with those voters, the source added. More low-propensity registered Democrats have shown up at the ballot box than Republicans in the first week of voting, though that could change. And Trump voters are widely known to show out in high numbers on Election Day.
Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, held an event in Kenosha on Thursday with activated Democrats; a few said they had even phonebanked for Harris more than a dozen times. But the excitement at this block party, which was also attended by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West, was not visible in other parts of the city.
Elijah Dabney, a Black 23-year-old canvasser for the local organization Power to the Polls, went door to door in the working-class area and kept running into people who said their number-one issue was protecting their rights but said they were not voting for Kamala Harris.
“I just say, ‘OK, thank you for your time,’” he said, moving from house to house. Finally, he stopped at a Democrat’s door.
“If you can ask an elected official to focus on one issue, which one would it be? Affordable healthcare, union jobs and pay, affordable housing or protection of rights?” he asked, reading off the prompt. Amelia Muhammad, a Black woman, said it was too hard to choose, initially landing on affordable housing before quickly switching her answer to protecting her own rights.
“Elections are always about the rich or the middle class, and I’m not either — I’m poor,” Muhammad said. “At the same time, the simple issue of women’s rights and you know, things like that. I don’t care for Kamala, but I know that I don’t want my rights taken away.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.