| By Big Radio News Staff |
The Harris-Walz Presidential campaign hits small-town Wisconsin with just a month left before the Presidential election.
Gwen Walz, the spouse of Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz, stopped in downtown Beloit Wednesday.
Walz stressed a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign priority: to win over small-town voters in Wisconsin. The state’s considered one of the most hotly contested political battlegrounds in the U.S.
“Right here, in Beloit, you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders,” Walz told the Beloit crowd of about 100 gathered at Bushel and Peck’s, a specialty grocery market in the heart of the city’s downtown.
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Wisconsin remains a near-tossup, with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leading Harris 48 percent to 46 percent.
It’s the first Democratic presidential campaign stop to come to the working-class city of Beloit, pop. 36,000, since current President Joe Biden and then-Presidential candidate and former President Barack Obama stopped off on the trail in 2008.
Mark Spreitzer, a Democratic Wisconsin state Senator from Beloit, told Big Radio he thinks Harris-Walz’s campaign stop-off in Beloit on what’s now the lead up to the election is significant for southern Wisconsin and for small-town voters.
“It signifies that we matter. And it signifies that this is going to be a really close election, and that every vote is going to count,” Spreitzer said.
Gwen Walz’s visit comes on the heels of a swing through Wisconsin by Trump last week, during which the former president also sought to woo the state’s small-town demographic. Trump stopped off at Juneau, a small county-seat town of 2,700 people in largely rural Dodge County.
Walz stops in Wisconsin as her spouse and Vice President Kamala Harris trade blows this week with Trump at high-profile appearances that both campaigns plan in Michigan. That’s another key battleground state in the Presidential election, where crucial political fault-lines lay along middle-class concerns over the specter of job loss and a potential economic recession in 2025.
On Wednesday, Gwen Walz hit mainly on familiar Harris-Walz talking points, including middle-class tax cuts and reproductive choice freedom for women. She also appealed to the mainly middle-aged crowd at the Beloit stop by touting a new Harris-Walz plan — a proposal for Medicare coverage for long-term care at home.
“They (Harris-Walz) will make long-term care more accessible and more affordable,” Walz said during her 15-minute-long speech. “Because so many folks are struggling to balance their careers with caring for the ones they love.”
She said the Democratic presidential long-term care proposal would be a building block for an “opportunity economy” that “gives middle class families a chance, and a chance to get ahead.”
At one point, Walz echoed her husband’s folksy political style by singing the official, high school football fight song of her hometown, Mankato, Minnesota. It was after she learned that a woman standing at the front of the crowd grew up in Mankato.
Walz also appeared Wednesday in Madison.
Big Radio reporter-anchor Neil Johnson gathered information for this report.
