Even the election eve rallies by populist insurgents are relatively subdued in Wisconsin.
Less than 12 hours before polls opened in the Wisconsin primary, dueling rallies in downtown Milwaukee between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were toned-down, mellow affairs.
Although the insurgent candidates have packed stadiums and arenas, both struggled to fill rooms the night before the state’s crucial primary election.
Trump spoke to a half-empty room at the Milwaukee theater despite taking the precaution to curtain off the balcony of the 4,000-capacity venue. Despite being the underdog in Wisconsin’s primary, Trump has tried to pull out all the stops in an attempt to try to finally knock off Texas senator Ted Cruz and become the party’s presumptive nominee.
For the first time in the campaign, Trump’s wife, Melania, spoke. In halting English from prepared remarks, the Slovenian-American former model praised her husband for having a “great heart” and assured attendees “no matter who you are, man or woman, he treats everyone equal”.
In his speech, the Republican frontrunner went after his usual targets such as trade deals, the Obama administration, “lyin’ Ted Cruz” and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He also vented about the fact that because of a lack of organization, Trump ended up with precisely as many delegates from Louisiana’s 5 March primary as Cruz, despite receiving more votes. He spoke about how party rules worked against him, “I don’t care about rules, folks.”
As Trump spoke in downtown Milwaukee, Cruz held an event just minutes away in the crucial suburb of Waukesha. There, Charlie Sykes, the most prominent conservative talk radio host in the state, warmed up the crowd by reading insulting tweets that Trump had written about him. The Republican frontrunner had not just gone to war with the state’s most prominent conservative media figures but also had repeatedly bashed Scott Walker, the state’s governor and a former presidential candidate. Despite being a divisive figure among the electorate as a whole, Walker is deeply popular among Badger state Republicans and Trump has repeatedly bashed him on the campaign trail.
A Cruz win in Wisconsin would help the Texas senator close the gap in delegates and build momentum for him before the next primary in Trump’s home state of New York. In contrast, a Trump win would probably be a death blow to Cruz’s chances of edging the real estate mogul in the battle for the 1,237 delegates needed to earn the GOP’s nomination.
Sanders had been due to appear at the much larger BMO Harris Bradley center, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, but in an unusual move for his campaign was forced to downsize to a large room in the neighbouring Wisconsin convention center.
Both venues are just yards from the simultaneous Trump event, and there was a strong security presence outside following clashes between the two groups of supporters in Chicago in March.
But whether heeding calls to stay away from each other’s rallies, or simply avoiding the bitter cold on the unseasonably snowy April day, there was little sign of mingling ahead of the dueling events.
Instead, Sanders stuck faithfully to a script that has served him well through nearly a year of campaigning, focusing on the “corrupt campaign finance system” and the problem of income inequality.
His only concession to the local crowd was a series of attacks on Walker, who he blasted for “cowardly and un-American” voter ID rules, which Democrats claim are a form of voter suppression.
“If you are afraid of free and fair and open elections, get out of politics and get another job,” Sanders told the cheering crowd.
The Vermont senator has campaigned hard in Wisconsin, taking a lead over Hillary Clinton in recent polling, and some aides speculated that a similar low turnout in Madison on Sunday night may simply reflect the fact that he has already appeared before packed crowds there.
Nevertheless, in order to build on momentum from recent wins and close the sizable delegate gap with Clinton, the senator needs to win by a large margin on Tuesday and inspire a big turnout by his supporters.
His campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, wrote in an email to supporters: “As far as we’ve come in this campaign and in Wisconsin, it would feel terrible to come up just short on Tuesday night.”
“After winning six of our last seven contests, the outcome there will go a long way toward determining who has the momentum heading into New York’s primary,” he added.
In a sign that both camps in the Democratic primary now see the Empire state as the really important battleground, they put aside recent bickering and agreed to stage an additional television debate in Brooklyn on 11 April.
The former secretary of state is already largely focused on New York, leaving husband Bill Clinton to carry the flame in Wisconsin, where he told an even smaller rally earlier in Milwaukee that Democrats needed to focus on what change was achievable rather than be seduced by unrealistic Sanders promises such as tuition-fee public colleges.
Outside the Milwaukee standoff between Trump and Sanders later on Monday there was little sign of the fierce ideological divide between the two insurgencies on the right and left. A shout of “fuck Bernie!” came up from one side of the street. “Fuck Trump!” came back the swift reply, before both supporters passed off into the cold Milwaukee night and the more gripping college basketball final.
