In her effort to maximize her support among Republican voters who may be disenchanted with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris has enlisted former Rep. Liz Cheney as a campaign surrogate in Wisconsin.
Harris and Cheney will appear together at a campaign stop in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party. But if Cheney’s appearance with Harris is meant to bolster the vice president’s standing with Republicans, she should probably find another place to do it.
In many ways, Ripon, which is in Fond du Lac County, is a microcosm of the political realignment that is currently taking place between the two parties. It is precisely the sort of county that has rejected the brand of Republican politics that Cheney has championed during her time on the political scene.
A longtime Republican stronghold, Fond du Lac County and the city of Ripon are part of Wisconsin’s 6th Congressional District, which has been represented by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) since 2015. In presidential elections, Fond du Lac County has not supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964.
On the surface, there may not have been much evolution in the partisanship of Ripon over the years, but the region’s political evolution is more about the changes within the Republican Party than it is about its willingness to vote for Democrats.
It began in 2014, when Grothman, then a state senator, announced he would launch a primary challenge against incumbent Tom Petri, who was known as among the most moderate members of Congress and had represented the district for decades. Grothman’s entrance into the race as a hard-line conservative prompted Petri to retire, rather than run for another term. And in this safe Republican district, that all but assured Grothman would represent the seat in Congress.
During the same period, at the presidential level, Trump has pushed Fond du Lac County even more to the right than it had been for more than a decade. In 2008, John McCain carried the county with 53% of the vote, Mitt Romney garnered 56% in 2012, but Trump, in his previous two campaigns, carried the county with 59% and 62%, a nearly 10-point improvement in a short 12-year span. And that was all taking place at the same time that Petri, the region’s former congressman, was openly opposing Trump, including during his 2016 campaign.
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These are not the marks of a region that is brimming with disaffected Republicans who have soured on Trump and are eager to vote for Harris. A far more credible conclusion would be that Trump may have yet to reach his ceiling in the region as he promises to bring back manufacturing to states such as Wisconsin and deport the tidal wave of illegal immigrants that the Biden-Harris administration has let in.
If Cheney wants to find Republican votes for Harris, she is better off visiting her childhood home of Fairfax County, Virginia, where the defense contractors that backed her political career have now fully embraced Democrats eager to support the military-industrial complex. In Ripon, Wisconsin, she is more likely to galvanize voters against Harris than anything.