Obama rallies with Walz in Wisconsin: ‘America is ready to turn the page’

MADISON, Wis. - Barack Obama appeared at a rally Tuesday with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, marking the former president’s first event with a member of his party’s ticket since Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign in July.

Both Obama and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, implored a crowd of thousands in Wisconsin’s capital on the first day of early voting in the battleground state to cast their ballots early.

“If you haven’t voted yet, I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now! Go vote. Go do it,” Obama told the audience at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Wisconsin is considered a must-win swing state for either party’s likeliest respective paths to electoral victory. In 2016, former president Donald Trump unexpectedly won Wisconsin - for years considered part of the Democrats’ Midwestern “blue wall” - by less than a percentage point. In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump in Wisconsin by a similar margin, with fewer than 21,000 votes separating the two.

By contrast, Obama won Wisconsin in 2008 by nearly 14 percentage points and again in 2012 by about seven percentage points.

Both Obama and Walz attacked Trump for his personal insults and bizarre behavior on the campaign trail, as well as for a staged photo op Trump conducted over the weekend at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

“There’s something not just nuts but cruel about a billionaire using people’s livelihood as a political prop. His agenda lets big corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very workers that he was cosplaying as,” Walz said. He added: “That restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt. Fake orders for fake customers.”

As he has at other events, Obama warned that a second Trump term would be worse than the first. Obama also dinged Trump for inheriting “75 straight months of job growth” from him, then trying to take credit for that economy, as well as for threatening to overturn the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature legislative health-care achievement.

“Wisconsin, we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails,” Obama said. “America is ready to turn the page. We are ready for a better story. Wisconsin, we are ready for President Kamala Harris.”

Harris and Trump remain locked in a tight race in Wisconsin. In a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, 50 percent of likely voters in the state said they support Harris, while 47 percent said they support Trump. The margin of error for the poll was plus-or-minus 4.6 percentage points.

“Our team is running like everything is on the line - because everything is on the line,” Walz said Tuesday.

Obama endorsed Harris in July, a few days after Biden announced his decision to step aside from his reelection bid, and said he and former first lady Michelle Obama would “do everything we can” to elect Harris.

After speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, Barack Obama has since been hitting the campaign trail to stump for Harris and Walz, but he had until Tuesday appeared at events by himself. His visit to Madison was part of a five-state tour of battleground states over the last week that included rallies in Tucson and North Las Vegas. Later Tuesday night, Obama will rally in Detroit, and on Thursday he makes his first appearance alongside Harris at a rally in Georgia.

The former president’s speech in Madison included an attempt at reaching out to Republican and independent voters who may still be on the fence about Harris - and an attempt at setting expectations.

“No president, no vice president, no senator, no governor is going to solve every problem. … Sometimes I think we expect so much, and then we’re disappointed when everything’s not immediately solved and we start thinking politics doesn’t matter,” Obama said. “But the thing is, what politics can do, what elections can do, they can make your life a little better, your neighbors life a little better, or they can make it a little worse and that little bit of better or a little bit of worse that adds up.”

Tuesday’s rally also featured Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), who is trying to fend off Republican challenger Eric Hovde for her Senate seat.

“It’s clear that Governor Walz and President Obama know that the pathway to the presidency and control of the United States Senate runs directly through the Midwest, which means it runs directly through Wisconsin, because we are the battleground state,” she said.

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Wang reported from Washington.