Trump appeals to voters in Wisconsin GOP stronghold ahead of debate with Harris

MOSINEE, Wis. -- With just days to go before his first — and likely only — debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump leaned into his familiar grievances about everything from his indictments and efforts to keep him off the ballot as he campaigned in one of the most deeply Republican swaths of battleground Wisconsin.

“The Harris-Biden DOJ is trying to throw me in jail — they want me in jail — for the crime of exposing their corruption,” Trump claimed at an outdoor rally at Central Wisconsin Airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bullet-proof glass following his July assassination attempt.

There's no evidence that either Biden or Harris have had any influence over decisions by the Justice Department or local jurisdictions to indict Trump.

The former president was speaking a day after appearing in court for an appeal of a decision that found him liable for sexual abuse, returning attention to his many indictments and criminal conviction. After his appearance, he delivered a lengthy statement to news cameras in which he brought up a string of past allegations of other acts of sexual misconduct — at times in graphic language — potentially reminding voters of incidents that were little-known or forgotten.

Hours later, a Manhattan judge announced that the sentencing in his hush money case had been postponed until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve. The sentencing had previously been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

At the rally, Trump again criticized Harris in dark and ominous language, claiming that if the woman he calls “Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, we will be living in a full-blown Banana Republic ruled by anarchy.”

He also railed against the Biden administration's border policies, calling the Democrats' approach “suicidal.”

Both Harris and Trump have been frequent visitors to Wisconsin this year, a state where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point. Several polls of Wisconsin voters conducted after President Joe Biden withdrew showed Harris and Trump in a close race.

The crowd in Mosinee was greeted by a big screen video of Trump urging attendees to check their voter registration and make a plan for voting.

“If we swamp them, they can’t cheat,” Trump said, continuing to raise unfounded concerns about voter fraud, which is extremely rare.

Democrats consider Wisconsin to be one of the must-win “blue wall” states. Biden, who was in Wisconsin on Thursday, won the state in 2020 by just under 21,000 votes. Trump carried it by a slightly larger margin, nearly 23,000 votes, in 2016.

As Trump was campaigning, Harris took a short break from debate prep on Saturday to stop at Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where she bought a number of seasoning mixes. One customer saw the Democratic nominee and began openly weeping as Harris hugged her and said, “We’re going to be fine. We’re all in this together.”

Harris said she was honored to have endorsements from two major Republicans: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman.

“People are exhausted, about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans,” she said, adding that her main message at the debate would be that the country wants to be united.

“It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness,” she said. “It’s time to bring our country together, to chart a new way forward.”

Trump held his rally in the central Wisconsin city of Mosinee, with a population of about 4,500 people. It is within Wisconsin's mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state. Trump carried the county where Mosinee is located by 18 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020.

Among those in the crowd was Dale Osuldsen, who was celebrating his 68th birthday Saturday at his first ever Trump rally. He hopes a second Trump administration will take on “cancel culture” and bring the country back to its “foundational past.

“We’ve had past administrations say they want to fundamentally change America,” Osulden said. “Fundamentally changing America is a bad thing.”

Democrats have relied on massive turnout in the state's two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, to counter Republican strength in rural areas like Mosinee and the Milwaukee suburbs. Trump must win the votes in places like Mosinee to have any chance of cutting into the Democrats' advantage in urban areas.

Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee in July and Trump has made four previous stops to the state, most recently just last week in the western Wisconsin city of La Crosse.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, last month filled the same Milwaukee arena where Republicans held their national convention for a rally that coincided with the Democratic National Convention just 90 miles away in Chicago. Walz returned Monday to Milwaukee, where he spoke at a Labor Day rally organized by unions.

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Bauer reported from Madison. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Josh Boak in Pittsburgh contributed to this report from New York.