MILWAUKEE—Donald Trump’s pitch to Wisconsin voters is more or less an elaborate neg. “I went through your numbers,” he said at a Saturday rally in Racine, “and you’re not doing that well. You’re right in the middle of the pack. You’re not doing anything outstanding, believe me.”
Trump has been doing several events per day in Wisconsin since late last week, a heavy schedule by his standards. He even spent Monday night in a Milwaukee hotel, a rarity for the figure who usually likes to fly back to his own bed in New York each night. He wants badly to win the state. But when he came to Wisconsin several days after Sen. Ted Cruz had hunkered down in the battleground, he found himself facing a sudden polling deficit to the Texas senator.
The Trump campaign’s comeback strategy has been to supercharge his attacks on Cruz as not just an errand boy for elite interests, but as elite interests personified. Cruz doesn’t just support deals that help China, but he “sides with China.” The Trans-Pacific Partnership—“which Ted Cruz totally supports, which Kasich totally supports”—isn’t just a bad trade deal, but one “far worse” than NAFTA, which “took the guts out of our country.” Cruz isn’t just your average Wall Street receptacle, but “Goldman Sachs’ favorite senator.”
The surrogate doing much of this work for Trump in Wisconsin is Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, who’s opened for Trump with snarling speeches of his own throughout Wisconsin. For a policy adviser, Miller—until recently an aide to anti-immigration Sen. Jeff Sessions—has a fantastic talent for giving icy, brutal, pit bullish political speeches inveighing against Trump’s rivals. His bromides are a pure distillation of white working-class resentment against the elites, and his function at Trump rallies is to get all the important information out there before Trump takes the stage and rants haphazardly about whatever’s on his mind.
“We are 24 hours away from delivering a message so loud that it shakes every conference table, in the office of every high-powered lobbyist who’s been betraying the working people of this country for 40 years,” Miller began at a rally in the downtown Milwaukee Theatre on Monday night, about one block away from a Bernie Sanders rally. “You have a chance, with your vote tomorrow … to cancel out 40 years of corruption and failure and betrayal that has destroyed the lives of millions of American people.”
In his speeches at the Milwaukee and Racine events, Miller described Cruz as “pro-amnesty, pro-Obamatrade,” a “Wall Street extremist,” and a “radical globalist” who “supports China over America.” Cruz, by Miller’s account, is the purveyor of Senate amendments to quintuple the number of guest workers to “compete against you and your children and your grandchildren and your brothers and sisters for jobs” and “double the number of Muslim migrants coming into this country.” Cruz “was happy,” Miller added, “to replicate here in the United States the same conditions we have in Germany and Belgium and across Europe … that is the real legacy of Ted Cruz.” Because of Cruz, Miller said, resettled refugees were taking jobs away from Wisconsin workers.
And where Cruz hasn’t been giving jobs to immigrants, he has been sending them overseas. “No man has pushed harder to push your jobs overseas than Ted Cruz,” Miller said in Racine, and given Cruz’s supposed support for TPP, he “will sign the death warrant for Wisconsin’s economy” and “end forever a manufacturing middle class in America.”
“Do you want your jobs?”
“Yes!” the crowd shouted back.
“Do you want Ted Cruz?”
“No!”
The Trump campaign’s efforts to position Cruz as TPP’s best friend in the Senate aren’t entirely based on the truth. Cruz has said he will vote against TPP, and he voted against Trade Promotion Authority, the legislation to “fast-track” trade agreements through Congress. But this doesn’t mean that Cruz’s history on these issues has been as crystal clear as Cruz says it has. Cruz initially did support passage of TPA. Not passively, either—he co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with Rep. Paul Ryan last April urging passage of TPA and saying nice things about TPP. He voted for TPA the first time it came up in the Senate and voted against it the second time. He’s on record now as being against TPP. It’s reasonable to presume that his opposition to TPP is much like Hillary Clinton’s: a stance that may have had less to do with the deal’s merits than with the prevailing political winds of the moment. And Trump’s campaigning is milking that suspicion for all it’s worth.
The Wisconsin campaign has been one in which Trump and Cruz appear to be speaking to completely different audiences. Cruz’s base is in the better-educated and very ideologically conservative suburbs of Milwaukee, like Waukesha and Ozaukee counties, the two wealthiest counties in the state. Trump does far better in the northern part of the state and in any low-income regions. Unfortunately for Trump, Cruz’s base is where more of the votes are, and that’s why polling suggests he’ll be able to pull off a win Tuesday night. But the deeper we get into the primary schedule, the further apart Cruz’s and Trump’s bases seem to grow, and the higher the animosity between them. This does not augur well for the party’s plan to unify behind the eventual victor.
