Bill Clinton stumps for Kamala Harris in Oshkosh

Just five days before the Nov. 5 presidential election, the Winnebago County Democratic Party’s cornstalk-decorated office in downtown Oshkosh received a high-profile visitor: Bill Clinton.

The former president was in the Fox Valley stumping for Vice President Kamala Harris Thursday. When 2024’s Democratic presidential candidate asked him to help her campaign, he said he made a specific request.

“Don’t send me to all those heavily televised, big rallies,” Clinton said he told Harris. “If you want me to help, send me where I’m most comfortable. Send me to the small towns, send me to the middle-sized towns.”

Harris and former President Donald Trump have been campaigning hard in Wisconsin, with both candidates holding rallies in the state Wednesday and both planning to return for events on Friday.

Campaign surrogates like Clinton have been fanning out across the state working to turn out the vote.

In Oshkosh, Clinton spoke to about 50 people gathered in the party office. He talked about presidential leadership styles, using advice he gave his own White House staffers during his 1993-2001 Presidency as an example.

“I said to them: If you ever come in this room and tell me something ’cause you think that’s what I want to hear, I might as well clear out and let a computer make the decisions,” Clinton said.

“You hire people to tell you they respectfully disagree,” he said.

He said Trump “only wants to hire people that say, ‘You, master, whatever you say.’” He argued Trump has “done everything he could to destroy every guardrail that exists in American democracy.”

Clinton then used an analogy to further illustrate his argument.

“There’s a lot of us that are sports nuts. Why?” he asked rhetorically.

“Because you value courage, bravery and effectiveness in a game where you think it’s not rigged,” he answered.

“Yet Donald Trump is running for president, saying, ‘You’re better than everyone else, and we should not live under the same set of rules, let me rig it for you,’” he continued.

He said he’s known both Harris and Trump for several years.

“She is smart enough to be president, she is strong enough to be president, and she learns with remarkable speed,” he said of Harris. “And she listens to people that don’t agree with her.”

Clinton also praised several of Harris’ policy proposals, like down payment assistance for home-buyers and her proposed extension of Biden-era insulin caps to patients with private health insurance.

The importance of his speech’s location in swing Winnebago County was not lost on Clinton.

“It may all come down to you, don’t feel any pressure,” he said to laughs.

Oshkosh is part of Wisconsin’s competitive ‘BOW’ counties

Oshkosh is part of Wisconsin’s BOW counties — Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago. Lakeside Oshkosh is home to over 15,000 university students. Further north, the Fox River flows through Appleton and several smaller towns. It enters Lake Michigan at Green Bay, where paper mills continue to be major employers.

This geographic and demographic mix makes the region contested turf for both presidential campaigns. Donald Trump held a rally in Green Bay the day before Clinton’s visit, while Kamala Harris will speak in Appleton tomorrow.

Clinton won all three the last time he ran, in 1996. But since 2012, the towns have become symbols of Wisconsin’s changing political landscape. In that year, Mitt Romney won the region by only a sliver — 696 votes.

In 2016, Donald Trump made huge gains in the area, winning by a whopping 32,037 votes. The BOW counties’ rightward shift was bigger than Trump’s statewide victory margin — meaning that, without it, he wouldn’t have flipped Wisconsin.

Joe Biden shrunk the BOW margin to 24,814 four years later. The Fox Cities’ swing towards Biden — over 7,000 votes — contributed one third of his total victory margin in Wisconsin.

This year, the region could again be a decider in the presidential election nationwide.

After leaving Oshkosh Thursday, Clinton headed to Milwaukee for an event at the Institute for the Preservation of African-American Music and Arts later in the day.