Wisconsin Democrats see jolt of energy after Biden-Harris change-up

When Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in the Milwaukee area on Tuesday, her rally set an attendance record for the 2024 Democratic presidential campaign.

She’d been in the race for less than 48 hours, following President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement Sunday that he was exiting the race, but so many people RSVPed to what had previously been planned as a support stop for Biden that organizers had to change venues at the last minute, according to a campaign official.

Now, video from that rally undergirds Harris’ first official campaign ad and Wisconsin Democrats saying they’re seeing a fresh jolt of energy behind the brand new bid with just over three months until the finish line.

“We’ve seen a surge of grassroots enthusiasm across the state, getting calls and texts from excited volunteers asking what more they can do to help elect Kamala Harris,” the Harris campaign’s Wisconsin spokesperson, Timothy White, said in a text.

About 3,500 people attended the Tuesday rally in West Allis at which Harris stressed the significance of swing-state Wisconsin in getting her elected. That was the largest rally in the 2024 presidential race, including any event held by Biden, according to White.

Jaliah Jefferson, a Democratic party organizer based in Milwaukee, said her team has seen an uptick in on-the-ground interest, including fresh faces arriving at local field offices for the first time all cycle.

“After all the craziness, we’ve had a myriad of folks walking into the office unprompted, wanting yard signs and signing up to volunteer and wanting to know how they can get involved,” she said. “We had folks that maybe previously said they wanted to wait until a little bit closer to the election to volunteer actually giving us a call back.”

That enthusiasm also appears to have translated into donor dollars. A spokesperson for the Wisconsin Democratic Party said the party has raised about $400,000 online since Sunday.

Harris’ national campaign raised $126 million between Sunday and Wednesday, according to her campaign, including $81 million in the first 24 hours after Biden’s announcement.

Joe Zepecki, a Milwaukee-based Democratic political consultant, said Harris’ entry into the race marked a “total vibe shift” in the campaign.

“The shift in enthusiasm is palpable,” said Zepecki, who worked on the 2012 campaign for former President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden in Wisconsin. “You can literally feel it in the air.”

Zepecki said Democrats had previously been supporting Biden as an incumbent — but “through some doubts and concern about the future of the country, and with real trepidation about whether or not he would be able to meet the moment and deny Donald Trump the Oval Office for a second time.”

“So I just think, psychologically, this shift to (Harris) is really freeing, and people feel some of that weight off,” he said.

Matt Fisher, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Republican Party, said the GOP is also coming off a fresh wave of enthusiasm after the Republican National Convention wrapped up in Milwaukee last week.

“We’ve certainly experienced real engagement and real positivity upticks in terms of interest and people getting involved,” Fisher said. “I think we left the convention with the party mobilized (and) energized in ways we haven’t seen in quite some time.”

The campaign of former President Donald Trump also experienced a wave of fundraising activity last month on the back of his criminal convictions in New York court on hush-money charges and Biden’s poor debate performance.

More recently, his campaign raised money after a failed assassination attempt on the former president before the RNC. Now the Wisconsin GOP is also looking to leverage Harris’ late arrival into the race to argue that her path to the ticket was improper, and that she is a new face on the same Democratic agenda that Biden had been promoting.

“Whatever honeymoon of enthusiasm has popped up on the Democratic side will soon run into this stone cold brick wall of political reality,” Fisher said. “You can swap the label off a jar; it’s still the same spoiled product.”