House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former Attorney General Eric Holder said in a video with Democrats during a virtual meeting that Wisconsin is a battleground state and will be a major factor in whether nominee Joe Biden wins the presidency in November.
“No pressure, it’s all riding on Wisconsin,” Pelosi said. “No pressure.”
“The road to the presidency runs through Wisconsin,” said Holder, the attorney general under former President Barack Obama, in the same video. “The fate of the United States, the fate of the western world, is on your shoulders,” he said, according to The Associated Press.
Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, alleged in the same meeting that Wisconsin has “some of the most gerrymandered maps” in the United States. “And that’s what this here election is” riding on, he suggested.
Evers said that Republicans need to be denied six seats needed in the Wisconsin Legislature to have a veto-proof super majority before redistricting efforts are carried out in 2021, according to the AP.
“I know Joe is going to win in November, but it’s also about maps,” Evers said.
“We need to make sure that Democrats have a seat at the table,” Holder also said. “This is an existential presidential election, I get that. But so are the races happening down the ballot in Wisconsin as well, and across the country.”
Trump won Wisconsin by about 22,000 votes in 2016. Trump became the first Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984 to win the state. Since then, Wisconsin has voted in favor of Democrats.
Former first lady Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, attempted to explain why she lost Wisconsin.
“For example, some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest,” she wrote. “And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple of thousand votes here and there.”
Clinton acknowledged in the book: “If there’s one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin. Polls showed us comfortably ahead, right up until the end. They also looked good for the Democrat running for Senate, Russ Feingold.” Feingold was defeated by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
Clinton said that more than 130 staff members were sent to the state, while $3 million was spent on TV ads.
“If our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger, of course we would have invested even more,” she added. “I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there.”
