MADISON – Bernie Sanders will meet voters in Kenosha and western Wisconsin next week as part of a national tour targeting battleground congressional districts won by Republicans in 2024 to boost Democratic turnout in contests ahead.
The Vermont senator who won the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary in 2016 will land in Kenosha on Friday evening for a rally at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and then head to Altoona High School on Saturday morning for a second rally.
The events come a month ahead of Wisconsin’s first major election since President Donald Trump swept the state and was returned to the White House for a second term.
On April 1, Wisconsin voters will decide control of the state’s highest court and whether to give the Democratic state superintendent another term overseeing the state’s education agency. The spring election will be watched nationally as a poll of how voters are feeling about Trump’s first few months in office.
In a statement, Sanders’ campaign said he is holding the events to push back against “the takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country’s move toward authoritarianism” and pressure Republican U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden to “vote against any cuts to Medicaid, housing, nutrition, education and other basic needs.”
Van Orden blasted Sanders’ visit to his district.
“A U.S. Senator that managed to become a multimillionaire on a government salary and has never worked an honest day in his life has no business lecturing our hard working Wisconsinites,” Van Orden said in a statement.
“It is the time of year to spread manure, and if it is one thing Bernie has, it is a bunch of that. I encourage him to stop by a farm or two and help out as we are still trying to lower input costs that spiked under Biden.”
Steil said Sanders’ “open borders and reckless spending policies have driven up costs for families and made our communities less safe.””I will continue working to deliver meaningful results for Wisconsin families who are struggling from the policies that Senator Sanders pushed over the last four years,” he said in a statement.
Van Orden defeated Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke 51% to 49% in the closest U.S. House race in November. Steil defeated his challenger, former state Revenue Secretary Peter Barca, by 10 percentage points.
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Sanders is a popular figure in Wisconsin among Democrats who have often favored him more than the party’s presidential nominees. In 2016, he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary and during the 2020 presidential contest, he outpaced his Democratic rivals — including Joe Biden — by double digits in popularity, according to a February 2020 poll by the Marquette University Law School.
“Today, the oligarchs and the billionaire class are getting richer and richer and have more and more power. Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and most of our people are struggling to pay for health care, childcare, and housing,” Sanders said. “This country belongs to all of us, not just the few. We must fight back.”
A spokeswoman for Sanders said he would not be campaigning for liberal Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford at next week’s events but would be discussing the Supreme Court race against conservative Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, a former Republican Attorney General.
Molly Beck can be reached at molly.beck@jrn.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bernie Sanders headed to Wisconsin to campaign in Republican districts
