Poetry of season warms election eve in Wisconsin

WAUSAU, WIS. » Something told the wild geese it was time to go.

The poet Rachel Field, whose poem set out that immutable rule of the seasons, was right, as the poets we read as children many decades ago often were. For there, up in the leaden skies, was the telltale “V” of birds in fl ight. Her premonition (“something whispered ‘ frost’”) was redeemed, too; here in swing- state Wisconsin, the frost on the “sagging orchards” that had “steamed with amber spice” sparkled in the early morning sun. And a day later, true to her prediction, “though the fi elds lay golden, something whispered, ‘ snow,’” — and soon the rural roads shone in a confectioners’sugar white.

The change in season came with a rush here politically as well.

The last days of the 2020 campaign have been a blur — of candidate visits, of poll results, of stuff ed mailboxes, of advertisements. The two campaigns have spent $ 120.1 million in advertising since the party conventions, with a $ 33.7 million advantage to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Four years ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — perhaps responding to favorable poll soundings, perhaps overconfi dent, perhaps just in oversight — did not campaign in Wisconsin. Trump came here six times. The visits that Clinton didn’t make have taken on a folklore all their own, with Trump taking on something of the aura of the “ambitious guest,” the title of one of the most beloved “twicetold tales” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Biden, determined not to make Wisconsin a twice- told tale, has set down here several times.

There are very few undecided voters here — the Elections Research

Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison puts the fi gure at 3 percentage points — but many uncertainties:

Will the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the subsequent civic unrest in Kenosha add urgency to the Biden campaign or fortify the voters who respond to Trump’s law- and- order entreaties? What will be the eff ect of early inperson voting, which began Oct. 20 and which, in one of the ironies of the season, has produced long lines — though one of the rationales was to minimize the dangers of spreading the virus in crowded polling places. What was the yield of the eff orts of the advocacy group Opportunity Wisconsin, which set out to convert Trump voters to the Biden camp?

And this: Will Black voters who did not rally to the Clinton campaign, especially in Milwaukee, fl ood the polls for Biden? That may be the decisive factor in a state that Trump won by 22,748 votes — about half the number of the people who did not vote in the state’s largest city.

Beyond Milwaukee, much of the focus is on the three WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — that sit outside Milwaukee and have a history of Republican affi liation but are populated by the college- educated suburban women who are part of Biden’s base. Before Trump visited there last week — at the height of the virus spike, with new records of infections being set daily — Biden released a statement pointing out the death of 47 Wisconsin virus victims in a single horrifi c day, arguing that “the sad truth is that it didn’t have to be this bad.” Trump hours later told supporters in Waukesha, which he won by 59% in 2016, that the country was “rounding the corner” on the virus.

The two men will continue to debate that, and much else.

Here, the contours of the battle have been laid in recent years.

The Democrats are struggling to hang onto the remnants of the New Deal coalition, frayed as manufacturing jobs drifted away. The Republicans have supported initiatives such as the FoxConn project, which Trump and Gov. Walker prominently backed to bring high- tech jobs to southwestern Wisconsin. Though it won a contract to build virus- related respirators, FoxConn hasn’t remotely redeemed the Trump- Walker hopes, though it stands today as a symbol of Republican eff orts to woo the non- college- educated workers who have been displaced in the modern economy.

Though it was 18 degrees in white- crusted Eau Claire the other day, politics in Wisconsin remain white- hot. Both candidates touched down in the state in the last few days of the campaign, for, as Field, who died in 1945, wrote, presciently, “Something told the wild geese/ It was time to fl y,/ Summer sun was on their wings,/ Winter in their cry.”