Campaigns: Candidates crisscross Wisconsin.
GOP dinner held at Serb Hall; Bill Clinton in state
Election fever officially hit Wisconsin on Friday.
With early voting running well ahead of 2012 and candidates crisscrossing the state in search of support, Serb Hall in Milwaukee became ground zero of the stop Donald Trump movement.
In front of hundreds of Republican Party activists, Gov. Scott Walker gave a formal embrace to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and urged voters in Wisconsin to back the Texan in Tuesday’s GOP presidential primary.
Walker said Cruz can win the party nomination and bring Republicans and the country together to defeat Hillary Clinton in the fall.
“We cannot trust Hillary Clinton on Benghazi, on the email server, on leading this country,” Walker said.
It was the first time Cruz and Walker shared the stage since the governor gave him his endorsement this week. The two men are scheduled to campaign together Sunday as Republican regulars try to derail Trump.
“I gotta say, your governor is a rock star,” Cruz said at the fish fry.
For the Democrats, former President Bill Clinton stopped in Appleton to ignite enthusiasm for his wife, the former U.S. secretary of state, while U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, made two stops in front of large crowds in Sheboygan and Green Bay.
Sanders, who leads Clinton in polls in Wisconsin, was going all out to win.
“We are working very hard in your beautiful state, and we hope to do well,” Sanders told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters and editors. He doubled down on his criticism of Clinton, accusing her of receiving some $4.5 million from people connected with the fossil fuel industry.
“Secretary Clinton has refused to say what I have said, that she will not take money from the fossil fuel industry,” Sanders said. “The Clinton people, I have to say, are good spinners.”
He bristled at Clinton’s comments slamming him over his recent statements about abortion rights. Clinton and Sanders criticized GOP front-runner Trump over his comments that any woman who received an illegal abortion should be punished. But Clinton then went after Sanders for saying
Trump’s comments were a distraction from a discussion about big issues facing America.
“I think it is an enormously serious issue,” Sanders said.
Later before a crowd of more than 1,500 at Sheboygan South High School, Sanders raised many of the same criticisms of Clinton, emphasizing their differences, especially Clinton’s financial ties to Wall Street. He called on Clinton to release transcripts of private speeches that have netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sanders and Clinton are due to appear Saturday night at the Democratic Party Founders Day Dinner in Milwaukee. Republicans who gathered at Serb Hall appeared enthused as they heard from GOP presidential candidates Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Trump sent as a surrogate former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
“We are going to have a contested convention,” former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson said as he introduced Kasich.
Kasich spoke of the anxiety that many American voters feel and told the audience, “I understand people who are Donald Trump voters.”
He presented himself as a common-sense, compassionate Republican who has not forgotten his working-class roots. “The Republican Party has always been my vehicle, not my master,” he said.
The crowd was mostly silent as Palin spoke of trade, immigration and foreign policy and claimed that the GOP establishment doesn’t know what to do about the “Trump train.”
Cruz told the crowd that all across Wisconsin and America, “People are waking up and help is on the way.”
“Nominating Donald Trump elects Hillary Clinton,” Cruz said, urging voters in the state and around the country to unite around his candidacy.
“Republicans are coming together and uniting behind this campaign,” he said.
With in-person absentee voting wrapping up Friday in Wisconsin, 198,300 absentee ballots had been issued and 172,200 had been returned, according to election officials at the Government Accountability Board.
That was running well ahead of the last presidential primary in 2012, when only 94,900 absentee ballots were issued out of a total of 1.1 million votes cast.
Last week, state elections officials predicted that nearly 1.8 million Wisconsinites — or 40% of eligible voters — would cast a ballot, which would amount to the largest turnout since 1980 for a spring election.
Adding to the work for local election clerks Friday, a state server failure cut clerks off for most of the morning from the state’s voter registration system.
As part of those problems, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation system for issuing driver’s licenses and IDs was affected for several hours before being fixed, spokeswoman Patricia Mayers said. Those forms of identification are needed to vote under the state’s photo ID law.
Because of the outage, DMV service centers that offer Saturday hours will extend them by three hours.
Service centers in Milwaukee, Appleton, Eau Claire, Madison, La Crosse and Wausau, normally open from 8:30 a.m. to noon, will be open from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Madison Odana will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Patrick Marley and Mary Spicuzza of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.