Trump To Visit Kenosha On Eve Of Election Day

Wisconsin’s swing state status will be on full display Monday — the last full day of campaigning before Election Day.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to stop in Kenosha, marking his third visit to Wisconsin in just the past week, and his 10th this year. It comes just days after former Vice President Joe Biden made his own campaign stop in Wisconsin.

Both presidential candidates are making last-minute pushes for votes in a state where nearly 1.9 million votes had already been cast as of Sunday, according to a running tally from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. That total includes more than 1.2 million absentee ballots that were returned by mail and about 637,000 in-person absentee votes, commonly known as early votes.

To put that in perspective, the 1.9 million absentee ballots cast represents 63 percent of the overall turnout in the 2016 presidential election. The more than 1.2 million mail-in votes, meanwhile, is 270,000 more than all of the mail-in votes cast in Wisconsin’s April election, which set the previous record.

Trump and Biden both visited Wisconsin on Friday, with the president campaigning in Green Bay and his Democratic rival in Milwaukee. Like other campaign stops the two have held around the country this year, they highlighted starkly different approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s Friday event featured a large crowd packed tightly into grandstands and a designated standing area at Austen Straubel International Airport. The visit comes as the Green Bay area, and Wisconsin more broadly, continues to experience an ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases.

Biden, meanwhile, held an invitation-only event at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Airport with about 50 people.

Trump’s Monday event is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Kenosha Regional Airport.

Polling has consistently shown Biden leading Trump in Wisconsin according to an average of polls compiled by the website RealClear Politics. Those include a poll released last week by Marquette University showing Biden leading Trump by 5 percent with 7 percent of voters either undecided or unwilling to say how they’d vote.

Trump famously trailed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin polling in the runup to the 2016 election only to win the state by fewer than 23,000 votes.

While voters will head to the polls Tuesday, it’s unclear how soon the results of the race will be known.

Wisconsin law prevents poll workers from counting absentee ballots before Election Day. Given the huge number of absentee ballots, elections officials have cautioned that it could be Wednesday morning before all the ballots are counted.