JANESVILLE, Wis. — James Sands was loading his pickup truck with flooring planks on Monday outside Home Depot in Janesville, across the street from a Holiday Inn where Vice President Mike Pence had paid a campaign visit hours earlier.
WAUWATOSA, Wis. — Andrea Ruffier is one of the undecided voters who could help determine the winner in Wisconsin, a state both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden see as a key to victory.
OSHKOSH, Wis. — With the Democratic National Convention set to kick off, President Trump offered a dose of counterprogramming on Monday, campaigning the oldfashioned way despite the coronavirus pandemic. After making stops in Minnesota earlier in the day, the president traveled to the
battleground state of Wisconsin, where at least 700 supporters gathered for an event at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh and cheered wildly as Air Force One landed.
The president made three campaign rally-like appearances at airports in Minnesota and Wisconsin in an attempt to counterprogram the first night of the Democratic National Convention. President Trump questioned former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s mental capabilities and mocked Senator Kamala Harris of California as an extreme liberal in three campaign rally-like appearances on Monday as Democrats began their four-day national political convention nominally in Milwaukee but largely online.
In Wisconsin, residents woke up to a state of confusion on Thursday after the conservative majority on the State Supreme Court sided with the Republican majority in the Legislature on Wednesday night, overturning a statewide stay-at-home order by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. In Michigan, hundreds of protesters, many of them armed, turned out at the State Capitol in a drenching rainstorm. The state closed the building in advance and canceled the legislative session, rather than risk a repeat of an April protest in which angry protesters carrying long guns crowded inside.
A crowd of a few thousand gathered at Wisconsin’s State Capitol on Friday, the latest demonstration by conservative activists against statewide stay-at-home orders meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The protesters, bearing Trump campaign attire, Tea Party regalia and American flags, condemned Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his extension of “Safer at Home,” a declaration requiring Wisconsinites to practice social distancing and to close nonessential businesses through May 26.
The latest high-profile prosecution of a police officer for a fatal shooting ended in an acquittal on Wednesday, as jurors cleared a Milwaukee officer of wrongdoing in the death of a 23-year-old man, Sylville K. Smith. The shooting in August touched off two days of protests and violence on this city’s north side. The verdict — the second acquittal in a week of a police officer facing criminal charges for a fatal shooting — was announced in a tense, emotional courtroom after less than 10 hours of deliberations.
Outside a polling place in the suburbs of Detroit, a shouting match between two women escalated into a parking-lot scuffle, ending with one of them
shoved to the pavement. At a community center in southern Florida, a middle-aged woman handing out Republican pamphlets reached frantically for her pepper spray as a man supporting Hillary Clinton charged at her.
Like many of his neighbors, Dominic A. Lebourgeois was in disbelief on Sunday at the level of violence that descended on his Sherman Park neighborhood the previous evening. “I’ve lived here for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said Mr. Lebourgeois, 53, a self-employed handyman. Hours after a police officer shot and killed a fleeing armed man, angry crowds confronted the police and then went on a rampage, destroying property, setting fires and throwing rocks and other missiles at officers.
Violent protests broke out in Milwaukee after a young black man was shot and killed by police. A group of angry residents — fed up with what they see as increasing police brutality against blacks in the city and across the country — set fire to a gas station, auto parts store, beauty supply store and a bank. In the aftermath, most residents in the city’s predominantly black, middle class Sherman Park neighborhood decried the violence and destruction, preferring instead to gather for prayer, but at the same time, confirmed a widespread feeling that poverty and joblessness is replacing the area’s former economic stability, and that racism plays a factor.