REEDSBURG, Wis. — Dairy farmer Randy Roecker is at a breaking point — and he blames it partly on President Joe Biden, so is planning to vote for Donald Trump for a third time this November.
“Farmers are hurting like you wouldn’t believe, and I myself, I am to the point of throwing up my hands and saying I’m done,” said Roecker, who cited inflation as straining his business for the last two years.
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But while he's planning to vote on booting the Democratic president, Roecker's also planning to vote to keep his Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin.
“I support her all the way. I mean, no question,” Roecker said. “And everybody I know — the farmers — everybody says that she’s great for Wisconsin agriculture.”
Baldwin is bracing for a tough re-election race against likely Republican nominee Eric Hovde, a multimillionaire and bank owner, in the evenly divided Wisconsin, one of a handful of states that will determine which party controls the Senate. But she has the advantage of incumbency, and has often outperformed other statewide Democrats in rural areas, even as the party as a whole has lost significant ground in those regions in recent decades.
Baldwin is already pouring more effort into rural campaigning this year as she prepares for the challenge of sharing the ballot with one of the forces driving GOP margins in rural areas sky-high. Unlike her first two races for the Senate, in 2012 and 2018, Donald Trump will be running this November, too.
Late last month, Baldwin sat around a kitchen table with Roecker and others from the Farmer Angel Network for a 90-minute discussion about farmers’ mental health. The event was part of the senator’s “Dairyland” tour through 19 counties, none of them among Wisconsin’s five most populated counties.
“I think that there has been a real opportunity for me to be a champion for issues that I might not hear about if I only was going to the population centers of the state,” Baldwin told reporters at a stop at the New Glarus Brewing Co.
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