How Virus Politics Divided a Conservative Town in
Wisconsin’s North
A
lightly populated area in the critical swing state of Wisconsin serves as a microcosm
for the way coronavirus politics is worsening partisan schisms across America.
Kirk
Bangstad, a Democratic candidate for Wisconsin state assembly, has made
little effort to win over voters who aren’t already appalled by Republicans’
handling of the coronavirus.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New
York Times
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Oct. 29, 2020
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MINOCQUA, Wis. — When coronavirus cases
began to spike in Wisconsin this fall, Rob Swearingen kept his restaurant open
and let customers and employees decide whether they wanted to wear masks.
Mr. Swearingen, a Republican seeking his fifth term in the Wisconsin State Assembly, didn’t require
other employees at his restaurant in Rhinelander to be tested after a waitress
and a bartender contracted the virus because, he said, nobody from the local
health department suggested it was necessary.
Kirk Bangstad, Mr. Swearingen’s
Democratic opponent, took the opposite approach at the brewpub he owns in
Minocqua, 30 miles away. He has served customers only outdoors, and when a teenage
waiter became infected after attending a party, Mr. Bangstad shut down for a
long weekend and required all employees to get tested.
Mr. Bangstad has
since turned his entire campaign into a referendum on how Republicans have
handled the coronavirus. On Facebook, he has served as a town shamer, posting
lists of restaurants and stores in Wisconsin’s Northwoods that have
disregarded state limits on seating capacity and don’t require masks.
With just days until the election, the
contest for Mr. Swearingen’s Assembly seat in this lightly populated area in
the Northwoods of Wisconsin serves as a microcosm for the way coronavirus
politics are playing out across America. Mr. Bangstad is unlikely to prevail in
a Republican-heavy district that covers parts of four counties stretching south from Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula,
but his effort to make the campaign a referendum on the virus echoes that of
former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has sought to make President
Trump’s handling of the pandemic the
central issue in the presidential contest.
Mr. Bangstad, a 43-year-old
Harvard-educated former professional opera singer, moved back to Wisconsin six years
ago from Manhattan, where he was a technology consultant and served as the
policy director for Anthony
Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign. Like Mr. Biden, he has eschewed
traditional campaigning. He has moved his entire effort online, including in
email and on the Facebook page of his brewpub, the Minocqua
Brewing Company.
But unlike the former vice president,
Mr. Bangstad has made little effort to win over voters who aren’t already
appalled by Republicans’ handling of the coronavirus. Many of them, he said,
are being duped by false or misleading statements by the president and the
conservative news media.
“A lot of them, I
feel, haven’t been equipped with the tools of media literacy or critical
thinking skills to be able to discern if they’re being told something that
doesn’t quite jell or is not true,” he said during an interview this week at
his shuttered restaurant overlooking Lake Minocqua.
Wisconsin’s 2020
campaigns are concluding while the state is in the midst of one
of the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. On Tuesday, as the state set records
for the most new cases and deaths, Gov. Tony Evers said Wisconsin faces
an “urgent crisis” and urged citizens to stay home.
Oneida County, which
includes Minocqua and Rhinelander, where Mr. Swearingen operates the
Al-Gen Dinner Club and
has lived his entire life, has a virus rate nearly twice the state average over
the past two weeks.
Scott Haskins, whose wife, Pamela, is a
waitress at the Al-Gen, is among the county’s recent fatalities. Ms. Haskins
contracted the virus after working a restaurant shift in mid-September and was
hospitalized in early October. Mr. Haskins, 63, checked into the hospital with
the virus four days after his wife, according to his daughter, Kelly Schulz.
Two days later, Mr. Haskins suffered a stroke and died.
“The day after my dad passed, Governor
Evers put in the 25 percent capacity limit, and they weren’t abiding by it,”
Ms. Schulz said of the Al-Gen. “People were posting pictures of themselves
there on Facebook and it was pretty busy for a Friday night.”
Republicans who control the state
legislature this month successfully sued Mr. Evers to overturn the capacity limits on bars and restaurants he ordered. In
Oneida County, local sheriffs and town police departments weren’t enforcing
them anyway.
Before winning
election to the Assembly, Mr. Swearingen, 57, was the president of the Tavern
League of Wisconsin, the powerful lobbying group for the state’s bars. He
fought the state’s efforts to ban smoking indoors at businesses, lift the
drinking age to 21 from 18 and lower the legal blood alcohol limit to drive.
He said his restaurant is not responsible
for employees who caught the coronavirus. No one from the local health
department ever called with questions, he said, and no contact tracers
contacted the restaurant. Mr. Swearingen said he has not had a test himself.
“There’s been no connection to the
restaurant to all these cases,” he said during an interview in the dining room
of the Al-Gen, which is bedecked with taxidermied heads of deer and black
bears. “These people are part-time, coming from different jobs and different
things.”
Of all the places where Democrats
barely bothered to compete in 2016, Wisconsin’s Northwoods may have been the
most neglected. Not only did Hillary Clinton skip
Wisconsin altogether,
county Democrats in this region didn’t even have yard signs to distribute, not
that there was much demand for them.
Mrs. Clinton was a “polarizing’’
candidate, said Matt Michalsen, a high school social studies teacher who ran
against Mr. Swearingen in 2016. “Personally, did I support her? No.”
Four years later, Mr. Bangstad has few
expectations that he will win. He sees his campaign largely as an effort to
increase Democratic turnout for Mr. Biden and cut into Mr. Trump’s margins by
focusing attention on the impact of the coronavirus on northern Wisconsin.
Mr. Bangstad wrapped the side of his
restaurant in a giant Biden-Harris sign that attracted the ire of the Oneida
County Board,
which sent a letter informing him that it exceeded the allowable size of 32
square feet. After Mr. Bangstad used the fracas to raise money and get more
attention for himself in the local press, the
board backed down.
At the same time, the
Biden campaign and local Democrats have put far more resources into northern
Wisconsin than they did four years ago. There are twice as many organizers
focused on the area than in 2016. And though the Clinton campaign swore off
yard signs as an unnecessary annoyance, the state party has made efforts to get
them in every yard that would take one.
“We distributed approximately 50 Hillary yard
signs four years ago, and we’re at more than 1,200 so far for Joe,” said Jane
Nicholson, the party chairwoman in Vilas County, just north of Oneida County.
There’s some evidence that Mr. Biden is
making up ground. A poll taken for Mr. Bangstad’s campaign this month found Mr.
Trump leading Mr. Biden in the district by five percentage points — a far cry
from his 25-point margin of victory in 2016. The same survey found Mr.
Swearingen ahead by 12 points, less than half his 26-point margin over Mr. Michalsen four years ago.
Mr. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by less
than 23,000 votes statewide. His gap in Mr. Swearingen’s district alone was
14,000 votes.
“If we’re in the low 40s there, that
means that we have blocked Trump’s path to pulling in the votes that he’d need
to cancel out other areas of the state,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the
Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
The Assembly race has engendered hurt
feelings and worsened political divisions in Minocqua, a town of about 4,000
full-time residents. Down the street from the Minocqua Brewing Company, Tracy
Lin Grigus, a Trump supporter who owns the
Shade Tree bookstore,
shook her head at Mr. Bangstad’s attempts to shame local businesses.
“On his Facebook,
he’s calling all of us up here idiots, like a mini Joe Biden,’’ said Ms.
Grigus, who doesn’t wear a mask in her store and doesn’t ask her customers to
do so. “It’s insulting to people that share the space with him and other
business owners. He’s like the only one in this town and surrounding towns that
went this far.”
Across Oneida Street,
the main drag through Minocqua’s small downtown, Casie Oldenhoff, an assistant
manager at the Monkey Business T-shirt shop, where signs instruct customers to
wear a mask, said Mr. Trump was to blame for the current wave of the pandemic.
“He’s just not taking care of us,” Ms.
Oldenhoff said. “He doesn’t care about what’s going on with the pandemic.”
Mr. Swearingen said he had little doubt
that Mr. Trump would do just as well in the Northwoods on Tuesday as he did in
2016. Enthusiasm for the president is higher, he said, as evidenced by the
regular boat and car parades adorned with Trump flags and
carrying young men concerned foremost about a Biden administration taking away
their guns.
But he said he had never been involved in
a campaign as ugly as his own this year.
“We’ve been targeted by my opponent as
a den of Covid and all sorts of rumors in Facebook,’’ he said. “I’ve never
quite had to fight against Facebook in an election. He went after a couple of
other bars in the area, and one of the bar owners was livid that that bar was
on the list. It’s like, ‘Well, who are these people? It’s the mask police or
something.’”
For Mr. Bangstad, shaming Mr.
Swearingen and other Republicans who have fought against public health guidelines
is exactly the point.
“If you’re a citizen in this state, and
there’s one branch of government that’s trying to keep people healthy from
Covid, and you have the legislative branch and the judicial branch trying to
stymie him every single time he does it, it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever
seen,” he said. “As a Wisconsinite, I’m just completely ashamed.”
Andy Mills and Luke Vander Ploeg contributed
reporting.