It's a big deal any time the president comes to your state.
But it seems to be an especially big deal.
Now, what's different about this
visit here in this point in 2026?
If you look back in history, more on the Democratic side.
There is a history of some candidates,
not only not sure
if they want to sit next to an unpopular president
in a midterm election in 2010, President Obama came to Madison.
There's a big question of whether Russ Feingold
was going to appear on the stage. In the end, he did.
But all the weeks leading up to it, his campaign
wasn't sure he might be in Africa.
He had some other things going on, and that was really
a political question of does he want to be seen with him?
And he ended up losing that race.
Just two years ago,
President Biden visited
Madison off that disastrous debate performance.
Tammy Baldwin was elsewhere.
She didn't come to Madison to be with the president.
That's about campaign optics.
I mean, we're talking about
sort of the steep odds
that the Republican Party is facing right now.
Obviously, the president right now has some of his lowest
approval ratings throughout his time in office.
But farmers, in particular
have really helped deliver him victories.
I believe in his last election,
he won
the vast, vast majority of sort of farm
dependent counties in the country.
And yet a lot of his policies, tariff policies
in particular, have really been connected
with some of the pain that farmers have been feeling.