rich9 How Door Knocking Is Going in a Wisconsin Swing County

Nancy Kidd, a coordinator with the Democratic Party of Door County in northeast Wisconsin, was willing to brave a door-to-door canvass for Democratic votes during a soaking rain in October.

“I don’t melt,” she said, gathering her things at the party’s office in downtown Sturgeon Bay.

Map locates Door County in the northeast corner of the state of Wisconsin.

mich.

wisconsin

Sister

Bay

Sevastopol

Sturgeon Bay

Door County

minn.

Lake

Michigan

Milwaukee

iowa

50 miles

By The New York Times

But knocking on the doors of Wisconsin residents during a Packers game on a Sunday afternoon?

She hesitated. “It’s not a good idea,” Ms. Kidd said.

Off she went anyway. Maybe it was worth interrupting potentially persuadable voters engrossed in football when there were a mere 22 days left before Election Day. After all, she lives in a county that brims with both strategic and symbolic importance.

Door County is known in the Midwest as a scenic, artsy summer enclave with thriving tourism and agriculture industries — a respite, mostly, from chain stores, traffic lights and the annoying buzz of the outside world. It has not been able to avoid the frenzy of the presidential election, a reflection of how fierce the contest has become even in Wisconsin’s more remote corners.

The county, a peninsula on Lake Michigan in the northeast corner of the state, is a rare bellwether: It has voted for every presidential winner since 1996. And in the national battleground of Wisconsin, it is a swing county that could be won by a tiny margin: In 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald J. Trump there by only 292 votes.

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