Tanzina: It's The Takeaway. I'm Tanzina Vega and it's great to have you with us on day three of election week. Votes are still being counted across the country and Americans are waiting for a final decision on who the next president of the United States will be. Today, we're looking at three battleground states and we start in Wisconsin where the votes have already been tallied and the state has turned blue for 2020, granting its 10 electoral votes to Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.

Back in 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin by a narrow margin over Hillary Clinton but this year, following the news of Biden's apparent win, President Trump's campaign immediately said it would call for a recount. Meanwhile, Wisconsin is also at an all-time high for coronavirus cases in the state with 5,000 new cases coming in on Wednesday alone. I've got two Wisconsin reporters on the line to talk about this. Rob Mentzer is a rural communities reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio and LaToya Dennis is a news reporter at WUWM in Milwaukee. Thanks for joining us.

Rob: Thanks.

LaToya: Thanks for having me.

Tanzina: LaToya, we're hearing that the Trump campaign wants a recount. Where does that stand?

LaToya: Basically, the Trump campaign has said that they will ask for a recount. That cannot be formally done until all of the ballots have been actually submitted. They've been submitted, they've been counted, but there's another process that they have to go through in which they're turned over to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and that needs to happen by November 17th. Once that happens, the Trump campaign can officially ask for a recount and then that recount will have to be done within 13 days of that formal ask.

Tanzina: LaToya, just to give everyone a sense of where we are, the Associated Press and other news outlets have called Wisconsin for Joe Biden, but are there any other ballots still being counted right now?

LaToya: There are about 300 missing ballots and I say missing just because there was a clerk who got sick in a very small town on Election Day and went home. They haven't been able to find that clerk in order to get those ballots and so those ballots are still outstanding, but it's only about 300, which really wouldn't impact this either way.

Tanzina: That's what I was going to ask, Rob, I want to bring you in here because we heard former Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, say that it was unlikely that Trump would be able to close the gap even with a recount. What are your thoughts on that? Was that a surprise from Scott Walker who's been a supporter of the president?

Rob: Yes, Scott Walker and some other Republicans have made the same observation. The fact is that there is recent history of recounts in Wisconsin. There was a recount following the 2016 election initiated by the Jill Stein campaign, the third-party campaign. Look, there can be technical problems with vote counting and a recount. It's not necessarily bad to do a recount, there can changes. In 2016, for example, I think it was in the neighborhood of 1,500 votes. There's just no precedent for a change of ballots when there's a margin over 20,000 votes. I think that's why Republicans have said realistically a recount is not likely to change Wisconsin's outcome.

Tanzina: Let's talk a little bit about the messaging here from the Biden campaign specifically, Rob, how or did Joe Biden connect with voters in rural parts of the state outside of the urban centers?

Rob: There are a couple of big stories out of Wisconsin, but one of them is that President Trump's rural base really, really showed up on Tuesday and in voting. The counties that Trump won in 2016 in rural areas, he won again by the same large margins, 20 points, 30 points, and improved those margins in a lot of places.

There were efforts by the Biden campaign to target rural areas and to reach out to rural voters and using different sorts of targeting and certainly messaging about Wisconsin's dairy farms and other issues of interest in rural areas and they just didn't gain much ground. Now, in the end, they gained a lot of ground in Dane County and Madison, Wisconsin. They held very strong margins in Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, but in the rural areas, they did not gain ground and that's why they ended up being such a surprisingly close finish in Wisconsin.

Tanzina: We've seen that playing out in a lot of states, actually, how close this race was. LaToya, tell us a little bit about that, about Biden strategy in Milwaukee and was that a-- It seems like based on what Rob was saying, that was really the thing that helped push Biden over the edge, really.

LaToya: Definitely, Milwaukee and Dane County which includes Madison, Wisconsin. I have to say that Biden did much better here than Hillary Clinton did four years ago. He absolutely had to, he had to turn out the vote in Milwaukee and he had to turn out the vote in the Madison area. In doing that, he was able to gain enough votes to actually push him over the edge here because he needed these democratic strongholds.

There was some concern because some of the problem in 2016 was that Hillary Clinton didn't visit here after the primary, Biden did come, but it was only once in the last month of the election, which was the Friday before Election Day. There was some concern about his ground game here and whether enough was done, but they got the vote.

Tanzina: Rob, we know that exit polls, they're not written in stone and they're largely imperfect, but we are looking at them right now. Were there any themes that stood out to you, Rob, in terms of the exit polling so far? Did Trump win the white woman suburban vote, for example?

Rob: Sure. You see in exit polls, I remember being surprised by the percent of people in exit polls who were saying that the economy was the most important to them and relatively lower numbers saying that the coronavirus was a top priority and that may be an indicator of how the Election Day vote itself, people who voted on the day of in-person, may have been more likely to be Trump voters.

I think that's probably a fairly coherent story. Overall, there was a big polling miss in Wisconsin prior to the election. The polling averages showed Biden with a very comfortable lead and Biden won Wisconsin, but it was not a very comfortable lead. I think that there are a lot of people who didn't want to answer polls, don't want to talk to pollsters, they say are low-trust people. I do think that there's a problem there and that if we're going to look at these things, pollsters are going to have to find ways to reach these people.

Tanzina: That's been a big theme also, that's come up as we analyze what's happened with this election, the reliability or lack thereof on polling. LaToya, I do want to talk also about the fact that Wisconsin has a lot of different types of reputations, but one of them is that it's one of the worst places for Black Americans to live in this country on multiple social indicators. I'm wondering whether or not Black voters came out in favor of Joe Biden and if so, did he have a message for Black voters in the state?

LaToya: Black voters definitely turned out for Joe Biden this time around and you see that in the fact that he, so handedly won the city of Milwaukee, which is a majority Black, definitely majority-minority city. I'm not sure that he had a very strong message for Black voters. It's been the same when it comes to the Democratic line in general. I don't know that there was anything that he did in talking to voters here that particularly stood out to them and them saying, "Yes, we believe he's the guy for us." It seemed more so as though it was a vote against Trump than for Biden.

Tanzina: Now, that is interesting because as we mentioned, Black residents of the state of Wisconsin, particularly Black men, have the experiences there in terms of high rates of incarceration, poverty, ability to get a mortgage, housing discrimination. It is really one of the worst states to be Black in this country. Are Black voters expecting more from Joe Biden? Even as you say, they voted for him without many promises, but what is their expectation?

LaToya: I think they're hopeful. They're hopeful that he'll look at police reform and that their questions and their concerns and that what they've just been asking for, for so long, will be addressed.

Tanzina: Rob, I'm wondering, of course, we've got, while this is happening in the shadow of a coronavirus pandemic which has been very politicized including in the state of Wisconsin, which has gone back and forth on whether or not there should be a mask mandate or not, are you hearing from voters or did you hear from voters that that had anything to do with how they voted?

Rob: The state of the pandemic in Wisconsin is just the water that we swim in. In recent weeks, it is the worst it has been, hospitalizations are at their all-time highs and it's been bad for enough weeks that deaths are really high there. Where I live in Central Wisconsin, everyone knows people who are affected by COVID-19. There's no way to have an election without that being just in people's minds. On the other hand, on Election Day and this week, there's not a lot of evidence that people really change their voting behavior, change their partisan identity, as a response to the pandemic.

This result, it looks a lot like 2016's results or even like 2018's gubernatorial election in Wisconsin, where there's these incredibly tight margins and it's rural areas versus cities and suburbs. COVID-19 does not seem to have upended that same electoral dynamic that we saw in these previous elections.

Tanzina: It's very surprising, Rob. I think so many people are scratching their heads that a public health crisis has become a political issue, quite frankly. It's very surprising that in a state where there are so many people who have been affected. I keep having flashbacks to when New York City was the center of it. It's a terrifying experience and it's one that has forever changed me and I'm sure a lot of other New Yorkers. One would hope that people understand that it's not political, that it's science, but we can only hope for the best.

LaToya, before we wrap here, how are people in Milwaukee reacting to the news that Joe Biden has potentially won the state?

LaToya: It's interesting. Before you ask me a question about Joe Biden's promises for Black people, what was his message to Black people? I can't say that I've been checking social media this morning and some of the people I've been checking our Black community activists. Basically, they're saying, "Democrats, we saved you here once again. Put some money behind where your talk is now." They're saying, "We came out for you. Don't forget about us now." Outside of that, there's excitement. Of course, everyone knows that there will be a recount, but there's excitement and people are ready to move ahead.

Tanzina: Rob Mentzer is a rural communities reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio and LaToya Dennis is a news reporter with WUWM in Milwaukee. Thanks again to you both and we'll be sure to check back.

Rob and LaToya: Thank you.

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