Understand how foreign policy could affect the vote in battleground states. Read more from this series and follow FP’s election news and analysis.
In June 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump visited Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, around 30 miles south of Milwaukee. Flanked by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, the president broke ground on a site designated for a $10 billion factory campus for Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant. “America is open for business more than it has ever been,” Trump said, adding that the factory would be the “eighth wonder of the world.”
The facility, which would produce liquid crystal displays—or LCDs—for television screens, promised to create as many as 13,000 jobs for the area. It would receive $3 billion in tax subsidies from the state, plus local incentives that put the total package at nearly $4.8 billion—the biggest corporate subsidy in Wisconsin’s history and the largest U.S. public subsidy offered to a foreign company to date.
The deal was emblematic of Trump’s trade and economic policy. He has campaigned on tearing up trade deals and pushing U.S. and foreign companies to build factories in the United States. But Foxconn’s plans never quite materialized. When U.S. President Joe Biden took office, he laid a new path to bring manufacturing back to southeastern Wisconsin. Both administrations have sought to curb China’s economic rise through protectionist policies, marking a profound change from the free trade ideology that long dominated Washington. Now Trump and his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have descended on the state to make the case for their approach.
Racine County, where Mount Pleasant is located, is often called an electoral bellwether: The candidate who won the county has carried Wisconsin in every presidential election since 1980 with two exceptions, 1988 and 2020, the latter when 51 percent of voters in Racine County went for Trump but Biden won the state. This year, the key to Wisconsin seems to be a winning plan for the economy, which the state’s voters see as the most important issue. Wisconsin has the second-highest concentration of manufacturing employment in the country, and manufacturing has become a centerpiece of both candidates’ economic policy.
Trump is doubling down on his America First trade policies, proposing a significant escalation of tariffs across the board, especially against China, and easing regulations to encourage domestic manufacturing. Harris’s trade policies are less clear. She has criticized Trump’s sweeping tariffs as a “sales tax” on U.S. households, but she is expected to continue the targeted tariffs that Biden embraced. Harris is also likely to carry on Biden’s commitment to industrial policy: Last month, she outlined a $100 billion tax credit plan for key manufacturing sectors.
Voters in southeastern Wisconsin have seen the effects of these policy visions firsthand; now, they will have the chance to weigh in on which party got it right.
The Foxconn deal at first seemed like a masterstroke for Republicans. The company was regarded as a titan—known for manufacturing iPhones—and many people in the region were eager to hear Trump’s pledge to restore U.S. industrial might. But cracks soon emerged. In 2019, a Foxconn executive told Reuters that it was reconsidering its plans for the site. The company recommitted after pressure from Trump, but it missed its hiring targets, and years after the initial construction, reports found that much of the campus often went unused. (Foxconn has disputed these claims.)
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A worker is seen behind a robotic arm on a factory floor. - A worker waits as Trump tours a Foxconn facility at the Wisconn Valley Science and Technology Park in Mount Pleasant on June 28, 2018. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
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A disco-ball-shaped dome sits on the horizon with grass, fences, and a road in front of it. - The Foxconn campus in Mount Pleasant on Aug. 16, 2023. Taylor Glascock for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Walker lost his 2018 reelection campaign to Democrat Tony Evers, who sought to renegotiate Foxconn’s incentive package once in office. Meanwhile, homes had been bulldozed, and Mount Pleasant was left with a substantial debt burden. Some of the deal’s skeptics felt vindicated. “It was all about politics,” former state Rep. Gordon Hintz, a Democrat, told the Washington Post last year. “You had a swing state President Trump needed to win. … For Foxconn, it was always about evading tariffs.”
Last year, there was another surge of investment in the region. The U.S. Commerce Department designated southeastern Wisconsin as one of 31 inaugural Tech Hubs under the CHIPS and Science Act. Microsoft bought land from Foxconn in Mount Pleasant and broke ground on an artificial intelligence data center. In May, Biden visited the nearby city of Racine when Microsoft announced an expanded $3.3 billion investment estimated to create as many as 2,000 permanent jobs. It was a promise made in the shadow of a bigger, broken one—but Biden vowed to keep it, and voters likely expect Harris to carry the torch.
Kelly Gallaher, the chair of the Racine County Democratic Party, is a longtime citizen activist who was an early critic of the Foxconn deal—as well as its champion, Mount Pleasant Village President David DeGroot, now a Republican candidate for the Wisconsin State Assembly. As new investment comes to the region and politicians court Wisconsin voters, she thinks that Foxconn’s ghost is still in the room. “There’s a lot of other issues at stake, but in Wisconsin, I’m never going to rule out that Foxconn isn’t also on people’s minds,” she said. “We’re constantly reminded of how it didn’t work out.”
Robert Kraig, the executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, a progressive advocacy group, said Foxconn has become a “dirty word” to the group’s most active members. Kraig has found that people react unfavorably when other major projects—such as the $545 million in public funds approved by the Evers administration for renovations at the Milwaukee Brewers baseball stadium—are likened to the Foxconn deal. The disappointment with Foxconn seeded doubt about any candidate’s promises of economic development in the region, he said.
Others in the state are skeptical that the Foxconn deal still shapes voter sentiment. Brian Schimming, the chair of Wisconsin’s Republican Party and a former Walker administration official, said he thinks that most people understand the good intentions behind the deal. “We get very little flack about it,” he said, noting that though Walker and Trump are no longer in office, local politicians involved in the deal were reelected.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about his Investing in America agenda at Gateway Technical College in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, on May 8, during a visit to highlight investment by Microsoft in nearby Racine. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s projects in southeastern Wisconsin have been galvanizing—but both Democrats and Republicans are taking credit for them. Biden’s May visit was meant to showcase his administration’s successful approach to industrial policy. Microsoft President Brad Smith attributed the expanded investment in part to the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. Evers called it a “watershed moment for Wisconsin.”
Republican politicians, meanwhile, see Evers and Biden as undeserving of the praise and seeking only to curry favor among voters. Rep. Bryan Steil, who succeeded former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan in his Wisconsin seat, said in May that Biden “is looking for any opportunity to come [to Wisconsin], and he’s more than willing to come and take credit for things that he was not involved in and didn’t do.”
Foxconn supporters, many of whom made great efforts to distance themselves from the fallout of the deal, are also quick to claim victory for the Microsoft investment. They argue that without Foxconn and its corresponding infrastructure investments in the region, there would be no Microsoft deal. When he announced his State Assembly campaign this year, DeGroot highlighted his track record of attracting “numerous businesses like Microsoft,” notably omitting Foxconn.
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“Everyone I’ve talked to in Kenosha County and Racine County is fired up about the Microsoft thing,” Schimming said. He suggested that the deal could expand further, though he did not provide specific details; Microsoft declined to comment. Although hopes are high, many locals and officials in Wisconsin acknowledge that the Microsoft deal bears some resemblance to the initial promises made by Foxconn. A major high-tech company again aims to build in the swing state ahead of an important election, promising big money and a lot of jobs.
But Democrats emphasize that this deal is different in key ways. The investment is more reasonably sized and comes from a domestic company with a better reputation, they say. Whereas Foxconn’s LCDs soon became obsolete in a fast-moving market, many experts see AI as a key industry for the future. And Foxconn had a history of overpromising elsewhere in the world, but Microsoft doesn’t have that baggage.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler added that the Microsoft deal is already more tangible than its predecessor. “The shovels are actually in the ground—and not just in the symbolic way,” he said. “The jobs are already here. You talk to the folks who build things in Wisconsin, they will say that there’s a list of projects that are looking for workers.”
Guests listen as Biden speaks during an event at Gateway Technical College’s iMET Center in Sturtevant on May 8.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Such job creation could come with other costs. The Foxconn deal drew criticism over its environmental record, but AI data centers have their own problems, starting with energy consumption. In May, electricity provider We Energies asked state utility regulators for permission to bill customers for $2 billion in natural gas investments due to increased energy demand, a move that environmentalists say will push the state’s climate goals out of reach. Some locals are also skeptical of Microsoft’s promises—wary that there are no legal requirements for the company to meet its original projections.
On Nov. 5, the presidential race will be the biggest draw for voters in southeastern Wisconsin, but there is plenty at stake down the ballot. A lively race is underway in the state’s 1st Congressional District, where Mount Pleasant is located, between incumbent Republican Bryan Steil and Democrat Peter Barca, who most recently served as Wisconsin’s revenue secretary. Barca received criticism within his party for effectively greenlighting the Foxconn deal as State Assembly minority leader, but he has a bigger legislative legacy than Foxconn alone. Although Steil has the lead in polls, Wikler—the state Democratic Party chair—called it the “best opportunity we’ve had to flip that district in a very long time.”
Harris and Trump have each come to Wisconsin in recent weeks. On Oct. 1, Trump visited a manufacturing plant in Waunakee, where he rallied around tariffs and flirted once again with the logic of incentivizing foreign companies with public funds to build factories in the United States. A few days later, at a rally in Ripon, which is considered the birthplace of the Republican Party, Harris spoke at length about the constitutional oath, casting herself as someone who upholds its promise and Trump as someone who violates it.
In Mount Pleasant, it remains to be seen which promises voters believe. “Microsoft is a big help, and we appreciate that, but we are very much still living with the failure of Foxconn, and we’re never going to get those 13,000 jobs,” Gallaher said. “And that is a shame. We would do ourselves a favor not to forget it too quickly.”