Republicans spend big to bury Trump’s specter in this red state

President Donald Trump’s presence is becoming more and more of a liability in the state of Wisconsin, despite state voters choosing to send Trump to the White House in the last election. The president’s plummeting polls may have something to do with a Republican group having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ads in Milwaukee and Green Bay to salvage the campaign of Republican state attorney general candidate Eric Toney.

“The Republican Attorney General Association will purchase $500,000 in ads in the coming months, targeting Attorney General Josh Kaul and what the organization says has been a weak-on-crime approach to his office over his last two terms,” reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Wisconsin is one of four states with Democratic attorneys general where Trump won the 2024 vote, and the Sentinel reports RAGA and other GOP groups have chosen Wisconsin as one of five states for $11 million in ad buys — including Georgia, Kansas, Michigan and Minnesota — because of their status as battleground states.

But Republicans are finding Wisconsin’s “battleground” status more and more slippery, primarily because of the president’s sinking popularity and tanking poll numbers. After dominating state courts and election, Republican candidates are up against the headwinds left in Trump’s massive wake. In many Wisconsin races, Republicans have gone from domination to not even playing the game, with one GOP strategist warning the party has simply “given up.”

This is a massive turn from 2017, when Democrats did not bother to field a candidate for that year's Wisconsin Supreme Court race after a string of harsh losses, including one that cemented a healthy conservative majority on the state's highest court. Now, Republicans acknowledge that Trump has angered enough voters to incite a massive backlash at the polls.

This week, the Democratic Attorney General Association remained confident that the Democratic AG incumbent would survive the monetary onslaught.

“RAGA can try all they want, but they know voters are fed up with the corruption and extremism that Republican AGs and candidates have been defending. The wind is at our back," said Lottie Ash, the DAGA political director in an emailed statement. "With this election serving as a referendum on Trump, RAGA can’t distract from Democratic AGs being relentless fighters for their constituents, standing up against this [Trump] administration and bad actors. We’ll hold Republican AGs and candidates accountable in states across the country.”

The reversal in Wisconsin's political landscape reflects a broader national pattern: Trump's toxicity is spreading to down-ballot races.

In 2024, Republicans benefited from Trump's coattails, but 18 months into his second term, that dynamic has completely inverted. Trump's unpopularity—driven by his unpopular Iran war, skyrocketing inflation, and constant corruption scandals—is now dragging GOP candidates underwater. Wisconsin, which Trump won by a narrow margin, has become a microcosm of Republican vulnerability.