In Rural Wisconsin, Race Is an Undercurrent of the Presidential Election

The signs are everywhere that Sauk County, Wis., is a divided place.

Neighboring lawns display placards for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. After a recent heated barroom argument, the bartender at the Square Tavern in Baraboo, the county seat, posted handwritten notes admonishing customers along the giant mirror behind the bar: “No Politics and No Religion.”

Sauk County has been a presidential bellwether in recent years, voting for the winner in the past four elections. Like everywhere, voters here are split over which candidate will lower the cost of groceries and housing and who can best address issues like crime, abortion and especially immigration.

With the country now contemplating whether to support a Black woman for president and Mr. Trump stirring animosity, residents are also complaining about the divisive racial undercurrent in the campaign — an issue that could influence the way voters here and in other swing state communities decide.

Sauk County, which is mostly white with a small but growing nonwhite population, has been roiled by its own racial skirmishes in recent years.

This summer, a county board meeting turned hostile over worries that refugees might someday settle nearby.

In May, at a high school graduation ceremony, a white parent rushed the stage to shove aside a Black school superintendent.

A few years earlier, a photo circulated of local boys standing on the courthouse steps making gestures tied to the white power movement.

Now, in the weeks since Ms. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket, Mr. Trump has employed a new line of attack, questioning whether his opponent is truly Black and labeling her as a “D.E.I. candidate.” In Sauk County, some residents side with the former president. Others say the remarks are racist.

The way the candidates’ messaging is landing in places like Sauk County matters to both campaigns as they scramble to pick up votes across the battleground state of Wisconsin, where Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are essentially tied. The vice president even sent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to campaign for her in Baraboo over the weekend.

“These things are dividing the people,” said Ramona Hallmon, who is Black and operates a street ministry in Baraboo with her husband, Antowan Hallmon. “It’s a stirring of the pot.”

Some supporters of Ms. Harris here complain that much of Mr. Trump’s message is aimed at stoking racist attitudes to earn him votes. Their chief example: Mr. Trump’s proclamation from the debate stage that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs.

The story is false, but there are signs in Sauk County that the strategy is helpful to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

One Baraboo resident, Lori Miller, a travel agent, said she thought the former president’s claim that Haitians were eating pets was likely “partly true.”

“Have you been to Asian countries or to other parts of the U.S.?” she asked.

Mr. Trump’s backers say it is Democrats who are using race to win votes, tossing around accusations of racism as a cudgel. His supporters say they are tired of being labeled racist or xenophobic for complaining about urgent issues, in particular immigration.

“The only place race is an issue is with liberals who want to insult you and use it as an insult to shut you up,” said Stephen Hinke, who lives in Sauk County. “It does put you on the defensive.”

Jerry Helmer, the Sauk County Republican Party chairman, said what voters in Sauk County are worried about is the economy, and they think Democratic elites such as Ms. Harris do not care about the middle class.

“I hear more and more that nobody knows what her policies are,” said Mr. Helmer, who lives outside Baraboo in Prairie du Sac and is a candidate for the state legislature. “She comes off like a ditz.”

But when Ms. Hallmon, who is backing Ms. Harris, hears people insult Ms. Harris’s intelligence and question her qualifications, she wonders if they are simply masking fears about having a Black woman as president.

“When you talk about her inexperience, I just think that is a true excuse,” she said. “It’s another way of, I don’t want to say microaggressions, but another way of how things are said to try to tear her down — that she’s a woman and that she’s Black.”

‘Hate is being taught’

For many generations, Baraboo, population 12,600, was mostly known as the home of August Ringling, who started his circus here after coming to the United States “to escape the unstable political and economic conditions of his native Germany,” according to an exhibit at Baraboo’s Circus World museum.

Most of the Ringling operation eventually moved to Florida. Today, Baraboo, with a courthouse square surrounded by a lovingly restored theater and bustling specialty stores, is home to a small college, a hospital and a handful of plastics-manufacturing businesses. The city, with its old Victorians and farmers market, is surrounded by cornfields that shimmer at sundown.

Ms. Hallmon calls Baraboo “a very beautiful, ugly place.”

In 2018, the town drew unwanted attention after the courthouse photo circulated on social media. Sixty-some local boys, gussied up for the prom, posed for a portrait with many holding their arms in what appeared to be a Nazi salute. One of the boys formed his fingers into an “OK” sign, which has been used to symbolize white power.

The image tore apart the town. Some people said the students were minors unaware of the power of their actions. Some insisted the boys were merely waving goodbye.

Others, including Antowan Hallmon, who was building his congregation in Baraboo back then, saw it as a punch to the gut.

“You’d think that hate would die off,” he said, “but hate is being taught and reborn.”

The Hallmons joined Baraboo Acts Coalition, a movement to promote a sense of belonging among the community’s diverse residents with events that include lectures and readings at the town bookstore.

“We heard from a lot of other voices of people who had experienced feeling uncomfortable in Baraboo and realized this wasn’t just a one-time incident,” said Marcy Huffaker, who is part of the city’s small Jewish community and led the coalition.

Ana Cecilia Torres Pozada joined the movement because she remembered arriving in Baraboo from Peru in 2007 and feeling like an outsider. Back then, the police would pull over people who looked like her, she said, asking for citizenship papers.

The Latino community has grown to about 4 percent of the population, big enough that Ms. Pozada, who is a U.S. citizen, opened a grocery and restaurant to cater to anyone looking for a taste of home.

During the Trump presidency, white customers sometimes came into her restaurant to suss out if she was a citizen, she said, asking Ms. Pozada how often she goes “home.”

Ms. Pozada helps organize Celebrate Sauk, one of the coalition’s events that shows off the county’s diversity with food and dance.

Some organizers, including Ms. Hallmon, worry that the festival is reaching only like-minded residents.

“You get the same group of people that want to see change,” Ms. Hallmon said, “but the ones who need change aren’t in the room.”

‘A crash course on race and politics’

The Hallmons built a church, FaithWorks Ministries, of about 50 Black, white, Latino and Native American members in Baraboo and helped organize meals and laundry services for the needy, a task that took on new urgency in 2020 as Covid-19 spread.

That July, after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, Mr. Hallmon took part in a Black Lives Matter rally and march in Baraboo to stand up against inequity and injustice, he said.

Residents, including several of his church members, showed up to heckle him and other marchers.

Eventually, 17 members of Mr. Hallmon’s congregation left the church over his involvement.

“I got a real good crash course on race and politics,” he said.

Several months later, Mr. Hallmon and his wife were invited to join other ministers in the area on the courthouse steps for a gathering to pray for the country. He prayed for peace and unity. Other pastors prayed for God to block detractors of Mr. Trump.

To Mr. Hallmon, it felt like an open mic at a political rally. The couple left early.

“This is not what we stand for,” he remembered thinking.

This May, Baraboo was in the news again after a white parent rushed a high school graduation stage and pushed aside the Black school superintendent to keep him from shaking hands with the man’s graduating daughter. A video of the episode circulated widely online.

Some people in the community said that the incident had nothing to do with race, and that the father was upset about disciplinary actions at the school. But Mr. Hallmon saw the event differently.

“It was like the audacity of white privilege to walk up in a ceremony and to push the superintendent,” he said.

Two and half weeks later, the Hallmons, who are caring for ailing parents in Green Bay but have continued their street ministry in Baraboo, helped host the city’s first Juneteeeth celebration. Mr. Hallmon screened a film about the history of the celebration, which marks the emancipation of enslaved people.

“It was a way to look at history, not to make you feel bad, but just to see what was done — to get a better sense for how we got to where we are, so we can get past pointing fingers and the hate,” Mr. Hallmon said.

‘A secure country’

The divisions in Baraboo were evident on a recent afternoon of door knocking with Karen DeSanto, a Democrat running for the State Assembly. On the same block, three residents had three different ideas about the election: one undecided, one supporting Ms. Harris and the other backing Mr. Trump. Immigration was on everyone’s mind.

In August, the county board of supervisors addressed the issue at a heated meeting to consider a resolution asking state lawmakers to give county officials more of a voice in whether refugees could settle in the area.

Board members tabled the resolution to the dismay of some residents, including many members of the Sauk County Republican Party who gathered recently for their weekly coffee and conversation.

Mike Dempsey, who supported the resolution, said Ms. Harris had been terrible at securing the nation’s borders and needed to screen immigrants better, rather than bring “trash from in the streets from Venezuela.”

“I don’t hate anybody,” said Mr. Dempsey, who called his hometown, Baraboo, “a communist stronghold” and labeled liberals as “Satanists.” “I just want to have a secure country.”

Later that same evening about 50 members of the Sauk County Democratic Party squeezed into a small room for a potluck around a spread of pizza, brownies and Jell-O desserts to talk about strategies for winning over rural voters.

Sarah Keyeski, a state legislative candidate, encouraged them to connect with voters on an emotional level.

“If we say the reason you don’t want to vote for us is because you’re a racist and you don’t care about immigrants,” she said, but before she could finish, she was interrupted by laughter from some members of the crowd acknowledging the ineffectiveness of that approach.

“It’s true,” one woman shouted.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the Hallmons intend to reestablish their brick-and-mortar Christian congregation. They want to return to Baraboo, they said, to show other people who look like them that Sauk County can be welcoming.

“I think it’s just good for people of color in this area to see other people of color,” Ms. Hallmon said. “You can stand up, and you can be a part of this community, too.”

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.