Accepting the endorsement of a local police union, Ohio Sen. JD Vance presented his and former President Donald Trump’s Republican ticket as pro-law enforcement on Tuesday in Kenosha, Wis., the site of unrest and riots in the summer of 2020 sparked by a police shooting of a Black man and marked by the fatal shooting of two protestors by Illinois teen Kyle Rittenhouse.
Vance said the campaign was highlighting police support because “it speaks to the fact that law enforcement knows who's on their side,” arguing law enforcement in Wisconsin is “underfunded and under resourced” and blaming Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to rein in the operations of Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S. He also noted the importance of that community’s support in Wisconsin, a key swing state he has frequently visited and one that Trump lost to President Joe Biden by roughly 20,000 votes in 2020.
“We know what happens when we don't have leadership who support our law enforcement. We saw it in Kenosha just a few years ago. You all know this better than I do that four years ago, Kenosha had terrible riots after a police shooting,” Vance said. “Who was it that pacified the streets of Wisconsin and ensured that those riots didn't spiral out of control and burn down the entire city? That was President Donald J. Trump.”
Vance falsely charged that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers failed to act during the August 2020 protests and that Trump sent in the National Guard, a claim Trump has made since the first days after the unrest. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Evers activated the National Guard less than 24 hours after a Kenosha Police Department officer shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, calling in hundreds more after Rittenhouse shot and killed two protestors and wounded another on the second day of unrest. Rittenhouse was acquitted the next year by a jury of homicide and endangerment charges after arguing he fired in self-defense.
Vance used the memory of the unrest and the endorsement of the Kenosha Professional Police Association to pitch the Republican ticket as friends of law enforcement who will enter their time in the White House with the goal of “making it easy on our police,” ending “sanctuary city” policies, deporting violent criminals, instating the death penalty for drug dealers and protecting police “from frivolous lawsuits.”
“You hear President Trump talk about that. The reason that it's so hard for the police to do their job sometimes is they know if they do their job, they're going to get sued for it,” Vance said. “We're going to protect them from those lawsuits and make it easier for our police to do their jobs.”
“All this stuff is just simple common sense,” he added.
Pete Deates, the Kenosha police union president, accused Harris of being “on the side of the people committing crimes and supporting them,” citing her promotion of a bail fund in Minnesota helping protestors who were arrested in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. Vance similarly accused the Democratic presidential nominee of having policies “that promote violent crime and the criminals who do it,” contrasting them with Trump’s policies that “promote peace, who promote prosperity and want to throw the violent criminals behind bars.”
Among those supposed Democratic policies that Vance and Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde claimed Harris supported was “defund the police,” a policy she does not favor. The Harris campaign and her allies have frequently noted in the past Trump has called for the defunding of federal law enforcement over his criminal prosecutions and proposed cuts to federal funding for local law enforcement agents during his final year in office.
“What did Sen. Harris do, as well as Sen. [Tammy] Baldwin? They fanned the flames. They attacked the police and all of law enforcement and pushed ‘defund the police,’ and it resulted in the tragedy that happened here in Kenosha, but all over our country,” Hovde said.
Hovde trails Baldwin, the Democratic incumbent, in most public polls out of Wisconsin, with a New York Times/Siena College poll finding him down seven points among likely voters earlier this month. That same poll had Harris up four percentage points on Trump, with other polls in August showing them tied or with the vice president holding a slim lead.
Emphasizing Harris’ previous experience with law enforcement as a prosecutor and district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s attorney general is part of Democrats’ strategy to win Wisconsin and other midwest states, campaign advisor David Plouffe said on Tuesday during an Axios event on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Plouffe was one of the architects of Barack Obama’s two presidential victories and joined Harris’ campaign after she rose to the top of the ticket.
“If you're in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, you see, we're running ads that are talking about all her work as a prosecutor and attorney general, going after transnational games, gangs, going after sexual predators, holding them accountable,” Plouffe said.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are set to rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday night. It will be Harris' seventh trip to the state in 2024 and her third since Biden dropped out and endorsed her.
In Kenosha, Vance went on to mock Democrats for holding their presidential nominating convention in Chicago this week, decrying the gun violence and murder rate in the city.
“Tim Walz has been going around saying that he served in war, and maybe they did it in Chicago so that he could actually, accurately say that he went, he visited a combat zone,” Vance said. “Chicago has violent crime statistics that actually mirror Third World, highly violent countries.”
The Ohio senator said he was preparing to debate Walz on Oct. 1, joking he’s practicing with “a good friend from back home who embellishes and lies a lot, and I'm having him stand in for Tim Walz.” And he attacked Walz on social media after CNN confirmed the governor and his wife underwent a similar, but different fertility treatment than in vitro fertilization despite Walz frequently claiming they used IVF to conceive their children.
“Today it came out that Tim Walz had lied about having a family via IVF. Who lies about something like that?” Vance wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Gwen Walz described the process as “an incredibly personal and difficult experience” in a statement to CNN and that “like so many who have experienced these challenges, we kept it largely to ourselves at the time – not even sharing the details with our wonderful and close family.” The only one who knew at the time, she said, was a neighbor who was a nurse who helped give her shots needed for the process. Harris’ campaign defended their vice presidential candidate, telling CNN that he called the process “IVF” because he “talks how normal people talk. He was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”