JD Vance wades into midterm fight with battleground state visit - USA Today

JD Vance wades into midterm fight with battleground state visit

Vice President JD Vance will push the Trump's administration's economic message in one of the most hotly-contested congressional districts of the 2026 midterm elections.

WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance is venturing into a competitive congressional district in western Wisconsin, as the White House's effort to protect Republicans' delicate majority in the House of Representatives kicks into full swing.

On Feb. 26 Vance will visit Plover, Wisconsin — a suburb of Stevens Point. The district that's been represented by by Republican Derrick Van Orden since 2023 is hotly contested territory. Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL, was the first Republican to win the district in 26 years.

National Democrats announced this week that they are putting more resources into campaigning for the seat that Van Orden won by less than three points in the 2024 election. It's one of two Republican-held districts in Wisconsin that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has said it is trying to flip.

The DCCC said it's opening up its coffers for Rebecca Cooke in her rematch against Van Orden. The Republican congressman beat Cooke but underperformed Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

Trump won the congressional district that includes La Crosse and Eau Claire and runs along the western edge of the state by seven points. Wisconsin was one of a handful of Upper-Midwestern states that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024, when he won every battleground state in the country and crushed Democrats' blue wall.

The president endorsed Van Orden, a vocal supporter of his agenda, in the 2026 competition 10 months ago.

Vance will be touring a manufacturing facility in Plover to highlight Trump's economic message coming out of the president's annual State of the Union address.

A Vance spokesperson said the vice president would argue that wages are up, inflation is down and American workers are better off today than they were under former President Joe Biden.

The visit to the Wisconsin is one of the first domestic trips that Vance has made this year. In January, he visited Toledo, Ohio, and Minneapolis amid a standoff between state and local officials over the Trump administration's immigration enforcement operations.

Vance is also the Republican Party's national finance chair and held fundraising events last month in Naples and Miami Beach, Florida.

In a sign of just how important Wisconsin's third congressional district is to keeping the GOP's narrow majority — Democrats only need to pick up a net three seats to take control of the House — it is Vance's second trip to the area this election cycle. He went to La Crosse in August to boost Trump's tax and spending law. The congressional district is rated a toss up by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Van Orden attended Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6 before he was elected to Congress. But he said he did not take part in the storming of the U.S. Capitol and does not support political violence. He came under scrutiny in 2023 for cursing at a group of high school-aged Senate pages while giving a late-night tour of the building's rotunda.

Vance's latest trip to Wisconsin is part of a coordinated campaign by the White House to put the president and top administration officials in front of voters in battleground areas to try to keep the focus on Trump's economic policies after his address to Congress.

The president is headed to Texas later this week. A senior White House official said that event would be centered on energy production and the economy.

Trump's trip coincides with early voting in Texas ahead of a March 3 Senate Republican primary, in which incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn faces a stiff challenge from within the party. Trump is expected to visit the Corpus Christi area, where there are flight restrictions in place associated with presidential travel.

The White House also has its eye on presidential trips to Ohio and Tennessee in the coming weeks, the official said.