The Today, Explained podcast is taking a deep dive into the major themes of the 2024 election through the lens of seven battleground states. We’ve heard so far from voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and this week we turn to Wisconsin, where rural voters could make the difference. With less than a month until Election Day, Wisconsin Democrats are pouring time and energy into parts of the state they routinely lose by double digits in the hope of reaching the rural voters who went solidly for Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections. All signs indicate that these voters will do so again, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from campaigning fiercely in rural districts to claw back as many voters as they can. According to Rob Mentzer, the rural communities reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio, Democrats are clear-eyed about the fact that they almost certainly won’t win in rural parts of Wisconsin. By narrowing the margins, though, they hope to “lose by less” — and thus win statewide.  If that tactic succeeds, it would be a big deal. Though Wisconsin was long a progressive stronghold, a wave of Republican support in the early 2000s transformed it from part of Democrats’ Midwestern “blue wall” into a battleground state often decided by razor-thin margins. In 2020, Biden won the state by just over half a percentage point, thanks in large part to high turnout in Madison, Milwaukee, and other cities. If Harris and incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is up for reelection, can make gains with rural voters this time, it would expand their path to victory in the state. Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Mentzer about what he’s hearing from rural voters in north-central Wisconsin as Democrats make a play for their support. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. Can we just talk really quickly about what Wisconsin looked like, I don’t know, before Donald Trump? It used to be a progressive place, right? Wisconsin has a very long history of progressive politics. From the turn of the 20th century, it was actually one of the birthplaces of the progressive movement. Robert La Follette was a populist governor, later US senator. He was beloved by the state’s farmers, by rural areas. And you can draw a straight line from that progressive movement in Wisconsin to a lot of the New Deal legislation and into modern progressivism, for sure. And what changed? Is it as simple as Donald Trump or is there more to that story? I think that it goes back a little bit further than that. So in 2010, there was a massive wave election for Republicans. And one of the Republicans elected that year was Scott Walker, who became Wisconsin’s governor. Some people will recall the first thing he did in office was to introduce a bill that essentially removed collective bargaining rights from most public unions — teachers, government workers. And there was a huge backlash to this. There were weeks of protests in the state capital. But Republicans won that battle. And then, because 2010 was a redistricting year, they used their trifecta power to entrench those majorities in the legislature. Walker survived a recall election in 2012. He won reelection in 2014. And that gets us to the Trump era in 2016.  Hillary Clinton famously did not visit Wisconsin during the 2016 campaign. And she did not win Wisconsin on election night in 2016.  Now, the reasons for that are complicated. But I think that manufacturing really is a big part of it. It’s one of the absolute pillars of Wisconsin’s economy. There are a lot of rural communities where a paper mill or a window and door manufacturer, a Harley Davidson plant, are the biggest employers. They provide the most jobs. And there was a real and a long-term decline in that share of manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin that you can trace as far back as the 1970s all the way into the 2010s.  Some people absolutely blamed NAFTA for that or other free-trade agreements. Those were things that President Bill Clinton had signed into law, was an advocate for, and Hillary Clinton was associated with, while Trump was vocally against.  Also, in the 2010s, we saw a lot of consolidation of dairy farms, a lot of closures of smaller farms. And I think that those things were part of the change in rural areas that voters reacted to.  Is that how Biden flips it back in 2020? Because he’s got that Obama affiliation and he doesn’t have that NAFTA affiliation? In a word, no.  Okay!  The election in 2020 looked a lot like the election in 2016 in Wisconsin. The rural vote came out for Trump in huge numbers. Bigger than 2016. The only thing is that the vote in Madison and in other Democratic strongholds was a little bigger. Democrats gained ground in the suburbs in Wisconsin in 2020, and it put Biden over the top by about 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, which was enough, but which was less than 1 percent. But the sort of rural base of Trump voters, they absolutely turned out. Okay. So let’s talk about where that leaves us this year, in 2024, in just a few weeks now. It sounded like you were saying you’d expect Wisconsin to go for Trump again from your vista, is that right? Well, I’d certainly expect that the part of the state that I live in to go for Trump again. There’s no question about that, I don’t think. It is worth saying that Democrats this year have put a lot of money and resources and volunteer time into rural Wisconsin. And what are Democrats doing to sort of shift the narrative in rural communities in Wisconsin, Rob? What are they doing to mobilize Democrats and to make new Democrats in these communities where you’ve been hanging out? Democrats have opened something like 50 field offices around the state, including more than 30 in counties that Trump won in 2020. They are out knocking on doors and doing direct mail and all the other sort of campaign outreach tactics, including a lot more in-person work than was the case four years ago.  We’ve also seen how Kamala Harris is trying to reach out to Republican voters directly. This month, she campaigned with Liz Cheney, a former member of House Republican leadership. They did that event in Ripon, Wisconsin, which is where the Republican Party was born in the 19th century. And it was explicitly understood as a way to reach out to voters who consider themselves Republican but may be open to voting for Harris.  And then there’s Harris’s vice presidential choice. Tim Walz talks about having rural roots, growing up on a farm in Nebraska. And he just sort of comes off as a rural guy. I passed on a highway in central Wisconsin one of those giant yard signs that said “Harris 2024,” and someone had spray-painted “Tim Walz for VP” underneath it, I guess as a way to emphasize he’s also part of the ticket. And I do hear from people in rural areas in Wisconsin who feel like they connect with Tim Walz, a hunter. He wears a camo cap and [he’s a] small-town football coach.  And then one other factor this year is that for the first time in more than a decade, Wisconsin has new voting maps that actually do give Democrats a chance of taking back a majority in at least one house of the state legislature. I think that for sure has brought some new attention and additional energy to Democratic organizing on the local level. So do you think it could work? Do you think Democrats could win back rural voters in Wisconsin? Well, they could win back some of the rural voters, maybe. The Democrats I talked to, their goal is to lose by less in these rural areas. So one of those, Jim Davis, said that they’re not even remotely thinking that they’re going to get over 50 percent in Taylor County. And so if they can get to 35 percent in areas where maybe they’re lucky to scrape 25 percent, that can really make a difference in a state as close as Wisconsin.

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On the Money is a monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed. Where do I begin with investing? How does the stock market work and how do I get into investing in stocks? How do I budget without it being too strict? How do I go about smartly saving? Dear Future Investor, These questions are best answered in reverse order, so let’s begin. Smartly saving money — which is something you’ll need to do before you can start investing — comes down to the difference between your income and your expenses. Many people are unable to save because their expenses exceed their income, and spend much of their financial energy digging out of credit card debt. Other people are able to save small amounts of money, but not enough to get them out of the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. (One or two missed paychecks, or the equivalent in unexpected expenses, would empty them out of everything they’ve saved.) Budgeting is one of the more effective ways to lower your expenses and save more money, particularly if you really are overspending in certain areas of your life. (Overspending, in this case, would involve making purchases that bring neither utility nor pleasure. Clothing you don’t wear, games you don’t play, food you throw out, and so on.) However, many people aren’t actually overspending, which is why their budgets feel overly strict.  That said, there are plenty of good reasons to take a look at how much you’re earning and how much you’re spending. You might as well draft up a budget just to see how you’re doing. Any of the popular budgeting apps will help you get the job done. I use YNAB, which lets you forecast how many of your future expenses you can pay with your current income. If you’re interested in tracking both your budget and your investment portfolio, you might want to try Monarch Money. Cleo is a budgeting app that uses AI to help you decide what you can afford to buy, although I haven’t used it myself so I can’t specifically recommend it. If you want to go the DIY route, you can open a spreadsheet and start tracking earnings in one column and expenses in another — I’ve budgeted that way for years, and it works. Once you’ve done a top-level assessment of your finances, one of two things may happen. Either you’ll say, “Wow! I could save hundreds of dollars every month if I simply stopped buying all of this stuff I never use!” or you’ll say — and this is the more likely scenario — “Um, it kind of looks like I need everything I buy.”  This brings me to the most effective way to save more money, which is by earning more money.  Some people earn more money by increasing their skills. Others turn an existing skillset into a side hustle. You may even be able to leverage your current skills into a raise, a promotion, or a better-paying job. You may also be able to earn more money by investing. A lot of people turn to the stock market because they believe it’s the best way to earn enough money to achieve their biggest financial goals, whether they’re using a Roth IRA to save for retirement or a 529 Plan to save for college. Other people successfully use the market as a way to achieve smaller financial goals, such as saving up enough money for a down payment on a home. (A few people try to use the market as a get-rich-quick tool, and most of them fail.)  When you purchase stock in a company, you are predicting that the company issuing that stock will be more valuable in the future than it is right now. When you purchase a share in a total-market index fund — which essentially allows you to purchase a representative portion of everything the market has to offer — you are predicting that the entire market will be more valuable in the future than it is right now.  You are also, in a sense, helping to fund the growth of the companies and entities in which you are investing — which is one of the reasons why many people choose to invest in companies that are meeting social or environmental benchmarks.  Once you invest your money, it’s gone. Literally. You’ve exchanged your money for the stock or ETF or index fund, and you cannot count any of the numbers in your investment app as part of your net worth — no matter how high they get — until you exchange your stock for money, which is called “realizing” your investment.  In other words, and I cannot emphasize this enough — you have to sell your stock for its value to become reality. There are two reasons to sell an investment: Should you combine finances with your partner? How to cope with inflation and lifestyle creep How are you supposed to start investing? Do you have questions related to personal finance? Submit them here. In either case, you are at an advantage if you sell early. The first person to realize the value of their investments makes more money than the second person (who makes more money than the third person and so on). Every sale reduces the total value of the investment, and the value won’t start to go back up again until there are more buyers than sellers. This can get complicated really fast, which is why a lot of people navigate the bulls and bears of the stock market by following a strategy called “buy and hold.” Simply put, they believe that the long-term future of the market will be better than the present even if there are ups and downs in between.  The trouble is that every once in a while the market crashes — and although it has historically always rebounded, it takes a while to get those numbers back to where they were. During the Great Recession, for example, it took about four years for the market to recover. If you needed to sell your investments during those four years, perhaps to cover an income gap due to unemployment, you might have found yourself at a loss. This is one of the reasons why financial advisers recommend saving a three-to-six-month emergency fund before getting started with investing. Since we all know how difficult it can be to save up six months of expenses, some people choose to invest small amounts of cash specifically to build up their emergency fund, then sell the investments and transfer the money into a high-yield savings account or CD ladder. At that point, they can begin an investing strategy that could help them achieve longer-term financial goals. After all of that, investing is the simple part, all things considered. It’s a matter of picking a brokerage and installing an app. From there, you can open an account, follow a series of prompts that are designed to help you build an investment portfolio, and decide how much money you can afford to invest. Some people choose to get a financial adviser involved, but you don’t have to — there have been plenty of studies on whether the average investor benefits from an actively managed portfolio, and it turns out that passive management may be just as effective. (In other words, picking an index fund and sticking with it could be just as good as buying and selling a bunch of different stocks and/or hiring someone to buy and sell your stocks for you.) You might want to do some research before you choose your brokerage and your portfolio, but you could also pick one of the more popular options and set yourself up with whatever they recommend. The amount of work you put into your investment decisions is entirely up to you. Some people read everything Warren Buffett ever wrote. Other people spend part of every day having conversations on investment forums. Most people simply let their investing app guide them toward a balanced portfolio, which is perfectly fine! You don’t have to master the art of investing to earn a modest return on your investment.  On the other hand, if you find the market fascinating and want to invest both time and money into understanding it, go ahead. Buy low and sell high, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, and remember that past performance does not guarantee future results.

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