COLFAX, Wis. — President Trump came to Wisconsin late last month to boast about the state’s unemployment rate, which has been at or near 3 percent for more than a year. “It’s never been this low before. Ever, ever, ever,” he said. (Fact check: true.)

It’s a message that strikes a chord with Bubba Benson, who lives paycheck to paycheck but says that is still better than where he was a few years ago after getting laid off from a shoe warehouse “when all the jobs went to Mexico.” His new job at a plastics manufacturing plant covers the bills and pays good overtime. There are even a few extra bucks in his paycheck now, which he credits to Mr. Trump’s tax cut.

“It didn’t let me go out and buy a new house,” Mr. Benson said as he leaned on the bar at the Outhouse, a watering hole on Main Street in this village of about 1,100 people. “But that wasn’t what it was for.”

As 21 candidates compete to become the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2020, Mr. Trump is running on the strongest economy of any president seeking re-election since Bill Clinton in 1996, and arguably since Richard M. Nixon in 1972. Job creation is strong and last month the unemployment rate dipped to its lowest point in half a century, 3.6 percent.