Election Day 2020 is still eighteen months away, but Donald Trump is already on the road, touting his record, vilifying Democrats, and mocking the Mueller investigation to hurrahs from supporters. On Saturday night, he took the show to the ten-thousand-seat Resch Center, outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, as he worked to solidify his strength in the pivotal upper Midwest. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, primed the crowd, instructing it to be energetic, because campaign videographers were filming the rally for future advertisements. Millions of people, he said, will view the event “over and over” as the reëlection battle unfolds. To make sure that the scene played well, he rehearsed a series of chants with the crowd: “CNN sucks!,” “Build the wall!,” and “Four more years!”

The President took the stage, grinning broadly in a dark suit and his trademark red tie, as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blasted through the arena’s speakers. (“I’d thank my lucky stars / To be livin’ here today / ’Cause the flag still stands for freedom / And they can’t take that away.”) He was thirty-seven minutes into his speech when he said that he needed to be very careful with his facts, because of “those people back there,” meaning the journalists covering the event. The crowd booed. “Fake news. They’re fake. They are fake. They are fakers,” he said. He spoke slowly and paused for five seconds as he awaited the inevitable response. As the chant of “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!” built to a crescendo, he listened, and then said, with perfect timing, “I’ll tell you, you know what sucks? Their ratings suck.” The crowd erupted again, drowning his words.

As Trump sets out to win Wisconsin next year and re-create the map that carried him to the White House, his ability to connect with disaffected white voters seems undiminished. In conversations in Green Bay, several people told me that he was “draining the swamp” of corrupt Washington insiders. One woman, who drove three hours to see him, said that he is “bringing back the rule of law, but with heart.” Another said that he is working hard to “stem the tide” of immigration. A third, a construction worker, said that Trump is “the best President who ever was.” When I asked why, he said, “Everything. Everything you can think of.” He added, “Not his personality. He has some issues. All Presidents do.”

Outside the arena, an overflow group of about two hundred supporters stood in the cold and watched on a giant screen, cheering Trump’s zingers and laughing at his occasional jokes. Ashley Gisenas, a stay-at-home mother whose husband is in the logging business, drove forty-five minutes from Pound, Wisconsin, to see him. “He brings passion and patriotism into America. That has changed from the last President,” she said. Trump is “trying to help bring everyone back together. The ultimate goal is to have a better future for our families. Who could not want him?”

Yet Trump is facing headwinds in Wisconsin, not least the opposition to his trade policies, which have hurt two of the state’s best-known brands—dairy farms and Harley-Davidson. In a Marquette Law School poll of registered voters from early April, forty-six per cent of respondents said that they would definitely vote against him in an election held today, compared with twenty-eight per cent who would definitely vote for him. That can change, of course, but even when you add the fourteen per cent who say they would probably vote for him, Trump’s total only reaches forty-two per cent. “He needs a little more,” Charles Franklin, who has directed the poll since 2012, said. “A lot of the wavering folks are Republicans who will probably be drawn back to the Party no matter who the Democrat is, but Trump can’t depend one hundred per cent on that. He needs to win more than just Republicans, and Independents are very clearly negative towards him. He needs some of those folks.”

Jim Fitzgerald, for one, is optimistic. A retired insurance executive, he chairs the Brown County Republican Party, and he spent much of last week fielding calls and preparing for the President’s visit. He’s heartened by the fact that supporters are already requesting Trump 2020 yard signs. (He doesn’t yet have any.) “This President has struck a chord with the American public like no other candidate before, and it’s largely because the people identify with him,” he told me. “He understands them and he says things that they talk about in their back yards with their neighbors.” I asked him for an example. He replied, “When people sit in their back yard and say, ‘What the hell’s going on with this country?’ ”

Brown County, which includes Green Bay and the surrounding towns and villages, went for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Trump in 2016. When he considers Trump’s chances, Fitzgerald said positive economic numbers “totally” make a difference. “People are working, and that creates a sense of pride.” He also believes that the Republican ticket will benefit from a contrast with Democrats who, he said, are racing one another to see “who can get to the left the furthest and fastest. We’ve got all these people running under the banner of socialism and advocating socialist values. We’re sick of that. That’s not what we fought for. We fought for freedom, for individual values and individual beliefs, not that everyone gives to the head of the Politburo.”

Fitzgerald said that his Republican friends, and even some Democrats, are judging Trump on “what he’s saying he’ll do, and he does.” He pointed to the appointment of two conservative Supreme Court Justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and lauded the President’s persistence in trying to extend the barrier along the border with Mexico. “Right now, immigrants in this country are treated better than our veterans,” he said. Fitzgerald mentioned one of the campaign’s slogans: “Promises made, promises kept.” At the local G.O.P. headquarters, on South Webster Avenue, you can buy coffee mugs with the phrase for ten dollars apiece. For Easter, he said, loyal supporters bought mugs, went next door to Kaap’s Old World Chocolates, and filled them up with treats. “That time of year, ya know,” he said.

For years, with few exceptions, Wisconsin Republicans won important statewide races, with no politician more successful, or polarizing, than Scott Walker. He won three consecutive races for governor, including a 2012 recall election that followed his leading role in passing Act 10, which virtually eliminated collective-bargaining rights for government employees. But high Democratic turnout helped sweep Walker out of office in November, when he lost a close race to the state’s education superintendent, Tony Evers. Republicans, in fact, lost every statewide contest last fall, including those for senator and attorney general, even as they preserved majorities in the statehouse with the help of gerrymandered districts now being challenged in court.

But as Democrats were crowing, Republicans rebounded last month in a race to choose a new Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, the latest chapter in an officially nonpartisan election process that has generated partisan fervor for years. The winning candidate, Brian Hagedorn, was a little-known conservative appeals-court judge who, in 2005 blog posts, labelled Planned Parenthood “wicked” and wrote that he believes “that Christianity is the correct religion, and that insofar as others contradict it, they are wrong.” While serving as a judge, he helped found a Christian school that prohibits employees, students, and their parents from engaging in “immoral sexual activity,” defined as any relationship that is not between a married man and woman.