Wisconsin has about 6 million people, putting it 20th on the list of most-populous states.

But when it comes to 2020 politics, it’s arguably number one.

Which is why both number-twos on the Democratic and Republican tickets were campaigning there on Labor Day, seeking holiday crowds in very different parts of the state.

“There were a few more competitive states in 2016, but no loss was as devastating to Democrats as Wisconsin,” says the New York Times, noting that Trump beat Hillary Clinton there by less than one percentage point.

Vice President Mike Pence went to the city of La Crosse, on Wisconsin’s western border with Minnesota, whose population of around 51,000 is nearly nearly 90% white.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Joe Biden’s running mate, went to Milwaukee, about 200 miles southeast of LaCrosse on the shores of Lake Michigan — a metropolitan area of some 2 million, about 40% of whom are Black, 37% white and 17% Latino.  It’s considered one of the most racially segregated metro areas in the U.S.

Harris’s first meeting in Milwaukee was with the family of Jacob Blake, the Black man who was shot in the back seven times in August by a police officer in Kenosha, a lakeside city near the Illinois state line. Blake, paralyzed and in constant pain since the shooting, joined the meeting by phone.

Speaking at the Dairyland Power Cooperative, a La Crosse electric utility, Pence never mentioned Blake, sticking to the Trump “law and order” script and touting the administration’s economic record, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The American comeback has begun,” Pence declared. “In the last four months alone we’ve literally seen half the Americans that lost their jobs go back to work.”

But Newsweek points out that the key word there is “begun” — coming barely 8 weeks before Election Day, and with a polling average that puts Biden ahead of Trump by 7 percentage points.

Despite the recent decline in unemployment, Newsweek says, “the economy is operating with about 11.5 million fewer jobs than in February” while the threat of a second wave of coronavirus outbreaks looms.

For the second part of Harris’s Labor Day visit, she turned to Wisconsin business leaders and labor unions, touring an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers training facility and speaking with Wisconsin labor leaders, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

She then joined a “Build Back Better” roundtable with Black business owners, discussing racial equity as part of the nation’s economic recovery.