Surrogates for former President Donald Trump held a town hall on Milwaukee’s lower east side Thursday night in which they framed the November election in existential terms and urged supporters to turn out the vote.

The visit came just hours after President Joe Biden spoke to supporters in the western Wisconsin town of Westby in his first visit to the state since he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in late July.

The town hall is part of the “Team Trump Agenda 47 Policy Tour.” The tour coincides with Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025, a conservative blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation, even as Democrats continue to point out his connections to the plan.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Janesville Republican, told those gathered at the Jan Serr Studio in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Kenilworth Square East building that the election is an opportunity to “get our country back on track.”

“The final piece of this is we only win if we show up and vote,” he told the 100 or so people gathered. He added that the fast-approaching election will be decided by a narrow margin.

Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have been crisscrossing the state with just two months until the November election. The latest Marquette University Law School poll found Trump and Harris in a statistical dead heat in Wisconsin, a critical swing state that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020.

The panel was moderated by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who was joined on stage by Steil, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and former Trump administration official and conservative commentator Monica Crowley, a contributor to Project 2025.

Before the town hall kicked off, dozens of protesters gathered on Prospect Avenue outside with a larger-than-life puppet of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Their chants included, “JD Vance you can’t hide, Stop Project 2025” and a slogan from Harris’s campaign, “When we fight, we win.”

Tracy Washington, a Power to the Polls canvasser, was quick with an answer when asked what she wanted town hall attendees to take away from the protest: “I want them to take away (Project) 2025,” she said.

“Project 2025, as you know, is an attack on seniors — our health and security,” said Pat Dunn, 79, of the League of Progressive Seniors. “Now, I want you to help me understand why I got to be this old, and now they want to attack my Social Security, my health and security.”

Project 2025 is billed as a “menu of solutions to the border crisis, inflation, a stagnant economy, and rampant crime” that “dismantles the unaccountable Deep State, taking power away from Leftist elites and giving it back to the American people and duly-elected President.”

The policy blueprint calls for replacing civil service government employees with partisan appointees and eliminating the Department of Education, among other proposals.

Similar town halls are taking place across battleground states and focus on issues like the economy, the border crisis and “ending the threat of World War III,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement.

Trump’s campaign billed the Agenda 47 Tour as the “the most extensive surrogate operation in the history of presidential politics” and said it would “enlist some of the most prominent figures in politics, influential celebrities, and a diverse array of everyday Americans across key battleground states to champion President Trump and his Agenda 47 initiative.”

Agenda 47 is Trump’s official campaign platform.

On Thursday evening, the topics ranged from the economy to the opioid epidemic to illegal immigration to “weaponized government” agencies.

The speakers also rallied the crowd, impressing upon those gathered the importance of winning Wisconsin on the road to winning the White House.

Thompson urged Republicans to go to places that aren’t “safe” for them, like college campuses, the Democratic stronghold of Madison and Black churches.

“Ask the people, what do they want? They want our agenda,” he said, adding that Harris is “trying to copy it.”

What wasn’t mentioned during the panel discussion was Project 2025. Only when a reporter asked about it afterward did speakers mention the proposal, saying the event and Trump had nothing to do with it.

“He’s disavowed Project 2025. That’s not his set of his policies. It’s just like any one of a number of think tanks around,” Burgum said afterward. “So I think it’s a complete red herring.”

He added that Project 2025 is “not relevant.”

While Trump has tried to distance himself from it, writing on his social media platform Truth Social that he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” a July USA TODAY analysis found that at least 31 of the project’s 38 creators had connections with Trump’s administration.

Crowley pushed back on Democrats’ tagging the Trump campaign with Project 2025.

“I just want to clarify, when the project got started in the early days, they contacted me to make a few contributions on the Treasury Department piece of it. So I was literally involved for maybe three weeks, and that was the end of it,” Crowley said. 

She stressed that the Trump has “absolutely nothing to do” with Project 2025. 

“The official Trump platform for policy for his second term is Agenda 47,” Crowley said.

Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@jrn.com. Mary Spicuzza can be reached at mary.spicuzza@jrn.com.