Will rural America respond to Biden’s call for masks?

A second spike in U.S. coronavirus cases has been led by places like Wisconsin’s Shawano County. The region is a test of whether behaviors will change under new circumstances – and a new president.

As coronavirus cases swept through the rural communities of the upper Midwest this fall, more people here began to wear masks and stay home, say residents of Shawano County, one of the hardest hit counties in Wisconsin.

Richard Kucksdorf was not one of them. An Iraq War veteran and head of the Shawano County Republican Party, Mr. Kucksdorf goes out often, attends meetings, shops. He almost never wears a mask if he can help it.

“I put one on when I go in a store and don’t want to hassle anyone,” he says. “But they don’t do any good.”

He’s not alone. At Wayne’s Place Bar and Grill in Bonduel, a crossroads hamlet in the eastern part of the county, owner Wayne Ort works behind the bar on a recent afternoon, filling small plastic containers with salad dressing, his snow-white walrus mustache drooping majestically and uncovered. No one else in the bar is wearing a mask, either. Most customers don’t, he says.

“Some of them wear them coming in, and I don’t have a problem with that,” he says. “I kind of think it’s up to each individual.”

Resistance to mask-wearing and other measures has frustrated public health officials here, in a state that was at the leading edge of a second U.S. surge of coronavirus cases. It also shows the wider challenges facing the country and a new occupant of the Oval Office.

President-elect Joe Biden has urged state mask mandates and last week called for a 100-day period of mask-wearing vigilance nationwide. Wisconsin already has such a mandate, imposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on July 30 and now under challenge by Republicans in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the court of public opinion, many have rejected it.