U.S. Library of Congress
When the Democratic nominee for President takes the stage in Milwaukee, site of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, she or he will be entering an arena at the center of all the major political crosscurrents of our current moment.
Clearly, the Democrats have gotten the message that they must pay more attention to Wisconsin, which went Republican in 2016 for the first time in a presidential year since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot.
Hillary Clinton didn’t even show up to campaign in the state after she won the nomination. But Donald Trump came here, and stirred up white, working-class voter antagonism, including with a rally in Janesville, a former manufacturing hub that lost its GM plant. There, Trump promised to represent “the forgotten women and men of America,” and mocked city’s Republican Representative in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan, as well as Republican Governor Scott Walker, implying both men were phonies.
One lesson for Democrats from 2016 is that they can’t leave white, working-class voters to Trump. In choosing Milwaukee, a blue-collar Midwestern hub, the Democrats are sending the message that they are not just the party of East Coast and West Coast elites.
Bernie Sanders, arguably the Democratic frontrunner so far this year, beat Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary by 56.6 percent to 43.1 percent.
Sanders, a Democratic Socialist, will feel right at home in Milwaukee, a working-class city that elected three socialist mayors when it was at the center of the early-twentieth-century Sewer Socialist movement, which pushed for increased wages and worker protections and public ownership of utilities.
But Milwaukee has also been rated the worst place in America to raise an African American child. The city, home to two-thirds of Wisconsin’s African American residents, is the most segregated in America.
Milwaukee County, alone among Wisconsin counties, went for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, highlighting Bernie’s gap with African American voters all over the country.
It is the first Midwestern city to host a Democratic convention since Chicago in 1996.
Milwaukee is Ground Zero for Republican voter-suppression efforts, which arguably changed the outcome of the 2016 election. Had the Republican legislature in Wisconsin not passed voter ID, Wisconsin would have had 200,000 more voters in 2016, Ari Berman argues in a Mother Jones article titled, “Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump (And Possibly Handed Him the Whole Election).” Those missing voters skewed more African American and more Democratic than the general voting population. That’s a big deal, because Trump only won the election by only 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Berman points out.
Milwaukee—with its working-class, socialist history, its legacy of civil-rights struggle, and its white working class that has swung back and forth between political parties—is a fascinating location for the 2020 Democratic convention.
It is the first Midwestern city to host a Democratic convention since Chicago in 1996.
By choosing Milwaukee as the site of their 2020 national convention, the Democratic Party is trying to right a historic mistake. Not only did Hillary Clinton skip Wisconsin in 2016, the whole national Democratic Party chose to stay out of a crucial battle for the soul of the country when Republican Governor Scott Walker rolled out his “divide and conquer” strategy, attacking teachers and other public employee unions and bringing hundreds of thousands of citizens into the streets in historic protests. Citizens gathered a million signatures for a recall effort against Walker that President Obama somehow couldn’t find the time to support.
In the state that was the birthplace of the Progressive Movement, as championed by Fighting Bob La Follette, which pioneered workers comp, a progressive state income tax, and stringent child-labor laws, Walker turned non-union working-class people against their unionized neighbors, and stoked a bitterly divisive politics that set the stage for Donald Trump.
One of the bright spots of the 2018 midterm elections was Walker’s defeat by Tony Evers, the gentle, upbeat former state superintendent of public instruction. Evers sidestepped the Republican culture wars and ran on solving problems Walker created, including fixing roads full of potholes, restoring school funding, and cleaning up a toxic political atmosphere in a once-civilized, progressive state.
Evers won in a nail biter, with help from his charismatic young running-mate, Mandela Barnes, the first African American lieutenant governor and only the second black candidate elected to statewide office in Wisconsin.
Barnes, who is from Milwaukee has been a target of relentless racist attacks by the rightwingers who continue to control the state legislature.
Despite voter suppression, one of the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the country, and an outrageous eleventh-hour power grab by the Republican legislative majority that sought to disempower the new Democratic administration before it even took office, Wisconsin’s 2018 election raised hopes that Democrats could overcome the divisiveness of the Walker/Trump era with a unifying, public-spirited message.
That hope will be put to the test next year in Milwaukee, in the heart of America’s divided political landscape.