Picking Milwaukee for Democratic Convention reinforces the party's priority on winning back the Great Lakes battlegrounds it lost in 2016, starting with Wisconsin.
Holding their national convention in Wisconsin won't automatically deliver this vital presidential battleground to Democrats in 2020.
Democrats held their conventions in North Carolina in 2012 and Pennsylvania in 2016 — and went on to lose each of those states in the fall.
Republicans held their conventions in Minnesota in 2008 and Florida in 2012 — and went on to lose each of those states in the fall.
Conventions are very long and expensive campaign ads — platforms for a party and its candidate to say the things they want to say to the voters they want to say them to.
They're saying that re-taking Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania is a core strategic priority. Those three states had voted Democratic for president at least six times in a row before 2016. Had they voted Democratic in 2016, Trump would not be president. If Democrats re-take all three of these states in 2020 — and nothing else on the map changes — they will win the White House.
A good case can be made that Wisconsin is the most challenging of these three battlegrounds for Democrats, and that in a very close election it could be the "tipping point" state that puts the winning party over the top in capturing an electoral majority. If it's not the most important state next year, it's one of the top three or four. The blue wall states are not the only path to victory that Democrats will pursue in 2020; there is a southern track that targets Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. But it's the easiest, most winnable path.
Democrats are also saying with their convention pick that they are not content to lose rural and blue-collar white voters by ever-bigger margins, since those voters make up a huge segment of the electorate in the blue wall states. Historically, Democrats have done better with these kinds of voters in these particular states than they have done nationally. But Clinton lost rural and blue-collar whites by far bigger margins in Wisconsin than Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012.
Trump won Wisconsin mainly because he made massive inroads in small, blue-collar towns. Former GOP Gov. Scott Walker improved his own dominant performance in small towns and rural counties in 2018, even while he was losing ground in the cities and suburbs on his way to statewide defeat. Democrats can afford to lose blue-collar and rural white voters in Wisconsin, but when they lose them by the kind of landslide margins they did to Trump and Walker it gives them little margin for error and is usually a recipe for defeat.
These voters are not monolithically pro-Trump. Even in 2016, exit polls showed that 50 percent of non-college white voters in Wisconsin had an unfavorable opinion of Trump. In a Marquette poll this January, the president's approval rating among non-college whites — his demographic base — was a modest 48 percent.
Since many of these voters have mixed feelings about Trump, the "right" Democratic candidate could plausibly improve on Clinton's dismal performance with these voters in these Great Lakes battlegrounds. That makes a concerted outreach to working-class voters in the industrial Midwest a very reasonable strategy for the party. It wasn't that long ago that Obama performed well with these voters. And in 2018, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Madison progressive, won 17 "Trump counties" in Wisconsin and lost non-college whites statewide by only five points after running a campaign that combined economic populism, parochial Wisconsin themes, health care advocacy and heavy outreach outside Madison and Milwaukee.
In addition to being political platforms for the parties, conventions are also used by the national media to tell political stories and shape political narratives.
We mentioned one big one already: the erosion of Democratic support across rural America and among white voters without college degrees, which led to the remarkable number (more than 500) of Wisconsin communities that voted for both Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Add in the issues surrounding Trump's trade policies and the painful struggles of dairy and crop farmers in Wisconsin and the electoral plot thickens.
An even bigger role in Walker's defeat was played by Dane County, where a near-presidential-level turnout epitomized the intensity of the Democratic liberal base since the rise of Trump. Madison and its suburbs comprise what may be the outstanding example of a high-growth, high-turnout, ultra-blue metro area in America.
On the Republican side, Wisconsin is the most striking example of a party that has wrestled with its relationship to Trump. GOP voters here rejected him soundly in the state's 2016 primary. Then they coalesced enough in the general election to help Trump breach the blue wall. Today, while the vast majority of GOP voters in this state approve of the job the president is doing, a significant fraction has qualms, and that is one more X-factor in 2020.
Finally, the state of Wisconsin continues to exemplify two of the defining attributes of today's political culture.
This is one of the most politically mobilized and engaged states in America (It was anywhere from second to fourth in the U.S. in turnout last year, depending on how you measure it.).
Next year, when the Democrats come here to nominate a presidential candidate, Wisconsin will be a fitting backdrop to the turbulent politics of the Trump Era.