Milwaukee’s political bargain at the heart of hosting the RNC
Milwaukee’s political bargain at the heart of hosting the RNC
The RNC is coming soon, many in the city are not thrilled, and economic impact might not meet expectations. But in a way, Milwaukee’s convention-connected political victory has already been won.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here.
The Republican National Convention is coming to Milwaukee. It’s happening, and it’s now less than two months away.
With any kind of event on this scale, there’s never going to be any one single reason behind the decision to welcome it to town. But for something this overtly political, there is inevitably going to be a political element to it. The national politics are obvious. The state and local politics, less so. But those state and local politics are a huge factor in why Milwaukee is hosting the RNC in 2024. Milwaukee didn’t necessarily have to say yes to hosting this convention, but it did. And critical to understanding that decision gets at one of the most significant policy achievements in recent years — the shared revenue reform and local control sales tax bill known as Act 12.
So, if Milwaukee had rejected the RNC, would Act 12 have been passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature a year ago? Without the RNC, would there even be an Act 12?
As the convention planning ramps up around the city in the coming weeks, and as the event and its legions of red-hatted attendees roll into town, this is something we must consider. There is a political bargain that undergirds this entire convention.
Act 12 is a distinct — and rare — political victory for Milwaukee. Despite some of the more uncomfortable Milwaukee-only policy requirements of the law, the injection of new funding through shared revenue increases for local governments, and the new sales tax increase for Milwaukee, have brought the City and County back from a fiscal cliff that could have been genuinely catastrophic — hundreds of jobs lost, steep across-the-board cuts to city and county services, and the threat of full-on bankruptcy, to name just a few of the potential outcomes.
Act 12 is the law signed on June 20, 2023, by Gov. Tony Evers. This law reforms the relationship between state and local government in Wisconsin. The headline items from the bill are a) an increase in shared revenue going to each municipality and county in Wisconsin, and b) allowing Milwaukee’s local governments the option to vote to increase the sales tax (which they did), with several Milwaukee-only policy requirements.
Marquette University political science professor Philip Rocco wrote a series on the legislative battle over Act 12, a series that recently received the gold award from the Milwaukee Press Club for Best Explanatory Story or Series.
The bill has been passed, and disaster averted. Now comes the political cost — white-knuckling, in full Midwest nice fashion, through the convention for this anti-democratic party and its wanna-be authoritarian leader.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads are genuine threats to democracy, and few places have felt those threats more acutely than the city of Milwaukee. Trump has lied about the 2020 presidential election results in Milwaukee countless times in a myriad of ways. He still claims to have won Wisconsin in 2020 (he did not). Conspiracy theories about the validity of the city’s votes, in this and many other elections, are widespread on the right. The GOP within Wisconsin has long held problematic, insulting, and sometimes outright vile views toward the city, with policies directed toward Milwaukee that often push the line from punitive to outright harmful. The anti-Milwaukee sentiment often expressed by Wisconsin Republicans is rarely subtle, and sometimes the dog whistles for this majority-minority city are played at bullhorn volume. So, this is complicated.
It can’t be overstated, too, just how many Milwaukeeans just do not want the RNC to be here in our city. At all. Some have opposed this from the very beginning, and many cannot conceive of why leaders would welcome this Republican Party to hold its party in the city at this moment, for a myriad of reasons. There are those in Milwaukee who have no interest in engaging in this event whatsoever (like Bay View bar The Mothership, which is closing for the week), and are many are planning to leave town for the week to avoid it entirely.
But despite all of this, there is a political battle inextricably linked to the city’s hosting of the RNC. It is a battle that has already been won.
A confluence of factors created a window of opportunity for Milwaukee to achieve a long-sought policy goal to stabilize its future. New leadership in Milwaukee, along with the chance to host the RNC, helped crack open the possibility for a deal to be struck with state Republicans who had for years been blocking the City and County from approving a new revenue stream to fund critical services. A potentially devastating fiscal cliff loomed, and pension costs were set to explode.
In a 2022 column on whether Milwaukee should play host to the RNC, I reported that if the city were to say no to the convention, any agreement on a sales tax or shared revenue would be “dead in the water.” It’s possible that in either sense, saying no to one would have torpedoed the other.
The City and County needed help from the state. After years of the GOP-controlled legislature cutting shared revenue for local municipalities — harpooning the City’s budget to the tune of an estimated annual nine-figure dollar amount, and returning a flat sum to the County as collections rose — a fiscal cliff was fast approaching. Federal ARPA dollars staved this off somewhat, but without a long-term solution, the outlook was dire. State Republicans had, in budget cycle after budget cycle, blocked locally-backed efforts to raise new funds through a sales tax increase, which could not be achieved without approval of the state legislature.
County Executive David Crowley (elected in 2020) and Mayor Cavalier Johnson (appointed in Dec. 2021 and elected in April 2022), both history-making Black millennials who did not carry the same baggage of old guard leadership, each made bridging this divide and finding a solution to this pressing problem priorities in their respective campaigns, with Johnson regularly saying he’d be so committed to this effort that he would have a “cot in the Capitol.” They desperately needed a “reset.”
Part of this “reset” was simply having conversations that weren’t happening previously. Johnson has repeatedly told the story about the first time he hosted Assembly Speaker Robin Vos at his office at Milwaukee’s City Hall, where Vos remarked it was his first time there. But it had been Vos himself who had long blocked this effort, saying in 2021 that Milwaukee’s push for a local sales tax was “never going to happen.”
Another part of that “reset” was about the city playing host to the RNC, along with the push for greater financial support, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in August 2022, alluding to meetings that essentially amounted to a charm offensive from Johnson, Crowley and the new wave of Democratic leadership in the city.
Of course, Milwaukee’s pitch to host the RNC contains factors that go well beyond the mechanics of state and local politics. Again, there’s never going to be just one single reason behind a decision like this.
The economic factor has probably been the most prominent public argument in favor of the city hosting the RNC, both in direct economic impact on the city and to showcase Milwaukee to a global audience.
“All major political parties should choose Milwaukee,” wrote Omar Shaikh in a May 2022 opinion piece for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It is not about red or blue. It is about the green that these major events bring to a city.” This not red or blue but green argument has been repeated ad nauseam by city boosters and the business community’s RNC backers.
There’s some truth to this, of course, but the overall projected economic impact seemed overblown even at the time. A Politifact fact check gave the mayor’s claim of a “$200 million economic infusion into our communities” a “Half-True” rating, and Recombobulation Area contributor and Marquette professor Philip Rocco delved further into this in a piece titled “We tell ourselves economic stories in order to live.”
Now, the reality seems like it could be underwhelming compared to those loftier projections. Some Milwaukee area venues, like The Rave, have already pivoted to more typical programming, and there appears to be a lot of uncertainty from many of the city’s more prominent event venues, according to a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report. The Milwaukee Art Museum just announced that it would be partnering with Baird to provide free admission during the convention. An early April story from The New York Times with the headline “In Milwaukee, Restaurants and Venues Worry of Seeing Limited R.N.C. Boost” detailed the slow roll of bookings among restaurants and events venues, including one example of a “clear mismatch in expectations” where someone tried to book the 2,500-seat Riverside Theater for a 50-person film screening.
This activity may yet ramp up, and Congress’ later-than-expected approval of $25 million in additional security funding may have been a factor in a shifting timeline for bookings. But it’s certainly possible that the RNC will not provide the economic windfall hoped for at the outset of these conversations.
Still, timing is also a factor in the economic calculus surrounding the RNC. The newly minted Baird Center — a significant expansion of the downtown convention center — cost $456 million in public dollars, financed through the Wisconsin Center District. There’s hope that the expansion and a successfully-run RNC can prove to be a catalyst for Milwaukee to generate a greater level of convention activity for the foreseeable future, and after the DNC made their convention almost entirely virtual in 2020, Milwaukee had missed out on a signature event, and the city wants to be a bigger player in the convention business. Hosting the RNC is about hosting more than just this one event, after all.
But perhaps for Milwaukee, the primary benefit for hosting the RNC — with this party and this candidate in this moment — is less about red or blue or even green, but more about black.
As in, getting the City and County’s finances back into the black. Because that’s what has now happened. Post-Act 12, the annual fall budget process that for years and years saw cut after cut instead saw a “mindblowing” turnaround with no cuts, instead turning the dial toward new investments with Milwaukee’s best budget season in decades. The dollar figure to focus on here is not the flawed study projecting a $200 million economic impact, but the estimated $193.6 million for the City and $82.2 million for the County that new sales taxes are projected to generate. RNC attendees will be directly contributing to those numbers with every purchase made in Milwaukee County during the convention.
So when it comes to hosting the RNC, Milwaukee’s greatest political battle connected to the convention was won in the summer of 2023. Gov. Tony Evers signed the bill in June, and the Milwaukee Common Council and County Board approved their pieces of the deal in July. Any coming injection of greater economic activity is just icing on the cake, even if it fails to meet projections. Best case scenario is that the city serves as a beautiful backdrop and stage for the event, and Milwaukee continues to build its reputation as an emerging city.
The risk of this political bargain is whether or not Milwaukee will emerge unscathed from whatever this increasingly extreme Republican Party brings to the city in mid-July. We can only hope that whatever transpires on stage at Fiserv Forum and in surrounding events doesn’t cause lasting harm, reputational or otherwise, to the city of Milwaukee. Fingers crossed.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 18 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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I appreciate your breakdown of the politics and negotiations behind MKE hosting the RNC. It’s a positive spin — “in the black”, cash infusion. Thank you.
But I still plan to fly my MKE flag upside-down during the convention. Seems about right.
This is really interesting context, thank you. Feels like a bargain with the devil, honestly. Like MKE leaders essentially had to bow to blackmail by the GOP in order to get the funding powers the city should have gotten in due course, but instead had to trade for hosting a convention that will be filled with people who are actively hateful toward most of the city's inhabitants and are working to dismantle our very democracy. Feels...bad.