The Local Impact
Dissecting the underwhelming activity around Milwaukee and the overwhelming positivity about Milwaukee of the week of the RNC.
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 simmering story of underwhelming activity in Milwaukee outside of the convention grounds as the RNC has taken over downtown became an undeniable reality by mid-week.
Inside of the convention’s fenced-in security perimeter, it is a busy place. Delegates, attendees and media from all around the world bustle through the grounds and pack Fiserv Forum during the evening’s convention programming.
But outside, early week concerns that this might not be the local business boom that many were hoping for became unavoidable. In his morning press conference on Wednesday, July 17, opening the third day of the convention, Mayor Cavalier Johnson acknowledged that downtown businesses were “expecting a little bit more,” per BizTimes, and encouraged attendees “to explore, to shop and to eat at the great establishments that we have right here in Milwaukee.” Urban Milwaukee also reported Wednesday that Alison Prange, chief operating officer of the Milwaukee 2024 Host Committee, said “it’s quieter than I would like it to be with locals” during the convention — quite the on-the-record admission.
And look, too, to the headlines from local media around Milwaukee.
'A complete dud': Restaurants and businesses around Fiserv Forum are struggling (WUWM)
Downtown Milwaukee bars, restaurants report slow sales from the RNC. Business improving for some. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Need a Reservation? Downtown Restos Have a LOT of Them (Milwaukee Magazine)
“We were hoping to just be full:” Downtown Milwaukee businesses fearing RNC bust (620 WTMJ)
‘Ghost town’: Some Milwaukee businesses say week of RNC has been a bust (WPR)
This doesn’t exactly paint the picture of a large scale event providing a jolt of activity to its host city. Social media posts this week, too, showed spaces in the city that are typically busy in the Milwaukee summer months, being empty or slower than expected. By the end of the week, people were making comparisons to the early days of the pandemic.
On the whole, these concerns match much of what I’ve been seeing and hearing from people around town, too, both in close proximity to the convention grounds and around the city.
Dan Jacobs, the co-owner and chef of DanDan and EsterEv who was a finalist in this year’s season of “Top Chef,” said, “This is the slowest week we’ve had in months.”
“To tell you the truth, it’s been difficult,” said Jacobs. “The RNC hasn’t really helped our business whatsoever.”

DanDan, the Third Ward restaurant that Jacobs co-owns, made changes to their hours to accommodate after hours guests during the convention, but “zero people showed up” on Monday.
“We were going to do a limited menu from 9 p.m. to midnight and no one showed up,” he said. “We advertised it on Instagram and Facebook, and it was the RNC with the thing VISIT (Milwaukee) put together. But if people are unwilling to go out into even neighborhoods like the Third Ward, I don’t know what to say. The only one who showed up was a to-go order from a guy who works for us.”
He added that this feels like a missed opportunity in a few different ways.
“It doesn’t sound like people are really getting out there and seeing what we have to offer,” he said. “It’s disappointing on both ends. Both on the convention goers and on our end, because I feel like they’re missing an opportunity to see how great the city really is and we’re missing an opportunity to show them the hospitality that we’re ready to deliver.”
Others have shared a similar experience.
Wolfegang Klinkammer, bar manager at Buckley’s and veteran of Milwaukee’s hospitality industry, said people who’ve been in the restaurant coming from the convention have been polite and nice, but the restaurant hasn’t been busy. Reservations have been “pretty bare” and walk-ins were “not materializing either.”
“As we got close to the actual week of (the convention), just talking to people around in my circle, everybody kind of had a bad feeling,” he said. “Because there was nothing to show, there was nothing booked…In the restaurant industry, you can’t be busy every day, but to have a huge event like this with x-amount of people and however many millions into the economy, just…no.”
Of the event and its impact on the city, he added, “It’s nice to hype it up, but you have to be realistic about what’s actually happening.”
Some restaurants in close proximity to the convention haven’t been seeing increased activity from the convention, either.
At Brick 3 Pizza on M.L.K. Drive, just a few short blocks from one of the main convention entrances, they were expecting a tremendous amount of activity, but instead, “It hasn’t really been this slow in a while,” said Grace Micke, an employee working a full-day shift on Tuesday, adding that her boss said business was down 80% from the Monday of the prior week.
Another employee, Shane Abrahamson, said about 70% of customers they’ve seen are members of law enforcement, but otherwise, “It’s been really quiet. Insanely quiet, compared to the amount of people (we expected).”
“We thought there would be a line out the door,” added Micke.

Kelley Cramer, digital media and marketing manager for the Water Street Brewery Group, which owns Harp, Trinity, Vagabond and Brewery, said Monday was a little slower, but activity began to pick up the following day.”
In preparing for the week, he said, “It was a little hard to judge what it was going to be like, but I think it’s right on par with what we thought it was going to be.” The group also hosted a few private events early in the week, in addition to being open to the public for much of the week.
At Taco Mike’s, also on M.L.K. Drive, Reginald Hildy, a manager at the restaurant, said it’s been challenging to get in and out of the business, and delivery business through Uber Eats and DoorDash was down significantly, but was pleased with the overall level of activity, which he described as mostly “coming in waves.”
In many of these conversations, I asked if the shooting and assassination attempt that happened at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania had any impact on potential business happening during the week, and while some acknowledged the presence of increased security because of it, no one was saying the incident was having a real impact on business.
While the frustration and uncertainty from local businesses was abundantly evident throughout the week, it was also the case that those attending the RNC in Milwaukee — be it media, delegates, attendees, security, etc. — were effusive in their praise of the city and their time here. People had wonderful things to say about Milwaukee.
So, two things can be true about Milwaukee hosting the RNC: The impact locally, outside of the convention grounds, was undeniably underwhelming (sometimes staggeringly so), and people who attended the convention and experienced the city for the first time had overwhelmingly positive things to say about Milwaukee.
But let’s dig into this issue on what was happening locally a bit further. Based on my experience reporting at the convention grounds, in the area around the security perimeter, and throughout the city this week, there are a number of ingredients mixing together to create this somewhat unfortunate cocktail.
For one, this lackluster level of activity was not entirely unexpected. I had been reporting in the weeks running up to the RNC in Milwaukee about the concerns many were having about bookings and reservations not coming close to meeting lofty expectations, and unfortunately, many of those concerns were realized.
Celebrated downtown restaurant Lupi & Iris, for example, went from hoping to host large private events to re-opening their reservation books to the public (to a tepid response) to disclosing their disappointment to local media to closing entirely on the Wednesday of convention week. The Riverside Theater went from being one of the local venues toured by the RNC’s selection committee when they were deciding on a host city in 2022 to being vacant the week of the convention. Places like the Milwaukee Public Museum being closed to public and private events all week should have been a sign of things to come. Something was clearly broken in the planning process of this convention, and the RNC host committee did not appear to have the answers for the questions locals had been asking because the concerns of “overpromise and underdeliver” felt like the prevailing sentiment of the week.
Part of this is the nature of these kinds of conventions, though, too. As Phil Rocco pointed out back when Milwaukee was getting in the mix for the RNC, these kinds of events rarely provide the type of economic boon they’re promising. Many of the same concerns would have been there with the DNC four years ago. So, that’s another piece.
Another significant piece of this is a logistical one. Many delegations traveled to and from the convention by private buses. Leaving the grounds on the first night of the convention, I was directed to a large tent where attendees were lining up by the hundreds to get on a bus that would go directly to the hotel.
This is what that line of buses waiting to pick up attendees looked like from the pedestrian bridge that goes over McKinley to Winnebago.
There was a quality to this convention that made it feel like an all-inclusive resort. Food and drink was available on site, and much of the activity was contained within the stretch that includes the Baird Center, UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena, Deer District and Fiserv Forum — all within the security perimeter. There was plenty for people to be doing all in that one place, without having to deal with parking or security.
For all of the large events that Milwaukee hosts, there was really nothing at all like this. From the outside, Klinkammer said the only other event this compared to was “that first Summerfest back after COVID because everybody wanted to go down there, and it was a ghost town in here.”
Some of us may have expected this four-day event to compare with something like a Harley-Davidson anniversary celebration, where the city’s popular areas have motorcycles upon motorcycles parked out front, but with this convention, it was more self-contained into a kind of right-wing Disney World.
A Thursday Journal Sentinel story on frustration and disappointment over lack of activity in Milwaukee’s majority-Black Bronzeville neighborhood. While Mayor Cavalier Johnson told The New York Times the week before the convention that he hoped people would venture out and explore neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Angela Lang of BLOC expressed major doubts about this coming to fruition, essentially predicting this exactly during our live podcast on July 10.
Another ingredient here that can’t be overlooked is just how many people in Milwaukee wanted absolutely nothing to do with this convention. Milwaukee is a very blue city and today’s Republican Party is a very red party, and the fraught and fractured dynamic between the host city and the GOP here in the state of Wisconsin is indeed a factor. Many people chose to leave town this week.
Many downtown workers, too, even if they stayed in the area, were not downtown this week, as many offices were closed. Urban Milwaukee reported that some estimated that 50,000 visitors were arriving for the convention, but 80,000 downtown workers were not downtown. People working in the central business district weren’t there to provide regular business and other people who live in and around the city who might be regulars at restaurants and bars kept far away from the security zone and RNC festivities.


The level of protest activity, too, was next to nonexistent after the first day of the convention. The negotiated demonstration zones in Zeidler Square Park south of the convention grounds and Haymarket Square Park north of the grounds sat largely empty for the week, and the space once reserved for protest activity before Republicans raised concerns, Pere Marquette Park, was nearly vacant throughout the week, too.
And while no one was blaming this incident for lack of business, I also think it’s impossible to overlook the assassination attempt and shooting at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania that occurred roughly 24 hours before Sunday night activities got underway as a factor in all of this. The Daily Show changed their plans to broadcast from Milwaukee in the immediate aftermath, and security was especially intense around the convention on Monday. It wasn’t just occurrences like the false alarm at Aloft Hotel that we reported on, but on Monday, people who had to drive to work downtown had to wait in long security lines. Jonathan Dye of Mr. Dye’s Pies, located in 3rd Street Market Hall, told me he waited at a security checkpoint for nearly 90 minutes before getting into work. With the week starting like that, it certainly stands to reason that some were discouraged from dealing with those kinds of headaches after hearing what some were experiencing.
Not to be overlooked either is just what kind of party the Trump-era Republican Party is. For all their bombast about being a bigger-tent party in many of this week’s speeches, the reality is that this party continues to drift further and further toward frightening fringe territory. The “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!” signs handed out inside Fiserv Forum on Wednesday served as just one of many, many examples. And as the event wore on throughout the week, the convention at large — and Trump’s closing night speech – served as a reminder that this wannabe-authoritarian MAGA movement is one on the extreme end of right-wing politics and that is reflected in the scope of who might be up for making the trip to attend this event.
So, it is all of these factors. It is the disconnect between the convention and the community in the weeks and months before the RNC arrived. It is the all-inclusive resort nature of a convention like this. It is the overhyped economic impact of political conventions, generally. It is the politics of the party convening. It is how Milwaukeeans feel about the GOP considering how the GOP treats Milwaukee. It is the very real security concerns of the moment.
There’s also a longer-view piece at play especially where many of those advocating for this convention are concerned. This is the first time Milwaukee has hosted an eyes-of-the-world political convention like this, and for many, this is a proof-of-concept that hosting an event at this scale is something Milwaukee can do successfully. The uptick in overall convention interest and activity articulated by VISIT Milwaukee’s Peggy Williams-Smith in the weeks prior to RNC seems to indicate there’s momentum building in Milwaukee’s favor. Then again, that also might have something to do with the $456 million Baird Center expansion that was just completed this spring, and not entirely because of the big spotlight of the RNC.
It’s going to be important for Milwaukee to learn from this experience. Too many saw only opportunity with this convention and refused to reckon with reality when it turns disappointing or even tragic. Truth be told, there are far too many people in positions of power in this city who are afraid of their own shadow.
Our brand of Midwest Nice should be as welcoming and hospitable as we’ve been this past week, but we also can’t deny the evidence of our eyes and ears when confronted with uncomfortable truths. And the truth of the 2024 RNC is that it did not deliver for Milwaukee in a way that many hoped it would. And now, this lingering hangover is going to leave us with more questions than answers as those in the red hats roll out of town.
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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Is it because Republicans don't like to explore anything out of their comfort zone?
Subject: Re: Welcome to our community.
Ok I read my first newsletter however I’m appalled that you would put in something so ridiculous written by Dan Shafer I will go viral with his article and how you didn’t vet him to see if he is a journalist? Is a journalist supposed to be biased ? Unbiased or both I never read such nonsense in my 60 years plus he questions what happened to businesses in Milwaukee and listed some absolutely incorrect garbage I have ever read and I’m 100% not biased but now I see why there is such a divide in this country it’s not a particular party or candidate it’s journalist so with that you published his trash talk uneducated to say the least and so bad that now I half to take my time to set the story straight on this guy so I will be posting his article to my circle on different social media and maybe it will good for civic media short term because at least there will be people who have never heard of you will and maybe some will like your platform with or without Dans input but as an American not being interested in politics or the country’s divide I was appalled to read what I read I mean his article was so off the wall now I see the problem in this country I happen to know exactly what happened in Milwaukee as I have a close friend who is President of a certain bizness there ( hint )) I am going to show him this immediately and tell him I can no longer support him or his business if he has anything to do with Dan and I’m almost certain he knows this award winning journalist well if anyone wants to know the reason for the poor traffic at the RNC or Summerfest I have friends from Mo’s Steakhouse to Where restaurants go to Clothes Clinic to apartment rentals real estate agents and many commercial repair companies and they are in my inner circle so I’m going to have them read what Mr Shafer wrote
And personally do you think Civic Media is a better company with Dan in it ?
I’m not a journalist but I could write his article myself where it will help answer the question for every business in Milwaukee regardless of party choice or candidate preference how does being so biased help any company it’s 50/50 no matter where you go in each state in Milwaukee it’s 90/10 but so don’t you want the other 40% of any Wisconsinites to grow your company and ultimately help every business in Milwaukee does Dan or your company understand that a lot of wisconites who live outside of Milwaukee spend a fortune in Milwaukee? I go to Brewers , Bucks , Summerfest , Restaurants, Pabst Theatre , support food trucks it’s endless but me personal I spend 50k a year in Milwaukee and yes some is at Potawatomi 🤣call me an extremist but later today I’m alerting everyone I know that I’m no longer going to spend a dime in Milwaukee or whatever ward he supports I think 3rd and yes I sometimes get free games with the Bucks when I alert them about security fraud or fans having there credit cards compromised at the kiosk stations and my wife knows the Chief that’s the big chief at Potawatomi because she handles all the data communications their with AT&T , now I really understand how people like Dan and I don’t know enough about Civic Media and I don’t recall ever signing up for it but that’s a different issue entirely so no more $$$ from me city of Milwaukee or anyone that wants to be a part of my circle friend or business and maybe in some small way I can get Milwaukee to be the greatest city I thought it was when I first experienced it over 44 years ago and it was a great city until the last 15 years ago but I still supported it because it was my city and after reading Dan’s article it’s now Dans city and I have no idea how publishing what he wrote is going to help anybody in the city of Milwaukee and if I was going to vote I would vote for Kamala but I don’t see how hate or negative comments about anybody is going to help Milwaukee and unfortunately you hired him and gave him a platform and it’s a real ugly one some of my circle is afraid to go downtown now unfortunately I’m afraid too I don’t wanna be a part of supporting anyone who I feel is creating a divide amongst Wisconsinites aren’t we all responsible to bring everyone in this state together for the benefit of all of us ? Knocking any party or person or any of us is not a way to fix our issues, when do we all take the responsibility ourselves and stop the blaming again I hate being repetitive but tell me where in the article that he helps the 3rd district or and person in the great state of dairyland ? I will let be known when someone says let’s go to Milwaukee to Leon’s or Copps for some food or any of the hundreds of great places to go I’m now saying no this garbage has to stop
Thanks for reading $$$$ no more sorry
Tell Dan the award winning journalist that he just cost the city a few bucks get it ? And some bad news to some people I’m still sitting here at 6am shaking my head 🤷🏼♂️😢🫢 I don’t know maybe he will get a raise because he offended a Kamala supporter who knows