Why the Republicans will convene in a forge of American socialism

Considering the recent pattern of American politics, the Republicans’ choice to hold their convention this July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is no surprise. Barack Obama easily won the state twice, but in the other four presidential contests this century Wisconsin was decided by less than 1% of the vote. Hillary Clinton, who did not even campaign there in 2016 against Donald Trump, lost the state by 23,000 votes. In 2020 Joe Biden did not repeat her mistake. The Democrats planned their convention for Milwaukee, before covid-19 intervened, and in the end he carried the state, though by just 21,000 votes out of more than 3.2m. Wisconsin is among the handful of swing states this year.

But look a little deeper into the political past and the choice of Milwaukee, a manufacturing hub on the western shore of Lake Michigan, says something more profound about the evolving contest between Democrats and Republicans. For a century Wisconsin’s dairy farmers and factory workers were at the leading edge of America’s labour movement and its progressive politics. Wisconsin created the country’s first progressive state income tax, its first unemployment-insurance scheme and its first workers’-compensation programme. Wisconsinites helped shape Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Although the city had never hosted a Republican or Democratic convention before 2020, it repeatedly hosted the Socialists. Milwaukee, which swelled with German immigrants in the second half of the 19th century, elected America’s first Socialist member of Congress and first Socialist mayor of a big city, in 1910. They were pragmatists, not revolutionaries. As that congressman, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrant named Victor Berger, put it, given the rights on offer in America it was “nonsense to talk of sudden bloody revolutions here, until the power of the ballot has been at least tried”. Milwaukee’s practical radicals became known as “Sewer Socialists” because of their passion for good government, including decent sanitation, parks, libraries and schools.

To Mr Trump, his competitiveness in Wisconsin is evidence that he has aligned the Republican Party with the interests of working people. “They say many of the rich people are with Democrats,” he declared in early May at a rally in Waukesha, west of Milwaukee. “We’ve become the party of the worker. We’ve become the party of the middle-income. It’s done a whole flip.” True to form, he overstates the case: a flip may be under way, but he has not completed the landing. Though Democratic candidates in Wisconsin have come to depend more on college graduates, most of their support is still from voters without a college degree.

But the biggest change in the composition of the Wisconsin electorate since 2012 has been an increase in the Republican advantage with white men who lack a college degree, from nine points to 23 points, says Charles Franklin, who conducts the esteemed Marquette Law School Poll. That shift began before Mr Trump appeared on the scene, under Governor Scott Walker, a more conventional conservative. The trend among white men flattened out late in Mr Trump’s term, and it has not been enough to prevent Democrats from winning almost every statewide election in Wisconsin after 2016.

The most recent Marquette poll, released in mid-April, had Mr Trump ahead 51 to 49. On closer inspection it seems surprising that Mr Biden is even in the hunt. “Trump gets a lot of credit for having accomplished a lot as president, and Biden gets very little,” says Mr Franklin. Mr Trump is seen as much more effective in handling the two issues Wisconsin voters care about most, the economy and immigration. Mr Biden has smaller advantages on the next two issues, abortion rights and Social Security and Medicare, and they are far less important to voters. But Mr Trump is weighed down by concerns about corruption and his temperament. As bad as much of that news is for Mr Biden, it suggests he has room to improve, if he can get word out about what he is doing in office. The election in Wisconsin will probably come down to independent voters who do not pay much attention until late in the race. In 2016 they broke to Mr Trump, and in 2020 to Mr Biden.

Back to the sewer

Borrowing from Roosevelt, Mr Trump closed his rally in Waukesha by promising that “the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer”. But to make the case for himself, Mr Trump relies on alternative history—had he remained president, there would have been no inflation, no war in Ukraine—and on Mr Biden’s failure to increase security at the southern border. Mr Trump can point to few policy accomplishments on behalf of working people: no infrastructure plan, no “much better and less expensive” health-care insurance. “I have a hard time seeing a clear policy agenda that they push at the convention,” Mr Franklin says. “I think he more embodies appeal to populism to working-class voters, rather than laying out some sort of agenda for how to improve working-class life.”

By contrast, Mr Biden has specifics to cite, though he is struggling to move projects along so people feel their benefits. The federal government is pumping more than $1bn into Milwaukee County to replace lead pipes, improve roads and more. Another $1bn has been allocated to rebuilding a bridge from Duluth, Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, over the largest port on the Great Lakes. In Racine, Wisconsin, on May 8th Mr Biden announced a $3.3bn investment by Microsoft in a data centre at a site once touted by Mr Trump for a giant factory for Foxconn, before it drastically scaled back its plan. The words “sewer” and “socialism” may never come back into political fashion, but maybe the renewed competition for the allegiance of the working class is starting to revive the ethos they once represented. ■

Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:
Joe Biden is practising some Clintonian politics (May 2nd)
The campus is coming for Joe Biden (Apr 24th)
Truth Social is a mind-bending win for Donald Trump (Apr 18th)

Also: How the Lexington column got its name