The mood here among Republicans in Milwaukee has been one of unmitigated glee—a sense that they’re about to cruise to victory in November, amplified by a seemingly endless parade of polls suggesting Donald Trump is on track to defeat Joe Biden, possibly in a landslide. They’ve been giddy about the swing state polls, gloating over Democratic fractures, and eagerly anticipating the next Biden stumble. “I think this is a 1776 moment,” Vivek Ramaswamy said at a Moms for Liberty event here this week, promising to usher in a “new Declaration of Independence in 2024.”
But for Democratic onlookers, the scene here has mostly just underscored how firmly Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP since it first nominated him for president in 2016. “He has completed the takeover of the Republican Party,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me Wednesday morning. “What’s striking to us across all of this is that there is a greater level of unity among Republicans in this convention than what we believe we saw in 2016,” added Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive Swing Left. “In terms of the rhetoric, it’s all tremendously aligned and sort of well orchestrated and pointing in a singular direction toward MAGA extremism.”
Indeed, while Republicans in 2016 nominated Trump with some reservations—“Vote your conscience,” Ted Cruz told the crowd that year after taking a heap of abuse from the nominee during the primary—they are now enthusiastically pledging their fealty. “God bless Donald J. Trump,” Cruz said in his speech this year, referring to the assassination attempt on the former president last weekend. Thank God, the Texas senator added, for “turning [Trump’s] head on Saturday as that shot was fired.”
“I don’t think that it is appreciated enough among Democrats,” Radjy told me, “how much very dangerous progress has been made in bringing the Republican Party together into the very narrow ideological lane of MAGA extremism.”
The selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate reflects that extremism—and could accelerate it, former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp told me. “It signals a continuation of [his] very populist rhetoric” and approach, the moderate said.
We were talking at the Youth VoteFest, a voter-engagement workshop on the campus of the old Pabst brewery. We were only about half a mile from the convention grounds, but the decidedly nonpartisan event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics seemed a world away—refreshing, after spending two days immersed in all that radical rhetoric.
Here, engaged college students spitballed ideas to get their peers to the polls. They also vented about a few reasons they might not turn out this year, including that the current administration does not have a “trustworthy track record” and that “people are just upset about each party’s candidate.” In short: The state of affairs has made them deeply cynical.
That cynicism, I think, is a major challenge for Democrats this year: While the party’s record on abortion, the economy, and a host of other issues is more aligned with the electorate than that of their opponents, and many Democratic candidates—like Senator Tammy Baldwin here in Wisconsin—are polling well, Biden seems to be struggling to connect. Throughout the race, he’s been fighting against abysmal approval ratings and unfavorable polls, including in battlegrounds like the Dairy State. But his disastrous debate performance last month exacerbated the issue and deepened concerns about his age and acuity, leading a number of high-profile Democrats—most recently the prominent California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff—to call on him to drop out. Biden’s response, and that of his inner circle, may also be putting the party’s credibility at risk. Can they overcome all that to stave off an extreme second Trump term?
“I don’t think Democrats are divided as much as they are deeply concerned,” Heitkamp told me. And while the enthusiasm for the party may be presenting itself “more as anxiety” right now, said Wikler, “at a certain point it’s a binary choice.”
“There’s an enormous number of people across the country who think that Trump should never get in power,” Wikler added. “Their vote can decide whether Project 2025 becomes a reality or not.”
