Milwaukee selected as the host city for the 2020 Democratic National Convention

It’s offi­cial: the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty will gath­er in the Mid­west to nom­i­nate its next stan­dard bear­ers for Pres­i­dent and Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee announced today that Mil­wau­kee — Wis­con­sin’s largest city — will host the Con­ven­tion from July 13th-16th, 2020.

The con­ven­tion’s antic­i­pat­ed four gen­er­al ses­sions will take place at the new­ly-built Fis­erv Forum, where the NBA’s Mil­wau­kee Bucks play, while addi­tion­al activ­i­ties like cau­cus and coun­cil meet­ings will take place at near­by venues, like the Wis­con­sin Cen­ter, UW’s Pan­ther Are­na, and Miller High Life Theater.

The 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion will be the first held in the Mid­west in decades, and the first held in a Mid­west­ern city oth­er than Chica­go in over a cen­tu­ry. It will be Wis­con­sin’s first ever major par­ty con­ven­tion, as well.

“This was­n’t easy,” said DNC Chair Tom Perez. “We start­ed out with almost ten cities, and we nar­rowed it down to three — three spec­tac­u­lar cities. Mia­mi, Hous­ton and Mil­wau­kee. They had spec­tac­u­lar bids that they put forth.”

“It took us a lit­tle longer because we had an envi­able dilem­ma. While the choice of Mil­wau­kee does not guar­an­tee suc­cess, where you hold your con­ven­tion is a strong state­ment of our val­ues, and who and what we’re fight­ing for.”

“The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is the par­ty of work­ing peo­ple, and Mil­wau­kee is a city of work­ing peo­ple,” Perez added. “I want to thank the lead­ers in Hous­ton and Mia­mi for all their hard work through­out this process. They both put for­ward com­pet­i­tive pro­pos­als that I’m sure will lead them to host­ing future conventions.”

“This is a great day for the city of Mil­wau­kee and for the state of Wis­con­sin,” Mil­wau­kee May­or Tom Bar­rett said. “Mil­wau­kee is a first-class city, and we are ready to show­case Mil­wau­kee on one of the largest stages in the world.”

“We all know that com­pe­ti­tion for con­ven­tions like this is fierce,” Bar­rett added in remarks to the press. “There’s com­pe­ti­tion from the East Coast, there’s com­pe­ti­tion from the West Coast, there’s com­pe­ti­tion from the Gulf Coast. And I am here today to wel­come all of Amer­i­ca to Amer­i­ca’s fresh coast.”

“There is no bet­ter place to show­case the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s vision for the future than in Wis­con­sin,” U.S. Sen­a­tor Tam­my Bald­win said. “The Mid­west is a crit­i­cal bat­tle­ground and will be key to secur­ing a bet­ter future for America.”

“Mil­wau­kee will be ready to host a tremen­dous expe­ri­ence for all of our vis­i­tors and res­i­dents,”  Mil­wau­kee Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Chris Abele said.

“We will fea­ture Mil­wau­kee as a place that respects and val­ues all peo­ple, a core belief of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty – it’s an event I’ll be thrilled for us to host.”

The 2020 DNC is expect­ed to cost over sev­en­ty mil­lion dol­lars to stage.

As Perez said, Mil­wau­kee was cho­sen over two south­ern cities, Hous­ton and Mia­mi, which had also been named final­ists by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee. A major logis­ti­cal strength of Mil­wau­kee’s bid was that it had a brand new are­na to offer as the cen­ter­piece of its pitch — the afore­men­tioned Fis­erv Forum.

The 730,000 square foot Forum is so new that it had yet to open when Perez and top Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty offi­cials toured it last year. It can accom­mo­date 17,341 peo­ple for bas­ket­ball and 18,000 peo­ple for con­certs. The low­er bowl seats 10,000.

It was built with thir­ty-four suites, six load­ing docks, 300,000 pounds of rig­ging capa­bil­i­ty for events, ten ele­va­tors, ten esca­la­tors, more than 9,000 LED light fix­tures, and thir­ty-four large pub­lic restrooms — nine­teen of which are for women. There are eight hun­dred high def­i­n­i­tion tele­vi­sions in the are­na as well. An enter­prise-lev­el net­work of Wi-Fi hotspots pro­vides fast, free high speed Internet.

Skep­tics of Mil­wua­kee’s bid have ques­tioned whether the city has enough hotel rooms to accom­mo­date thou­sands of del­e­gates, media rep­re­sen­ta­tives, VIPs, guests, and vol­un­teers. The city’s orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee is con­fi­dent it does.

“We have enough hotels,” Mil­wau­kee 2020 Chair Alex Las­ry said in response to com­ments about the Brew City’s capac­i­ty to lodge guests.

Thank­ful­ly, sev­en new or ren­o­vat­ed hotels are due to open in down­town Mil­wau­kee before the con­ven­tion occurs, increas­ing down­town’s capac­i­ty by over ten percent.

“The con­ven­tion could be a short ride or walk from all of the new hotels,” reports Urban Mil­wau­kee. “Each of the hotels is with­in a block of a street­car stop. Ser­vice on The Hop [Mil­wau­kee’s street­car line] is required to be free for the con­ven­tion. The con­ven­tion is sched­uled to run from July 13th through July 16th and the city is work­ing on an exten­sion to the con­ven­tion center.”

“The hotel com­mu­ni­ty came togeth­er and said, ‘Look, we got to make this hap­pen. And the way to make this hap­pen is to com­mit all of our rooms to this,’ ” said Greg Mar­cus, Pres­i­dent & CEO of the Mar­cus Cor­po­ra­tion, which is allot­ting all of its hotel rooms for use by peo­ple com­ing into town for the convention.

“The heavy lift­ing, I think so far has been real­ly get­ting ready and try­ing to con­vince, and teach and edu­cate the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee that we had the infra­struc­ture that we had the hotel rooms, that we have the event space, that we have the things they need,” Mar­cus added in remarks report­ed by WISN.

Although Mia­mi mount­ed a spir­it­ed effort to secure the Con­ven­tion, Perez ulti­mate­ly set­tled on Mil­wau­kee. It could­n’t have hurt that Perez’s wife is from Wauwatosa, Wis­con­sin… or that the cou­ple were mar­ried in Mil­wau­kee… or that one of their daugh­ters attends the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin at Madison.

Hous­ton’s bid was sig­nif­i­cant­ly ham­pered by a labor dis­pute between the city’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic may­or and its fire­fight­ers as well as glar­ing financ­ing prob­lems. Hous­ton’s major indus­try is fos­sil fuels and par­ty offi­cials were not keen on a 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion financed with oil and gas money. 

Mil­wau­kee also has an advan­tage over Mia­mi and Hous­ton with respect to its sum­mer cli­mate. Its aver­age July high is 83 F; its aver­age July low is 63 F.

Here’s how that com­pares to Hous­ton and Miami:

• Aver­age high for July 
  • Hous­ton: 93 F
  • Mia­mi: 91 F
  • Mil­wau­kee: 83 F
• Aver­age low for July 
  • Hous­ton: 76 F
  • Mia­mi: 77 F
  • Mil­wau­kee: 63 F

Where the Brew City real­ly shines, though, is its low­er dew point.

Mia­mi and Hous­ton both have the exact same aver­age dew point in July… 74 F. Mil­wau­kee, on the oth­er hand, has an aver­age July dew point of just 61 F.

Why is this relevant?

Because dew point is the best indi­ca­tor of com­fort out-of-doors. It’s “the tem­per­a­ture to which air must be cooled at con­stant pres­sure and water con­tent to reach sat­u­ra­tion”. When the dew point gets above six­ty-five degrees or so, it starts to feel pret­ty mug­gy and sticky. Every­one’s com­fort lev­el is dif­fer­ent, but there’s no deny­ing that when the air is loaded with mois­ture, it’s hard­er to perspire.

Mil­wau­kee sits at a lat­i­tude sim­i­lar to that of Rose­burg, Ore­gon, and Boise, Idaho.

Seat­tle and Port­land (Ore­gon) enjoy a long dis­tance rail link with Mil­wau­kee thanks to Amtrak’s fab­u­lous Empire Builder, while Alas­ka and Delta each offer one dai­ly non­stop flight in each direc­tion between Seat­tle and Mil­wau­kee. No non­stop ser­vice between Mil­wau­kee and oth­er North­west cities is avail­able from a major carrier.

In light traf­fic, Mil­wau­kee is about a thir­ty and a half hour dri­ve (1,946 miles) from Seat­tle via Inter­state 90 and Inter­state 94. A road trip from Port­land to Mil­wau­kee takes longer because Inter­state 90 fol­lows a more norther­ly alignment.

A road trip from Boise is quick­er because the cities are about at the same lat­i­tude and two rea­son­ably direct routes are avail­able to the motorist.

Wis­con­sin will be a bat­tle­ground state in 2020. Wis­con­sin had been in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic col­umn for decades before Hillary Clin­ton nar­row­ly lost it to Don­ald Trump. Democ­rats are anx­ious to reclaim Wis­con­sin as a blue state in 2020. The par­ty took a major step towards that goal last year by final­ly van­quish­ing for­mer gov­er­nor Scott Walk­er, who was defeat­ed in his reelec­tion bid by Tony Evers.

The Repub­li­can Par­ty will host its 2020 Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, from August 24th-27th — more than a month after the DNC. Char­lotte pre­vi­ous­ly host­ed the 2012 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion sev­en years ago.