All eyes on battleground state Wisconsin as Republicans gather for national convention

On Saturday evening in downtown Milwaukee, people were making their way to dinner reservations and drinks with friends near Water Street, the city's nightlife district.

But some of them had the U.S. election on their minds, as news of gunfire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania spread and visitors descended on Wisconsin's largest city for the Republican National Convention, which opens Monday.

"We were actually walking down and talking about how we're really scared about these elections," said 26-year-old Milwaukee resident Laura Hernandez.

Hernandez, who listed abortion rights, immigration and Israel's war in Gaza as her top voting priorities, said she was first eligible to vote for president in 2016 — but she's never liked her options.

"It's been so exhausting. Every single year that I've been able to vote, I have to choose between two evils. And I feel like the same thing is happening this year, but even to a higher degree," she said.

"So at the moment I'm indecisive. I'm not sure what I'm going to lean towards, come November."

Wisconsin is one of the most critical battleground states in this year's U.S. election. For three decades, the Midwestern state was a brick in the "Blue Wall" — a term for states that reliably went to the Democrats from the '90s into the early 2010s.

That streak ended dramatically in 2016 when Donald Trump notched a shock win, helping him secure a marginal victory over Hillary Clinton. While President Joe Biden reclaimed Wisconsin during the 2020 election, his win was also remarkably slim: He won by less than one percentage point.

In fact, the last six presidential elections have each been decided by a difference of some 25,000 votes in Wisconsin, which has 10 votes in the electoral college.

"There's no reason to expect the state is moving away from that swing-state status and from a very close electorate," said Charles Franklin, a political pollster and director of the Marquette Law School Poll.

With the next election looming, each campaign is placing its bets on Wisconsin, where small voting blocs and swing counties have the potential to sway what is now considered a "purple" state — one that could determine who will sit in the Oval Office come January 2025.

Four years after the Democrats staged their convention in the city — albeit with in-person events curtailed due to the COVID-19 pandemic — Milwaukee will host Republican party officials and delegates at its Fiserv Forum this week.

As the GOP works to wrestle the state back from the Democrats, the RNC's setting is no coincidence, said Jonathan Kasparek, a political history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"It is very much to appeal to those sort of on-the-fence, independent voters that are perhaps reluctantly Republican," he said. "It's really [about] trying to court those votes."