Democrats picked Milwaukee on Monday to host their 2020 national convention, setting up the party's standard-bearer to accept the presidential nomination in the heart of the old industrial belt that delivered Donald Trump to the White House. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez chose Milwaukee over Houston and Miami after deliberations lingered longer than party leaders or officials from the three finalist cities had expected, the AP reports. "This choice is a statement of our values," Perez said in a statement. "The Democratic Party is the party of working people, and Milwaukee is a city of working people." The convention is scheduled for July 13-16, 2020. Republicans are set to gather in Charlotte, the largest city in battleground North Carolina, on Aug. 24-27, 2020.
It will be the first time in over a century that Democrats will be in a Midwest city other than Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate. Instead, the political spotlight will shine for a week on a metro area of about 1.6 million people. Once dubbed as "The Machine Shop of the World," the famously working-class city also is known for its long love affair with beer and as the birthplace of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. "A lot people feel that we lost (in 2016) because this area had been ignored—whether it's from a political standpoint or whether it's from a governing standpoint," says the state's first black lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, one of the members of the convention bid committee. Holding the convention in Milwaukee, Barnes added, says "we are ready to reinvest in the Midwest, that the Midwest matters again."
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