In a different election year, a place like Milwaukee’s Zeidler Union Square would surely have been teeming with people, marching around with Sharpied signs and chanting about fascism. Instead, the square, an official protest zone located a few blocks from the Republican National Convention, was like a scene from some postapocalyptic tale. This afternoon’s designated protest zone was a wide, mostly empty expanse of lush grass. In the middle stood a charming gazebo equipped with a microphone and sound system. But nobody appeared to be speaking. Orange-shirted security staff paced the premises, but they really could have saved their energy. There was no one to secure.
“We thought there would be people,” Stephen, a white-bearded protester from Janesville, Wisconsin, who preferred I use only his first name, told me. He’d just arrived with two friends, who were both blinking at the empty space. “I don’t even see a dog.”
You can usually expect plenty of picketing at party conventions—even though the protesters are banished, in this post-9/11 world, far beyond the Secret Service’s safety perimeter. Protesters swarmed the streets at the 2016 RNC in Cleveland; thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched on the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. That energy was conspicuously absent in Milwaukee, where Republicans appeared more and more confident. Five days ago, a man tried to kill their leader. Now here they were, in the land of beer and cheese, celebrating Donald Trump’s survival and the consolidation of the party behind his nomination. They were busy drinking free old-fashioneds at the CNN/Politico Grill—and perhaps even scrolling Zillow for townhouse prices in D.C.
This is an extremely weird moment for Democrats at all levels of the party. It’s confusing, because the demands to replace President Joe Biden on the ticket have been waxing and waning for weeks—without any satisfying resolution. Democratic staffers, operatives, and members of Congress keep telling reporters—albeit anonymously—that they are going to lose. This strange brew of emotions, cycling between hope and hopelessness, seems to be affecting grassroots Democrats too.
This week in Milwaukee, only one major demonstration has occurred: a modest-sized march on Monday afternoon, before Trump arrived in the city. Organizers estimated that 3,000 people had shown up that day, although some local news reports suggested numbers in the high hundreds. It was a “decent attendance,” Omar Flores, co-chair of Coalition to March on the RNC 2024, told me. Many demonstrators were not registered Democrats. Some were socialists; others were pro-Palestinian activists angry with Biden. The march coalition had had to file a lawsuit and fight with the city for a protest permit so close to the convention center.
Yet after the march, and all that negotiating, the activity died down. “I was kind of surprised,” Christine Sinicki, a Wisconsin state representative and the chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats, told me. “I thought, with all the legal battles, they would be protesting every day of the RNC.” (When I asked Flores, the organizer, where he and his allies had gone, he was defensive. Monday’s march took two years to plan, he said, and “all of us have full-time jobs.”)
News of straggler events came to me via whispers: Somewhere outside of the venue, one colleague had seen an esoteric performance-art demonstration about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 involving sand. I was sad to have missed it. Otherwise, the streets surrounding the convention have been quiet, save for the occasional tipsy delegate or errant reporter.
If fascism is imminent, then where was everybody?
That’s what Nadine Seiler was wondering. The 59-year-old had come all the way from Waldorf, Maryland, to be one of two protesters standing on a street corner near a Secret Service checkpoint, where attendees and reporters like me were entering the convention. “I Googled it, and America has at least 200 million adults over 18 years old,” she said. “Why, with democracy on the line, are there only two of us here?”
Seiler wore hot-pink lipstick and a T-shirt that read July 13 was a false flag. She told me that she didn’t actually believe that Republicans had staged the Trump assassination attempt. But Republicans had blamed January 6 on the FBI, so two could play that game. Democrats are “gutless and spineless,” she told me. “I am done being polite, and I am done being sane.”
This does not appear to be the reaction of most Democrats. Instead, in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, which resulted in the death of one rally-goer, Democrats have been lying low. Sinicki, the Milwaukee chair, said her team had canceled several local party events this week, in an effort to turn down the political temperature.
The sense of defeatism is strong. “I’ve been speaking with some top Democrats,” the reporter Robert Costa said on CBS News. “They believe that those Democrats who have concerns about President Biden are now standing down politically.” A Democratic source told Semafor that Trump “was already on track to win and the fact that he is now a victim of political violence rather than the perpetrator undermines Biden’s core appeal.”
But the few Democrats who showed up to protest at the RNC seem moved to action by that desperation. Another gaggle of Biden supporters who, like Stephen, had planned to spend the day at Zeidler park arrived yesterday looking bewildered.
Was there supposed to be a gathering here today? I asked. “We were certainly hoping that,” Jane, who came from North Milwaukee and, like others, chose to give only her first name, told me, “because I know that a lot of people feel as we do.” They’d seen a city website beforehand that suggested speakers would be appearing every 20 minutes. Obviously, no one had signed up to do so. Still, Jane was undaunted. “I decided to be hopeful today,” she said. “Democrats understand clearly what is at stake, and I think that they will figure out how to make that message be communicated, and energize people, because that’s really what needs to happen.”
Kim, a friend of Jane’s visiting from Vermont, looked around at the empty park. “I’m not quite as optimistic,” she said. She paused. “But I believe that the better nature of people will prevail.”
There may be reason for optimism—a change in the works. The Democratic National Committee this week delayed a vote that would have made replacing Biden more difficult, and Democratic leaders appear to be pressing him to stand down. Regardless, here in Milwaukee, the streets are mostly quiet.
Jane, Kim, and the others had laughed when I asked whether they had a moment for an interview. Here in the empty park, their carefully drawn signs resting on the grass, they had nothing but time.
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