The real reason putting the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee is such a brilliant move
The Democratic Party announced today that its 2020 Democratic National Convention will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is a brilliant move, but it has nothing to do with the fact that Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin in 2016, and everything to do with the manner in which the media portrayed the 2016 election, and how the media will portray the 2020 election.
If you’ve been paying attention to the facts, as opposed to the ongoing media hype, you know that Hillary Clinton had every reason not to campaign in Wisconsin. The internal and external polls told her that it was a safe state, so it would have been stupid to waste time campaigning in a state she knew she would win. Instead she spent that time in the states that she knew could have gone either way.
And if you’ve truly been paying attention, you know that Donald Trump only “won” Wisconsin and a few other key swing states because he conspired with the Russians to alter the outcome. The polls ended up being accurate in every state, except for those few swing states. Polls don’t naturally work that way; it’s obvious that the results in those specific states were altered. How was it done? Just ask the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quietly released a bipartisan report a year ago which confirmed that Russian hackers got into swing state voter registration databases just before the election, and were in position to delete voter registrations.
So yeah, Hillary Clinton didn’t make a mistake by skipping over Wisconsin, unless she was supposed to have had a crystal ball to tell her what the Russian hackers were specifically up to. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Even as the media has spent the past two years very gradually starting to admit that Donald Trump didn’t legitimately win the election, the media is still as obsessed as ever with pushing the narrative that Hillary blew it. This is because the media, which pushed endless phony scandals about Hillary in a blatant grab for ratings, knows it’s partly to blame for Trump being in power, and will never admit it.
Because the media will forever bang the phony drum about Hillary having blown it by not visiting Wisconsin, the general public now believes it. Even a lot of Democratic voters have fallen for this nonsense. And there’s nothing that can be done to correct this false narrative, because the media will always double down on it. This leaves only one option: play into it.
Because the Democrats have decided to hold their 2020 convention in Wisconsin, the media can’t push the narrative that the Democrats are “still ignoring white working class voters.” Instead the media will smugly say something along the lines of “Wow, the Democrats are finally learning from the imaginary mistakes they made in 2016.” The media will get to falsely pat itself on the back, but so what? The Democrats will shut down one of the talking points that the media was planning to use against them in 2020.
Will holding the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee cause more people in Wisconsin to vote for the Democrat in the 2020 election? Of course not. That’s not how anything works. There is no historical evidence that holding your convention in a state has resulted in better than expected election results in that state. But because the media will loudly praise the Democrats for holding their convention in Wisconsin, it’ll cause more people to vote Democrat nationwide. That’s how it works. The people in the middle vote for whichever candidate and party the media is beating up the least.
You can’t earnestly beg the media to stop pushing its ratings-friendly phony narratives. You can only shake up the chess board so the media has no choice but to abandon those phony narratives. The Republicans have long been particularly good at this, even if they’re not good at anything else. It’s refreshing to see the Democrats finally understanding how to play the media at its own game.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report