Welcome to the ticket. I'm Isaac Dauver. In the Milwaukee Airport there's a space right past the TSA checkpoint that's called the recombobulation area.

It's where you go to get your shoes back on and get yourself back

together before your flight. Like in any airport, but there it's the quirky twist on Midwest Nice.

You can even buy from a wide selection of recombobulation area t-shirts right by the gates.

When I was there a few months ago I thought to myself maybe I should get a shirt and then I thought

I'm laid for my flight it's okay I'll get one when I'm back for the Democratic Convention.

Of course, with the pandemic disrupting the conventions, Wisconsin didn't get its time at the center of politics.

Milwaukee was supposed to be the Democratic Party's own recombobulation area,

where the mess of the primaries got stuffed into a neat package.

The choice of a site for a convention is never an accident.

If the 2020 race is about undoing the mistakes of 2016 for Democrats,

Wisconsin is the obvious place to start.

Hillary Clinton famously never visited during the general election and then lost by 30,000 votes,

making her the first Democrat to lose there since 1984.

Despite its democratic history, Wisconsin has shaped national conservative politics. Paul Ryan, Rites Pribus, In the and now policing have all centered in the state.

In the 2018 elections, Democrats won around the country

and hoped to build a model for what the Trump-era Democratic Party looked like.

Wisconsin offered a template, an older, more moderate white guy, and a 31-year-old

progressive black man. That'd be Governor Tony Evers, and Lieutenant Governor Mandel Barnes, who is my

guest this week.

Even without the Convention, the political world focused on Wisconsin anyway.

After Jacob Blake was shot seven times in Kenosha, the state has seen protests and now three more people

...