How a Largely Democratic Milwaukee Is Feeling About Welcoming Thousands of Republicans

Milwaukee is days away from a rare turn in the international spotlight, with the Republican Party coming to town to nominate Donald J. Trump for the presidency.

Some voters in the city, which is heavily Democratic, described the convention as an exciting and long-awaited chance to showcase Milwaukee to the rest of the country. Others called the gathering a terrible idea that would disrupt daily life and, they suspected, do little to help the local economy.

But in interviews with more than two dozen residents of the Milwaukee area, the most common sentiments seemed to be some mix of qualified enthusiasm and stoic acceptance. Perhaps this was not the convention they would have chosen, but this was the convention Milwaukee got, and the city might as well make the best of it.

“I think there’s a lot of negativity about it, that’s what I’m hearing from friends,” Luke Johnson, 23, a Democrat and an engineer, said last weekend after finishing a jog downtown with his girlfriend. Still, he added, “I can’t help but be a little excited for it because you don’t get this kind of opportunity often.”

Living in the largest city in Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important swing states, Milwaukeeans are no strangers to the political stage. Digital billboards along the interstate cycle between messages criticizing President Biden and others denigrating Mr. Trump. Both candidates and their surrogates are regular visitors to the region. Journalists and pollsters have long examined the subtlest shifts in the local electorate — are suburbanites moving toward Democrats, or Black voters toward Republicans?