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When Wisconsin hosts the Republican National Convention next week, it will welcome former President Donald Trump, but the relationship between Trump and some of the state's best-known Republicans is complicated. Wisconsin Public Radio's Rich Kremer reports.
RICH KREMER, BYLINE: Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Wisconsin Republicans were riding high. Janesville native Paul Ryan was speaker of the House, and former Governor Scott Walker was surfing a wave of conservative support, following a major battle with public employee unions. In the summer of 2015, he launched his presidential campaign in Waukesha.
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SCOTT WALKER: If our reforms can work in a blue state like Wisconsin, they can work anywhere in America.
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KREMER: But about a month before Walker launched his campaign, another candidate in New York scooped up attention.
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DONALD TRUMP: We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.
KREMER: Trump's momentum changed everything, especially for the once-rising stars of Wisconsin. Charlie Sykes hosted a conservative radio talk show in Wisconsin at the time. He quickly became a leading voice for the Never Trump movement.
CHARLIE SYKES: There was a feeling that maybe Republicans in Wisconsin were going to be a firewall against Trumpism, and, of course, that turned out to be a speed bump.
KREMER: When Walker folded his presidential bid just 70 days after launching it, he called on other GOP candidates to follow his lead. He basically wanted voters to focus on an alternative to Trump. Trump went on to clinch the nomination and the presidency in 2016, narrowly beating out Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin. As for Ryan and Walker, Sykes says their influence waned.
SYKES: Paul Ryan is now excommunicated and exiled, and Scott Walker is on Twitter, I guess.
KREMER: Twitter, of course, is now called X. Earlier this year, speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Ryan said he would not vote for Trump in November.
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PAUL RYAN: MAGA has basically taken over our party. It is the establishment, and it has pushed people like me out, because it's populism untethered to any form of principle, but to a cult of personality.
KREMER: Republican strategist Mark Graul of Green Bay ran George W. Bush's 2004 reelection bid in the state. He agrees with Ryan, saying Trump has transformed the party to focus on personality instead of policy.
MARK GRAUL: We talk about, you know, absentee ballot boxes more than we do about, you know, crippling debt, so it's just - we'll see. I do think it'll change back. I just think it's going to take a while for that to happen.
KREMER: In 2020, Trump lost Wisconsin to former Vice President Joe Biden by nearly 21,000 votes. This year, candidates other than Trump who had already dropped out of the GOP presidential contest received about 20% of the Wisconsin GOP primary vote. Yet in the days leading up to the convention, the party is uniting around the former president, and that can also be seen talking to some likely Republican voters.
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KREMER: Over the Fourth of July weekend, at a demolition derby south of Eau Claire, Trump was a crowd favorite. Elizabeth Sebena of Eau Claire plans to vote for Trump in November because of his different brand of politics.
ELIZABETH SEBENA: He definitely maybe doesn't say everything, you know, like other politicians would, but I think that's what we need. We don't need somebody who's, like, a career politician.
KREMER: Wisconsin, with its penchant for razor-close elections, is considered one of the most important battlegrounds in this year's presidential race. Trump, Biden and their surrogates have been crisscrossing the state.
For NPR News, I'm Rich Kremer in Eau Claire.
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