The major retail chain Kohl’s will not sponsor any events related to the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to take place from July 15-18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the company is based.
“Kohl’s is not a political organization nor donor and is not sponsoring nor engaging in any specific RNC events,” a spokesperson for Kohl’s said in a statement to CNBC on Thursday. “We support the business community through the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.”
“This is the same approach we took when supporting the Milwaukee community when the DNC was planned for Milwaukee,” a spokesperson for the company told Newsweek.
Kohl’s has not sponsored either convention for more than a decade, CNBC reported.
The Republican National Convention is expected to bring more than 50,000 people to Milwaukee next month to nominate former President Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee. Trump said on Thursday that he is considering announcing his vice presidential pick during the convention as well. His potential running mates include Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Tim Scott (R-SC), as well as Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
The convention is expected to greatly benefit Milwaukee’s economy and local businesses, as well as create more jobs in the hospitality sector, according to the city’s website.
“We think that it was a stark difference from the [Democratic National Convention] that was slated to happen in 2020 here,” Jacob Fischer, a spokesman for the 2024 Republic National Convention, told the Waukesha Freeman. “They sought other hotels, frankly a lot of hotels outside of Wisconsin, specifically Illinois, so the RNC made a commitment from the get-go that all of our hotel placements would be in Wisconsin.”
“We think Wisconsin is an important state and we wanted to make sure local businesses benefited from the convention,” he added.
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The convention will take place four days after Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11. He was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records last week.
Kohl’s’s decision comes after former RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told the Wall Street Journal that “virtually all of the Fortune 500 companies in Wisconsin” had pledged to support the event. Fiserv, a financial technology company, is one of the largest Fortune 500 Wisconsin companies sponsoring the convention, according to CNBC.