The 2018 Miss Wisconsin USA competition is the pageant that selects the representative for the state of Wisconsin in the Miss USA pageant. Since 2008, the state pageant has been directed by Future Productions of Savage, Minnesota.
Wisconsin is one of the least successful states in the Miss USA system with only seven placements in over sixty years. The state's highest placing was Mary Cook earning 2nd runner-up in 1974, and they had no placements from 1979 until 2007, when Caitlin Morrall made the top fifteen. In 2005, Melissa Ann Young won the Miss Congeniality award and Elyzabeth Lee Pham won Miss Photogenic in 1999; and Katherine Patrice Redeker was awarded the Miss Photogenic prize at the 2016 Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Every year, each state holds a preliminary competition to choose their delegate for the Miss USA pageant. In some states (such as Texas and Florida), local pageants are also held to determine delegates for the state competition. The state winners hold the title "Miss State USA" for the year of their reign.
The most successful state is Texas, which has had the most semi-finalists and winners, including five consecutive Miss USA titleholders during the 1980s.[22] Other successful states include California, New York, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. The least successful states are Delaware, placing only once in 2015; Montana, which has not placed since the 1950s; South Dakota, which has only placed three times (the last time in 2016), and Wyoming, which gained only its second placement in 2010. The only state which has produced more than one Miss Universe is South Carolina.
The Miss Universe Organization licenses out the state pageants to pageant directors, who in some cases are responsible for more than one state. The most well established directorial groups are RPM Productions, created in 1980 (Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina), and Vanbros, created in the early 1990s (Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma). Future Productions direct the most states, seven, across the Midwest and Rockies.