Who benefits?
It’s the age-old question when a new situation arises. This year, it is a question Republicans are pondering as their nominating convention follows close on the heels of the Democratic event. Republicans tomorrow enter unchartered territory. Never before have the two major parties held their conventions back-to-back — and the political ramifications are uncertain.
Regardless of how closely the conventions follow each other , conventional wisdom says that whoever goes last has an edge. Just as in poker, it’s always advantageous to see the opponent lay his cards on the table first. (The party with the incumbent president, by tradition, always goes last.)
What’s different this time is that the conventions aren’t separated by several weeks, as they usually are, but only by three days.
At first glance, this would seem to mean that the advantage of going last would be magnified. Before the Democrats can build on any momentum their own convention created — the proverbial “bounce” in the polls — the Republicans can grab the spotlight.
“The bounce [for the party that goes first] is usually enhanced by the lack of a counter message because of the downtime between conventions,” conservative pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz told The Examiner. “This time, the Dems don’t even get 24 unchallenged hours. The GOP is damn lucky or damn smart to schedule this way.”
Howard Wolfson, the former communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was at first inclined to agree.
“I’m not really sure what the advantages would be for the Democratic Party,” he said, a few hours before Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. “I’d rather go second than first … [because] a marginal advantage goes to the party that goes second.”
Then Wolfson paused to think.
“On the other hand,” he mused, “Obama could be so good tonight that McCain could appear to be by comparison sort of boring and pedestrian. Because the conventions are so close, people could be able to compare his speech to Obama in a way they couldn’t [if the Democratic convention were less fresh in people’s minds].”
The chronological proximity of the convention causes other problems for Republicans. When the galas were a month apart, the party that went last had plenty of time to absorb the message of the opponents’ convention, plan a response, poll-test those plans, and then sharpen its own convention message accordingly.
Even with a full month to respond to Democrat Mike Dukakis’ convention in 1988, the elder George Bush’s political guru Lee Atwater spent the weekend before the GOP convention in a nervous, foul mood, barking orders and expletives as he worried that too many considerations had fallen through the cracks.
With just three days to react to Obama’s convention extravaganza, the pressure on McCain’s team to craft the best response may be all the more intense.
