The Republican National Convention will feature wall-to-wall coverage of President Trump, but some supporters are wondering if the program does enough to appeal to the voters who turned Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin into red states, however narrowly, for the first time since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.
“There are a lot of different types of voters they need to appeal to and only so many hours in prime time over four days,” said a Republican strategist. “But this does seem like an omission.”
“If they had any brains they’d have them addressing the RNC from pivot counties in the Midwest, Florida, and the Rust Belt that Trump flipped from Obama,” tweeted commentator Ryan James Girdusky in response to a report that a major convention participant will be speaking from Jerusalem. Girdusky co-authored a book on national populism with Harlan Hill, a political strategist who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board.
The announced roster of GOP convention speakers is brimming with Trump family members, including first lady Melania Trump, sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, and daughters Ivanka and Tiffany Trump. The president himself will be featured daily in addition to delivering the traditional acceptance speech Thursday night. Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to give his acceptance speech on Wednesday night.
Also participating is a bevy of Republican heavyweights: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Kristi Noem, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Tim Scott, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
Some of Trump’s strongest supporters in Congress will also take the stage: Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri did not appear on the initial publicly released lineup.
Turning out Republican voters and convincing suburbanites the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is radical rather than centrist are important parts of the convention’s mission. But Trump Democrats, as well as infrequent voters of all stripes, especially among the white working class, were pivotal in 2016. Without them, Trump suffers the same fate as Mitt Romney before him, and Hillary Clinton becomes president.
According to estimates by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, Clinton lost somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of white Barack Obama voters without a college degree. These voters were overrepresented in Rust Belt states. Clinton also conspicuously failed to campaign in places such as Wisconsin, the intended site of the 2020 Democratic convention, in the waning weeks of that campaign.
The Trump campaign released a 50-point second-term agenda on Monday that was heavy on populism: creating 10 million new jobs in 10 months, bringing back a million manufacturing jobs from China, pursuing fair trade deals, making critical medicines and medical supplies in the United States, stopping “endless wars,” and making allies pay their fair share of defense costs.
Donald Trump Jr. is expected to make the case that Biden is bad for American workers.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Unlike the almost entirely virtual Democratic convention, Republicans are combining remote speeches with some live events from Charlotte, North Carolina, after the coronavirus disrupted both parties’ original plans. “They were smart to embrace the medium and tone things down — they did not try to replicate the pomp of an actual convention,” Republican strategist Alex Conant said of the Democrats. “The speeches were more like conversations, which worked well for their somber message.” Conant noted that Trump, by contrast, feeds off of speaking to live crowds, and party operatives have said for days that they are striving for a more upbeat, less gloomy tone.
Trump and Pence were both renominated by the delegates on Monday. The Republican platform is being preserved intact from 2016.
In remarks in Charlotte Monday that went longer than Biden’s formal acceptance speech, Trump thanked the delegates and urged people to “think of your life just prior to the plague.”
