The conventions are over and the general election campaign has finally begun. But what happened in Cleveland and Philadelphia certainly sets us up for the beginning of the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Although members of both parties who opposed the eventual nominees, along with bored political reporters, had hoped for contested conventions, they didn’t get them. Trump and Clinton entered and left the conventions the standard-bearers of their respective parties as anticipated.
When the delegates’ work doesn’t matter much, a convention is basically an extended television commercial for the nominee. The success or failure of a convention can therefore be decided by how effective the sales pitch was.
Clinton’s convention was dominated by a unified group of party leaders pushing a relentlessly disciplined message that their nominee was a longtime progressive champion of the people while Trump is a crazed, self-absorbed racist who might start a nuclear war. The speakers included some real political stars, including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton, along with some leading lights of the entertainment such as Meryl Streep, Katy Perry, Eva Longoria, Sarah Silverman and Lenny Kravitz.
There was always the risk that this line-up would upstage the nominee. Hillary Clinton is at best a workman-like public speaker, acknowledging in her acceptance speech that she wasn’t the top political talent in her family. (Chelsea Clinton, based on her introduction, is no Ivanka Trump herself.)
Yet Democratic organizers smartly left the night of Clinton’s big speech devoid of the party’s best orators. Andrew Cuomo, for example, does not match his late father in the speechmaking department. Many delegates, at least, feel she pulled it off.
“I’ve heard Hillary speak a number of times,” Clinton Wisconsin delegate Nancy Kaplan told the Washington Examiner. “This was undoubtedly the best speech ever. It was personal and it was clearly heartfelt. It’s been very hard for people to see her as both human and a leader. And I think she broke through tonight.”
“She knocked it out of the park and then some,” said South Carolina Clinton superdelegate Kim Cobb-Hunter. “It was factual, it showed skill, it showed compassion. It was a combination of substance and style. She has been accused of having more substance than style. But this time she had both.”
“She shut all the naysayers down and gave plans for what she wanted to do,” said Wisconsin Clinton delegate LaKieshia Meyers. “She gave a clear and concise contrast between herself and Donald Trump.”
“She’s proven that she can and she will be the leader of these United States,” said Louisiana Clinton delegate Lisa Diggs.
In contrast, Trump’s convention was split between mainstream Republicans who were at best timorous defenders of the nominee, family members and business associates, populist Republicans who were more full-throated Trump supporters and C-list celebrities.
While Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton in his convention speech and multiple times before, Ted Cruz pointedly did not (although he urged Republicans to turn out to vote, exclusively criticized Clinton and the Democrats, and did not encourage a vote for any other candidate).
Does that mean Trump’s convention was a failure? Based on the polls immediately afterward, the answer is no. House Speaker Paul Ryan may not have pushed Trump as aggressively as the president or Michelle Obama, to say nothing of the congressional Democratic leadership. Ryan mostly advocated his own free-market agenda, often at odds with Trump’s, and seemed to hope the businessman would be a signature machine for GOP bills if elected.
The pro-Trump speakers clearly had a lot of energy, however. And for once the GOP convention at least tried to match the Democrats in emotional intensity. The Democrats featuring DREAMers with 4.0 grade point averages in prime time was to be expected. Trump featured relatives of illegal immigrant murder victims, each of whom was as sympathetic a figure as a Democratic DREAMer.
“Only Trump will stand against terrorists and end illegal immigration,” said Jamiel Shaw, an African-American father of a young football star slain by someone who was living in the country illegally.
“These families have no special interests to represent them,” said Trump in his acceptance speech. “There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain.”
Then Trump went in for the rhetorical kill. “Instead my opponent wants sanctuary cities,” he said. “But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel?”
A C-list celebrity from sports or entertainment is still more famous than all but a handful of A-list politicians. Odds are more Americans can identify Carrot Top than House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The same is no doubt true of Scott Baio. Every Trump son or daughter who spoke hit it out of the park, even if Melania Trump’s otherwise successful speech was marred by plagiarism allegations.
The energy was greater in Philadelphia than in Cleveland, as more party regulars are Clintonites than Trump supporters. (Democrats also have twice as many delegates.) But that does not mean that is how it translated to the real audiences watching on television.
Finally, while Trump faced a more fractured party at the elite level, the Democratic convention revealed a lot of remaining dissension at the grassroots level, especially coming immediately after WikiLeaks appeared to confirm Sanders supporters’ worst suspicions about Democratic National Committee hostility.
Republican chairman Reince Priebus still has his job; Debbie Wasserman Schultz does not.
“I feel Clinton has a sketchy record that hasn’t supported … transparent partisanship,” Virginia Sanders alternate Patrick Auld told the Examiner. “She’s been in favor of fracking and still is as far as I know… And I don’t trust her at this point.”
Sanders delegates shouted antiwar slogans at former CIA Director Leon Panetta and retired Gen. John Allen. They screamed “Shame!” at Democratic delegates emerging from the subway in Philadelphia miles from the arena. A few of them even chanted their disapproval at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a progressive heroine defending Clinton.
Even those who were swayed channeled Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” dictum in dealing with the Soviets. “She said a lot of things that reminded me very much of Bernie Sanders, which I liked a lot. Stuff about climate change, healthcare, about the need for everyone to pay their fair share,” said New York Sanders delegate Kate Miller. “But it’s entirely up to us to make sure she holds to that.”
All this sets up an election in which Trump has generally been competitive in the swing states while surprisingly weak in a few Republican bastions, including Georgia, Arizona and Utah. If Trump holds Mitt Romney’s states and adds Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida he goes to the White House. But he’s also set up for a crushing defeat if he lets some of the 2012 red states slip and loses nearly all the battlegrounds, as Romney did.
Clinton has by most available measures a superior ground game to Trump, although the Republican National Committee has been adamant that this is exaggerated and they have always been prepared to take over this aspect of the fall campaign for the party’s nominee. She has led more often and Trump’s leads have seldom been outside a margin that would be safe from a Democratic organizational edge. The Democrats have the larger base in presidential election years.
But Democrats could be underestimating voter anger and the ease of Clinton reassembling the Obama coalition, which is highly dependent on groups who do not always turn out reliably. One of the blocs, younger voters, broke heavily against Clinton in the Democratic primaries and don’t remember the 1990s economic boom. They may be the one set of voters who heard something new in the Philadelphia convention’s attempt to “reintroduce” Hillary by telling stories that have been nationally known going on 25 years, like the quadrennial “new Nixon” of old.
Perhaps Trump shakes up the pre-existing electoral coalitions more than we currently think. Maybe the polls, especially live polling, is underestimating his support, although recent history has been unkind to such “poll unskewers.” Maybe there is a broader populist and nationalist wave in the Western world that Trump can ride to victory over Clinton.
Clinton is a tightly disciplined candidate who doesn’t excite but works hard, wants to win and takes few risks. Trump has shown keen gut-level political instincts, far better than many experienced politicians’, yet is prone to take big gambles, has trouble staying focused on one message, is perhaps overly dependent on earned media and lags organizationally.
It should be quite a ride.
Ariel Cohen and Ryan Lovelace contributed to this report.
