CHARLOTTE — “Law and order is on the ballot,” Vice President Mike Pence declared from the podium Monday afternoon at the Republican National Convention. President Trump decried Democratic mayors’ deference to rioters in cities such as Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and Seattle. “They’re pathetic,” Trump said. “They let them riot every night.”
The lawlessness and disorder in American cities this summer, as protests against police violence gave way to naked looting and anarchist violence and property destruction, provides a point of political light for a Republican Party on the decline.
Republican delegates in town for the shrunken convention expressed hope that voters, especially the heavily educated suburban voters who have been trending Democratic for 20 years, would recoil from the Democratic Party because of left-wing violence in Democrat-run cities. They made the case that this is a central issue in the election.
“Our law-and-order situation in this nation is totally out of hand,” Alabama Republican Chairwoman Terry Lathan told me Sunday morning when I asked her the biggest issue facing the country right now. “It’s being allowed to run amok.”
Lathan specified she was talking about “the violent protests. Not the protesters, but the violent protesters, especially antifa.”
Many other delegates shared these sentiments. “What we’re seeing in the streets of some of our major Democratic-controlled cities is indicative of what’s at stake,” Bruce Hough, a Utah delegate, told me. “We have to move forward in a way that honors the communities that need help and acknowledge that we have to do it in a way that is securing our rights of peaceful demonstration and security for businesses and for citizens.”
Support for the police is part of this pitch. Eddie Edwards is a former policeman, a former congressional candidate, a Trump delegate, and a black man. “One party certainly supports the police. One does not,” Edwards said. “I think the Democrats have abandoned the police in this country.”
The destruction of inner cities, while Democratic mayors capitulate, ought to move not only suburban voters, but urban black voters, some Republicans argued.
“Look at the riots” in Minneapolis, said Republican National Committeeman Rick Rice. “Republicans have had no say in that city for decades, look at the results. Democrats continually put out platitudes about nice things they’re going to do for the minority community. And what ends up happening? It’s the same old same old year in, year out.”
Baltimore congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik earned a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention after her campaign put forth a damning ad about the state of Democratic-run cities.
There’s some evidence that the issue is making the impact Republicans hoped. For one thing, violent crime is climbing in importance among voters, with nearly as many people in the United States (53%) saying it is very important for their vote as say the same about the coronavirus (63%).
But Democrats refuse to talk about it. Joe Biden has continuously refused to condemn looting, violence, and property destruction. He ignored the issue at his convention, and in his comments following a police killing of a black father in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Biden never even mentioned the subsequent senseless rioting.
But here’s the question: What does reelecting Trump have to do with any of this? The violence is happening while Trump is president. These are local law enforcement issues. It would make more sense for a Republican mayoral candidate in Portland or Minneapolis to bring it up, or even a presidential challenger, but the incumbent?
I asked Lathan this question. She replied, “The president has repeatedly said, ‘If you will, give me the opportunity, I’ll send federal troops in to help your city.’ If they choose not to do that, then they’re being complicit and aiding and abetting those that are destroying their cities.”
So maybe the mayors would be more likely to go along with Trump in a second term if it weren’t seen as aiding his reelection?
Hough, from Utah, speculated, “If the president is successful in his reelection effort, [it] is going to help lots of local elections as well.”
Trump, in his ad-libbed remarks Monday, put it this way: Look at Portland, Seattle, and now the conflagrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Were Biden elected, “This is the way our whole country would be.”
Outside of the convention center on Sunday, I ran into a protester, self-described “hip-hop Republican” Darius Mitchell. He was put off by this line of argument:
“You’re the party of Abraham f—ing Lincoln,” Mitchell said. “You’re the party of Frederick Douglass. And you’re dependent on people’s negative opinions of the riots to prop up why people should vote for you. That’s ridiculous.”
Maybe Trump this week, or Tom Cotton, can draw the rhetorical line that explains why rioting in Trump’s America would go away in Trump’s Second-Term America. But maybe they don’t need to make that case if Democrats continue to ignore the rioters destroying parts of American cities.
