National convention seating arrangements are the prerogative of the presumptive nominee. That’s the quick lesson from a tour of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans arena the afternoon before the convention opens.
Right in the front row center is New York — Donald Trump’s home state and also the first state where he won more than 50 percent of the vote. At the far end of the hall, stage left, in an area apparently carved out of the spectator seats when basketball games are being played there (there isn’t such an area at the stage right side of the hall), are the seats set out for the delegations from Wyoming and Colorado, where Trump got pretty much shut out in party conventions. You can scarcely see the podium from there, as this picture taken by my colleague Philip Klein makes clear.
(Phil Klein/Washington Examiner)
Similarly distant, off in another corner, are the delegations from the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. You might call this the Rubio corner: He won the D.C. primary and the Puerto Rico primary, his only other victory being in the Minnesota caucus. Also at the back, on the opposite side of the floor is Utah, where Trump finished third, far behind Ted Cruz, with a pathetic 14 percent of the vote.
(Phil Klein/Washington Examiner)
This reminds me of a story I heard at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. In the hallway of the convention hall I ran into members of the Washington State challenge delegation, George McGovern backers who objected to a party convention which awarded Henry Jackson all of his home state’s delegates.
They were backing the winning nominee, but they figured that they were going to lose their challenge when they checked into their assigned hotel on Saturday and took the elevator to a high floor. It was a kosher hotel in South Beach, it turned out, and on Shabat every elevator stopped at every floor so that observant Jews would not have to push a button. Sure enough, they weren’t seated.
