Republican Convention: Live Coverage Of The Final Night

Fran Tarkenton, the football Hall of Fame quarterback, told a story a few minutes ago about Vince Lombardi in order to illustrate the state of the country. I’m not sure Lombardi would have liked his name being used at a Republican National Convention. He was a Kennedy Democrat and an early supporter of gay rights.

Besides all the bigwig politicians in Cleveland for the GOP convention this week, there’s a host of local analysts and academics, including Paul Sracic, the chairman of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Youngstown State University. Ohio is a very, very tight race this year — the FiveThirtyEight model has it nearly even, with the polls-only model giving Clinton a 52 percent chance of winning its 18 electoral votes. According to Sracic, the Democrats have two very big reasons to fret about Ohio, and their names are Trumbull and Mahoning. The two counties — which are in the eastern part of the state and include and surround Youngstown — went for Trump during the Ohio primary, Trumbull by 18.5 points and Mahoning by 13.2 points, breaking with the statewide trend for Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Moreover, looking at the total votes in, the Democrats no longer enjoy a vast disparity in turnout. Based on data Sracic sent to FiveThirtyEight, there were 81,558 Democratic primary votes to 13,234 GOP primary votes in Mahoning County in 2008. Even in the uncontested Democratic primary of 2012, there were 33,593 votes to 15,278 GOP primary votes. This time around, Sracic said, that turnout advantage was eliminated: 36,887 Democratic primary votes in Mahoning to 34,982 GOP votes. Sracic doesn’t think Trump can outright win the two counties — Republicans don’t typically clear 40 percent there in presidential elections, and he’d be “completely shocked” if Trump won them. But he can pull votes there, he said, and that’s an issue for Democrats. “If they don’t get votes out of Trumbull and Mahoning counties,” he said, “they don’t have many more places to get them.” In 2012, a little more than 30,000 Republicans voted in the primary in Trumbull and Mahoning counties combined. In 2016, more than 61,000 did, and Trump won more than half of them. That may keep Democrats up at night.

This is video of motivational speaker Brock Mealer, who learned to walk after a devastating accident, leading the Michigan football team onto the field. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUZr-9NdOwY

If Trump really says what he’s supposed to say, per the leaked transcript, he’s painting a dire picture about crime and law enforcement in the country. Some of it is largely correct, though also lacking in context. For instance, he’s right that Chicago is facing a big violence problem — in part, as Rob Arthur and Jeff Asher documented on our website, because of a slowdown in law enforcement activity. He’s right that murders rose by more than 15 percent in the biggest cities last year — but it looks like the increase was smaller in the rest of the country, and the overall murder rate remains well below what it was 20 years ago. And he’s right that more officers have been fatally shot this year than this time last year, after five officers were killed in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this month. But overall line-of-duty deaths are level with this time last year, and the job of policing overall has gotten much safer over the last four decades.

Some useful context for Trump’s rather dark and pessimistic speech tonight: According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans satisfied with the direction of the country has dropped to 17 percent, sharply down from 29 percent in June. That timing might seem to be helpful for Trump. It’s also possible that the drop in satisfaction is caused in part by Trump, who is striking law-and-order themes on the campaign trail and drawing attention to terrorist attacks and attacks on police officers. On the flip side, as I wrote earlier this week, it’s not clear that Americans will see Trump as the remedy to a world they perceive to be in chaos, even if they agree with his diagnosis of the problem. Instead, Clinton has the edge on some issues that have risen in importance; Americans prefer her to handle race relations by roughly a 2-to-1 margin over Trump, for example.

Who will Americans trust if the world is in crisis?

ISSUE	PREFER CLINTON	PREFER TRUMP	MARGIN
Race relations	62%	27%	Clinton +35
Foreign policy	57	33	Clinton +24
Health care	52	34	Clinton +18
International crisis	54	36	Clinton +18
Middle class	48	36	Clinton +12
Immigration	50	41	Clinton +9
Trade	46	42	Clinton +4
Guns	43	41	Clinton +2
Terrorism	44	47	Trump +3
Economy/jobs	41	48	Trump +7

Harry, as we’ve mentioned, there are more than 20 times the proportion of black speakers as black delegates. One theory holds that since Trump is consistently racially controversial, the black speakers have a function of making the majority of delegates feel they cannot be racially regressive if the speaker roster is so diverse. Sort of a version of the “some of my best friends are black” theory.

This is definitely more amped than last night.

This is my first night live-blogging from the hall, and the crowd seems hyped! Was it this way early in the night all week?

I just pulled aside Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who I spotted on the floor of Quicken Loans Arena here in Cleveland, and asked him about whether Team Trump needs a win out of tonight to make up for the pretty obvious hiccups this convention has had. “There’s been a lot of effort to make mountains out of mole hills,” Sessions said. “Tonight’s speech is going to add a lot of people.” “People are going to grow to like him from now to November,” Sessions said when asked if the convention was doing anything to help improve the businessman’s reputation. A video trumpeting how welcoming the Trump corporation is to women and minorities seemed to tease the fact that Trump’s daughter Ivanka would be speaking later. “I think the family has been very helpful,” Sessions said, laughing, when asked about the Trump daughter’s speech. And his role in a possible Trump administration? “I do believe he’s saying things to middle America, and I want to help.”

Black preachers have gotten some of the loudest applause of any of the RNC speakers. Pastor Mark Burns just had the delegates on their feet, as he said “all lives matter.”

The leaked transcript of a draft of Trump’s acceptance speech, steeped in populist rhetoric and speaking of a “moment of crisis for our nation” and “chaos in our communities,” is provoking strong and polarized reactions in my Twitter feed, with some liberal commentators claiming it’s an awful speech and some conservative ones saying they expect it to be highly effective, whether or not they agree with his substance. Conservatives and liberals on Twitter disagree? I’m shocked, shocked! Well, yeah, ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal. But conservative intellectuals have often been just as anti-Trump as liberal ones, so this is at least a little bit of a change.

We’ve made it, everyone! It’s the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump and a host of other speakers are left to try to salvage what I’d argue has so far been a lackluster convention. Tonight’s theme is “Make America One Again,” which I guess is a statement about unity. And Republicans need it after Wednesday night: Ted Cruz refused to endorse Trump and got booed — then Trump entered the arena just as Cruz was finishing his speech, in a moment that seemed more WWE than party convention. Reflecting the oneness Republicans want to present, the list of speakers is broad. It includes elected officials (such as Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin) and business leaders (such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel). We’ll hear from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump. None of these speakers is a huge star, but the Trump children have been generally well-received so far. Of course, the evening is really about Donald Trump. Trump hasn’t seemed to master speaking with a teleprompter. Can he do so tonight? We know Trump can speak off the cuff, but comments made without a teleprompter have led to Trump trailing Clinton by a wide margin when Americans are asked who has the temperament to be president. Trump needs to reassure wary voters that his personality is a good fit for the Oval Office. If he can, he may be able to make people forget about the chaos of the first three days of the convention. If Trump can’t, he might be the first nominee since Democrat George McGovern in 1972 to receive a negative bounce out of his convention. Stay with us as we find out how Trump does.

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