Day Three Of The Republican Convention Got A Little Wild

When Harry Enten and I spoke to Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe today, Roe suggested that if Trump lost to Clinton, it would come to be seen as a black swan event and that the Republican Party might return to relatively familiar ground in 2020. Whereas a Trump win in November would be more transformational. One can agree or disagree with Roe’s analytical point. In our view here at FiveThirtyEight, there’s a substantial chance that the Republican Party is forever changed, whether or not Trump wins. But given that Cruz represents the Reagan-esque, movement conservative wing of the GOP, you wonder if Cruz wouldn’t prefer for the party to return to where it was before Trump descended that escalator last June.

It really does feel like the air has been let out of the hall here. Newt Gingrich is speaking, and I can hear a woman speaking in the next section and a few rows behind me. If Cruz’s goal was to disrupt this convention, he achieved it.

Modern conventions are so carefully stage-managed — with planned “spontaneous” demonstrations and crescendos timed for the networks — that a truly spontaneous moment like the one we just saw on the floor seems all the more shocking. Delegates practically booed an ultraconservative United States senator off the stage, not so much for what he said but for what he refused to say. It should not have been a surprise — Cruz never promised to endorse Trump, and the convention staff obviously knew from his prepared text that he would not do so — but Cruz’s decision, coming after more conciliatory speeches by other failed candidates, was clearly seen by delegates as a raised fist in opposition to their smiley-faced unity. But the moment would have been familiar to veterans of conventions in previous generations. There was plenty of chair-throwing and shoving at conventions through the mid-20th century, and in the last contested convention, when Republicans gathered in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1976, delegates from the warring Ford and Reagan camps even booed the spouses of their opponents. As our documentary recounts, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller ripped a Reagan sign out of a supporter’s hands and tore it up, and a Reagan delegate then pulled Rocky’s phone out of the wall. Those things don’t happen anymore, and they may never do so again, but we just got a taste of the rancor that still underlies a good political feud.