Day Three Of The Republican Convention Got A Little Wild

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Regarding Walker’s failed run: I’m inherently suspicious of the “bad candidate” explanation, because it’s so tautological. And Walker got elected three times in a swing state in four years, in races that had a lot of national media attention. Granted, he’s not a terrific public speaker, and that can matter. But he got stuck in a very crowded lane and might have gotten a bit unlucky given that Trump entered the race right as he did and sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

Micah, many Trump voters like entitlements, government jobs and government services … as long as they go to the people they feel are deserving. My interviews in Ohio included many crossover union members/Reagan Democrats. If that’s a key part of the Trump coalition, they’re not going to be happy with Walker’s policies.

We’re now about 60 percent of the way through the Republican convention, and to my eyes, it hasn’t been very effectively programmed. But you shouldn’t care about my opinion. Is it resonating for voters at home? Based on TV ratings, not particularly. Whereas many political events this year saw record, Trump-driven ratings, ratings for the RNC so far are average, similar to 2008 and 2012. And there was a slight decline in ratings from Monday to Tuesday. However, TV ratings haven’t historically had a strong correlation with the polling bounces that candidates receive out of the convention.

He’s got the people in the audience here pretty happy.

I don’t know, Harry, this Walker speech is … not great.

I don’t know if this year is just different, but the thing is that it’s difficult to know if someone is a good or bad candidate. We’d have said Trump was a terrible candidate if he had lost. Instead, he was a different candidate who won. Rarely is anyone called a good candidate who gets in the race in July and is out two months later.

Remember Scott Walker, everyone? Was the way he flamed out in the Republican primary this year an early sign that something was different? Or was Walker just a bad candidate?

We’ve been tracking the race of speakers at the Republican convention. Although the lineup is subject to change until the billionaire sings, right now fully 15 percent of the speakers at Trump’s convention are black, compared with less than 1 percent of delegates.

One thing that you don’t always appreciate while watching on television is how the crowd gets really pumped for some speakers and not pumped at all for others. I don’t know if the roller coaster happens every year, but it’s clearly what we’re seeing this convention. Some speakers are really good, and some speakers really aren’t.

Harold Hamm said President Obama has “tried to destroy” the U.S. oil “renaissance.” If that’s true, Obama has failed. U.S. oil production surged under Obama, mostly because of companies like Hamm’s Continental Resources, which figured out how to unlock vast new oil reserves in North Dakota and other states. That, as Hamm said, has led to a big drop in U.S. oil imports and has helped bring down prices worldwide. Obama doesn’t deserve much credit for the oil boom, which has taken place on private lands. But despite frequent criticism from oil companies, he hasn’t done much to stop it, either. Environmental groups have frequently pushed for Obama to restrict fracking or ban it outright, but he has largely resisted.

Pastor Darrell Scott’s rhetorical style of preaching was a somewhat-tempered-for-a-white-audience version of whooping, a rhetorical style associated with certain traditionally black churches. There’s more information on him in this profile by Jason Johnson in The Root, which reads in part:

In the 1980s, Scott was an addict and a drug dealer who went by the street name “Coddy” (or “Cotty,” in a Cleveland accent). … [N]one of that explains what connects him to a billionaire businessman who’s been at the forefront of riots and protests and expressed hostility toward African Americans in almost every speech. I attended Scott’s church for a week right after his endorsement of Trump and talked to parishioners and community members along the way. New Spirit Revival is located on Mayfield Road … nestled among empty car dealerships, derelict homes and a Starbucks that looks as if it tried to gentrify 10 years too soon. … [Scott] spits fire from the podium with the theatrics of most big-city black preachers.

Earlier today, Nate spoke with The Atlantic’s Molly Ball about how chaotic the GOP convention has been so far:

Given that Trump doesn’t have all that many big names at his convention, I wonder why he’s been cycling through such a rapid-fire program of speakers instead of having fewer, longer speeches with some filler like video. You’ve had folks like Darrell Scott, who are at least relatively effective speakers, and then you’ve had other people who … aren’t. But it’s a pretty random mix.

As Clare just mentioned, Ralph Alvarado, the first Latino elected to statewide office in Kentucky, ended his speech with an appeal to Latino voters: “Voten conmigo, voten Republicano, y voten por Donald Trump.” In English: “Vote with me, vote Republican, and vote for Donald Trump.” But the Latino vote could change the electoral map this year. It’s worth noting that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast has shown Arizona could be in play precisely because of the widespread dismay of many Latino voters when faced with anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant Trump rhetoric.

Darrell Scott has the delegates on their feet and cheering. You can see why he’s a pastor. And while I doubt that many African-Americans will vote for Trump, you have to give it to the RNC for having a diverse set of speakers from a racial and gender angle, as we pointed out earlier in the week.

We got a Republican appeal to Latino voters a few minutes ago from state Sen. Ralph Alvarado Jr. of Kentucky, who ended with a message in Spanish. A June survey found that 76 percent of Latinos saw Trump in a “strongly unfavorable light.”

Tonight’s speakers have the potential to be a big hit with the Republican base, but they aren’t likely to be as popular with swing voters. In fact, some of them are utterly disliked. Here are the latest favorability ratings we could find — using the HuffPost Pollster averages where we could find them and the recent Marist-McClatchy poll for Gingrich.

Tonight’s big-name speakers are pretty unpopular

POLITICIAN	FAVORABLE	UNFAVORABLE
Scott Walker	23	37
Marco Rubio	35	46
Ted Cruz	32	57
Newt Gingrich	33	53
Mike Pence	25	23

Rubio has the highest favorable rating, 35 percent, of the politicians speaking tonight, but his unfavorable rating is 46 percent. Pence has the lowest unfavorable rating, 23 percent, but he was barely known until last week, and his favorable rating is only 25 percent. Gingrich and Cruz are widely disliked, with unfavorable ratings that are almost as bad as Trump’s and Clinton’s.

The organizers squandered the big energy brought by Laura Ingraham at the top of the night with a couple of halting speakers. But the crowd on the floor is much livelier than on previous nights. It’s a reminder that conventions always have clunky moments (OK, maybe this has more than most). But it’s only Day 3 — there’s still plenty of time to show this crowd a good time.

Speaker Ralph Alvarado said that Hispanics believe what Republicans believe. In a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, 71 percent of Hispanics said they wanted a bigger government with more services over a smaller government with fewer services. No other group wanted a bigger government more than Hispanics, not even liberal Democrats.

Michelle Van Etten of Youngevity neutraceuticals is another speaker with a controversial background. She runs what is essentially a tiered marketing scheme with people selling her product from their homes. She said she employs 100,000 people … when in fact she employs none.

Retired Col. Eileen Collins, who spoke several minutes ago, is a former NASA astronaut who in 1995 piloted the space shuttle to rendezvous with the Russian craft Mir. She was the first woman to command the shuttle. That was one of several missions she flew until retiring in 2006. “The last time the U.S. launched our own astronauts from our own soil was five years ago,” she said tonight, to boos from the crowd. “We must do better than that.” The country has had 45 women astronauts, out of 60 total from around the globe. We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” and cast member Nichelle Nichols was actually pressed into service to help recruit women into the space program. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, 20 years after the first Russian woman in space.

We’ll see if the actual remarks differ from the prepared remarks. But yeah, just one mention of Trump would definitely be below the over-under line. Cruz is a pretty calculating guy, and taking the side of the bet that (i) Trump will lose and (ii) Republicans will declare Trumpism a failure might be a good percentage play.

Cruz just wants to lay groundwork for 2020. This is about going through the motions of being a good soldier for the party and telling his Cruz-ians (I’ve seen a lot of “C” buttons here … including in the endless concession queue) that he’s still kicking. Farai is correct in saying that his is not a broad appeal, it’s more of one premised upon the idea that a lot of conservatives stayed home in 2012 and very likely will do so in 2016. Maybe he figures that if he keeps up the “ideas/constitution/traditionalist guy” vibe, come 2020, Republicans will be looking for conservative purity post-Trump or -Clinton. In short, what a time to be alive and blogging from a Republican National Convention!

Cruz is from an entirely different wing of the GOP than Trump. Trump favors preserving entitlements, not shrinking government. Cruz, the opposite. And despite receiving the endorsement of Ben Carson, Trump is by no means a poster child for the religious right. Cruz is a solid social conservative. Cruz is likely banking that Trump will lose. But even if Trump does lose in November, Cruz’s brand of religious conservatism is not one that appeals across the board to GOP establishment voters.

According to the prepared remarks, Ted Cruz will mention Donald Trump’s name only once in his speech tonight. If that’s actually what happens, what would you make of it? Is Cruz confident Trumpism hasn’t taken over the GOP?

Jumping back to Pam Bondi’s speech for a second — that was a red meat speech. The delegates seemed to like it, though not as much as they liked Laura Ingraham’s speech. One thing that struck me was that Bondi, Florida’s attorney general, said she loved the chants of “lock her up.” That’s a hard-core statement from a government official in a state that Obama won twice.

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NASA has a 68 percent favorability rating, according to the Pew Research Center, making it the second-most-popular government agency, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Actually, quite a few of these government agencies are popular, which is part of a long-standing trend. Americans often dislike government in the abstract, but it’s fairly popular when pollsters ask about specifics.

Trump represents “something to which I’ve dedicated my entire career — the rule of law,” Florida’s attorney general said tonight. But Pam Bondi is one of several speakers at this convention about whom there has been controversy. She asked Donald Trump for a $25,000 campaign contribution while considering whether to join a New York state lawsuit against Trump University. Once she received the check from the Trump Foundation, she declined to join the suit. Later she endorsed Trump and joined the roster of speakers at the convention. She also tried to return the check, but the Foundation declined to take it back.

Laura Ingraham got the most applause I’ve heard at this convention. One of her many roars of approval came when she went after the media. It’s one of the smartest moves a speaker can make in front of a Republican crowd. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, just 32 percent of Republicans trust the mass media a great deal or a fair amount. It also plays to independents, as just 33 percent of independents have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. Democrats, at 55 percent, were far more trusting.

I have to say, the theme for tonight — “Make America First Again” — has me scratching my head a little, thematically. It’s a bit squishy, no? So I went into the convention hall tonight wondering what exactly the message delivery was going to look like. If Laura Ingraham’s speech a few minutes ago is any indication of what’s to come, we’re getting a hard-nosed message of party unity: “All you boys with your wounded feelings,” she said, presumably referring to the establishment figures who have expressed reluctance about the nominee, “you must honor your pledge to support Donald Trump now.” She got a huuuuuuuuge roar from the crowd for that one. In fact, I think that was the most pumped up I’ve seen the convention hall yet.

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This afternoon, in an ill-timed attempt to hand off some press passes, I got stuck in a bit of a protest jam. Protesters tried to burn a flag, and the police got their first chance to show what they could do with their bikes and horses. I got a little hemmed in, but that gave me a chance to get a decent look at who was causing the little corner of mayhem. The protesters who were eventually arrested and marched into a police van were wearing shirts that said “BA Speaks: Revolution — nothing less!” and chanting “One, two, three, four — slavery, genocide and war / five, six, seven, eight, America was never great!” I asked a woman wearing the shirt who was chanting along with the arrested people who their group was. She told me that they were called “Revolution Club” but that she couldn’t tell me anything more. A little bit of internet research has led me to suspect that the group is part of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a group described by the Boston Globe in 2008 as “a tiny Maoist organization whose most visible activity is running several branches of a store called Revolution Books.” Indeed, I found a July 7 post on the Chicago Revolution Books website advertising a July 13 sendoff party for the group members headed to the RNC. Their mission? “We will be there modeling a different, revolutionary way and organizing people into this revolution. We will be preparing the terrain, the people, and the vanguard for the time when millions can actually be led to bring this whole thing down. Most of all we will be projecting the only REAL alternative to the madness and the only REAL way out of it: OVERTHROW, DON’T VOTE FOR, THIS SYSTEM!” A small note of interest — the “BA” on that woman’s shirt refers to Bob Avakian, who, according to the Globe, is the group’s leader and has been “ostentatiously underground” for years.

The crowd on the floor is eating up this Laura Ingraham speech like no other I’ve seen so far. I suspect many of them are also getting a thrill out of seeing one of their favorite radio personalities live. Is this what it’s like when people see Harry at our live podcast tapings?

On Tuesday, I wrote a bit about the role of the bike in breaking up protests here at the RNC. Today, there was a skirmish outside of the main entrance of Quicken Loans Arena where we got a chance to see more of the protester-police-media dynamic in action. After a small group of protesters burned an American flag, with a crush of media surrounding them, the police moved in to disperse the crowd. There was some pushing and shoving and more than a dozen arrests, including some people arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. The entrance was closed, and after about an hour the tension died down. This continues to be the main police approach — flood the area, shifting the ratio of police to protesters, and break up large groups through physical presence. And once again, bicycles were used to create a mobile, but still substantial, barrier. In practice, this has been an effective approach. It means, however, that the police strategy is to essentially occupy a public space in greater numbers than protesters do, which is a bit jarring when you simply want to enter a park, or the arena. This was not, by any means, a violent protest. It was almost performance art: Protesters burn a flag; media gets their photos; protesters get arrested. But it was the first heated confrontation in what has been a surprisingly copacetic event thus far. We’ll see what tonight and Thursday bring. In the meantime, I managed to snap this photo, so there’s that … https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/755881022869409792

FiveThirtyEight tracked the endorsements from major elected officials during the primary. That ended up not foretelling the Trump train. You understand at least a little bit why right now. Few politicians to speak at this convention have received the applause that radio talk show host Laura Ingraham is getting for her speech. Perhaps in the future it might be better to track the endorsements from radio talk show hosts?

Florida Gov. Rick Scott just finished speaking. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a governor as consistently unpopular win re-election. Quinnipiac, which has been tracking Scott’s approval rating since he became governor in 2011, currently has approval rating of 43 percent. It has never risen above 45 percent in their polling.

We’re just getting going on the third night of the Republican National Convention, and Trump has as good a shot of becoming president as he ever has, according to the FiveThirtyEight models. Our polls-only model gives him a 38 percent chance of winning in the fall, and the polls-plus model has him at 39 percent. That’s up a good deal from just a few weeks ago, and you can see that shift in polls that were published over the past 36 hours. A national poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR) has Clinton ahead of Trump 43 percent to 40 percent. So Clinton still leads, but GQR’s previous poll, taken in late June, had Clinton up 48 percent to 37 percent. When you adjust GQR’s latest result for the pollster’s Democratic house effect — its results show better numbers for Clinton relative to other polls — Clinton is up 1 percentage point. A 1 percentage point lead in July is not worth much, and the movement away from Clinton should worry her campaign. GQR isn’t alone in showing a result that is less favorable than those of previous surveys. The latest Ipsos survey has Clinton ahead 42 percent to 35 percent. Again, Clinton is winning. The problem is that a week ago Ipsos had Clinton winning 44 percent to 32 percent. I’m not sure the race has tightened that much in a week, but it’s certainly tightened. Traditionally, candidates get bounces out of their conventions. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Trump leading in a few days. Of course, Clinton could reclaim that lead in Philadelphia next week.

It’s hump day at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where we’re expecting a potentially better-organized program than we saw in the first two evenings. Granted, the scheduled speakers don’t seem to have much of anything to do with the stated theme of “Make America First Again.” But there’s more star power on the schedule, with three of Trump’s vanquished rivals from the primary — Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — scheduled to address the convention. (Rubio’s remarks will be delivered via video.) Newt Gingrich is also speaking, presumably to provide the sort of red meat that Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie served up on the first two nights. And Mike Pence, unless he has a last-minute change of heart, will accept the vice-presidential nomination. I’m personally most interested in Cruz’s remarks and how much he embraces or distances himself from Trump. Reports imply that Cruz could “suggest” support for Trump without fully “endorsing” him. These semantics are a bit silly, and what’s probably more important is the overall tone of the address. A speech that warmly defends Trump’s philosophy could generate positive headlines for the nominee, while a defiant speech along the lines of Pat Buchanan’s in 1992 could cause problems. Stick with us through it all.

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