What Went Down On Day Two Of The Republican Convention

That’s a wrap on Day 2 of the 2016 Republican National Convention. (We’ll be back here live-blogging tomorrow night.) If you didn’t watch the convention, you can experience it all in order by starting at the bottom of this live blog and scrolling up. But if you have other commitments, here are a few highlights:

• Donald Trump became the official Republican presidential nominee;
• “Dump Trump” officially died;
• Nate made a word cloud;
• Donald Trump Jr.’s speech got rave reviews;
• The Day 2 speakers spent a lot more time bashing Clinton than building up Trump;
• That was especially true for Chris Christie;
• Paul Ryan tried to soothe movement conservatives;
• The delegates in Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena weren’t enamored of the early speeches.

Good night, everyone!

As many have pointed out on social media (and on this live blog), little airtime was dedicated to the ostensible theme of tonight’s program: “Make America Work Again.” Here’s a quick and dirty attempt to quantify what the speakers talked about instead of the economy:

The most frequently used words during tonight’s speeches

WORD	TIMES USED
Hillary	87	–
Clinton	70	–
America	60	–
Trump	59	–
Donald	59	–
President	51	–
Know	49	–
Year	46	–
American	44	–
Country	37	–
Work	37	–
Just	35	–
People	33	–
Women	33	–
Want	27	–
Make	27	–
Time	27	–
Life	26	–
State	26	–
Government	25	–
Business	25	–
One	25	–
Job	24	–
Way	24	–
Republican	24	–

To piggyback on what Harry just said, I interviewed a delegate today who said, “I don’t hate immigrants, but I fear them.” We’ll package some of our delegate interviews for future viewing.

The final speaker tonight was Muslim-American. It’s noteworthy that a lot of Republicans aren’t exactly comfortable with Muslims. According to a June Quinnipiac University poll, just 32 percent of Republicans were comfortable with the idea of a Muslim vice president; 65 percent of Republicans were uncomfortable with the idea.

“The Democrats offer up a woman who when she had a chance to stand up for women didn’t do so,” Kimberlin Brown said of Clinton, raising a line of argument about whether Clinton was anti-feminist or anti-woman when she stood by her husband after his infidelity. Brown, an actor and farmer, made several appeals directly to women, even saying there would be a time for a first female president, but it shouldn’t be Clinton. She also spoke about how imports are undermining the fortunes of American avocado growers. In addition to the imports, however, California growers are also facing drought conditions that may be far more significant to the fruit’s future.

I finally found a poll involving avocados. According to a 2013 CBS News poll, just 15 percent of Americans said their favorite food to eat while watching the Super Bowl was guacamole and chips. That was fourth behind chicken wings, pizza, and potato chips and pretzels. Only hot dogs, at 2 percent, were a less popular choice.

Fun fact: The California Avocado Commission, a trade group, has called on Congress to pass immigration reform allowing farmers to bring in guest workers from Mexico.

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/755596075147362304

An interesting item that popped up on the Twitter wire from Reuters: In a closed-door meeting with Republican donors in Cleveland, Chris Christie said the campaign was compiling a list of federal employees it would fire if Trump were elected president. Reuters obtained recordings made of the meeting. “As you know from his other career, Donald likes to fire people,” Christie said. “One of the things I have suggested to Donald is that we have to immediately ask the Republican Congress to change the civil service laws. Because if they do, it will make it a lot easier to fire those people.” Might be some worried folks in the D.C. metropolitan area reading the internet tonight …

There’s been lots of snark on Twitter (I may have participated) about the lack of economic discussion on a night supposedly dedicated to jobs. (The theme of the night is “Make America Work Again.”) But that may not be bad strategy on the part of Republicans. Sure, many Americans are uneasy about the economy, and there’s deep-set economic anxiety among certain groups and in certain parts of the country. But the economy is in pretty decent shape overall — unemployment is below 5 percent — and most Americans are actually pretty positive about their individual financial situations. And the closer we get to the election, the less likely it is that we’ll see a major economic meltdown before Americans go to the polls.

A Code Pink protester carrying a sign that said “No Racism, No Hate” was quite literally in a tug of war over her banner with attendees, who blocked her sign eventually with American flags.

What words have been spoken most often tonight? Well, Nate made a word cloud (as Nate said, “hopefully the FiveThirtyEight graphics team is sound asleep.”):

Coal was the seam running through Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s speech tonight — specifically, linking President Obama and Clinton as allies in a war against not only the coal industry but the people of her state of West Virginia and the Appalachian region broadly. It reminded me that the hero of “The Hunger Games” comes from District 12, a poor district of hard-working miners whose labor does not benefit them. They spend many nights in the dark. “We know that she will double down on the war on coal,” Capito said of Clinton. Coal is a contested industry at the intersection of environment and economics. This year’s Republican Party platform declares coal a clean energy source. But the coal industry, regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has launched a series of enforcement lawsuits, is also going through a spate of bankruptcies due in part to aging, hard-to-retrofit plants. “President Obama arrogantly proclaimed he would slow the rise of the oceans,” said Capito, decrying his actions as “ill-informed … and unconstitutional.” Although her speech was focused on nearly a single issue, it speaks to a broader question of how to employ people in industries that are economically — and in this case, environmentally — challenged and challenging.

Some liberals may laugh at the constant Republican knocking of political correctness, but Republicans are speaking to Americans. According to a December CBS News poll, 55 percent of Americans think political correctness is dangerous. Moreover, nearly 70 percent of Republicans, like Ben Carson, agree that it’s dangerous.

Just got a transcript of tonight’s remarks. The scoreboard: “Clinton” was mentioned 79 times and “Trump” 61 times. Variations on “work” or “working,” the alleged theme of the evening, were mentioned 48 times.

The announcer introduced Sen. Shelley Moore Capito as “the senator from West Virginia.” But there’s another senator from West Virginia, Democrat Joe Manchin. He’s exactly why Democrats need to run up the score in the Senate in 2016 to have a chance of keeping it in 2018: That year, five Democratic senators will be up for re-election in states Mitt Romney carried in 2012, including Manchin.

The audience here seems to decide in the first 30 seconds about whether a speaker is worth their attention or not — they’re mostly tuning out Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, for instance, even though she’s delivering a reasonably effective speech that has some Clinton-bashing. That’s one consequence of a lack of star power — without the name recognition, the viewer won’t give you as much time to capture their attention. There also hasn’t been much use of call-and-response — with the major exception of Christie — another way to get the crowd involved.

West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito goes hard after Obama and Clinton for their attacks on the coal industry. Both Democrats have made comments that make them easy for coal miners to hate. And environmental policies have doubtless added to the industry’s challenges. But the biggest problem for coal miners in West Virginia isn’t bureaucrats in Washington — it’s natural-gas drillers in Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. The fracking-driven boom in gas production has driven down natural-gas prices, making coal much less competitive as an source of electrical power.

https://twitter.com/NorahODonnell/status/755590075145187328

When Shelley Moore Capito won re-election to Congress in 2002, she became the first Republican to win re-election to Congress from West Virginia since her father in the 1960s. Today, there isn’t a single Democrat in the entire U.S. House delegation from West Virginia. Moore Capito easily won election to the Senate in 2014, and Trump is heavily favored to win in the state in November.

A hearty cheer here when Donald Trump Jr. said his father won’t have to use “a focus group or data analytics” to form his opinions. He’s not a FiveThirtyEight reader, we’re assuming.

Donald Trump Jr. says our immigration system is hurting mobility and holding back low-wage workers. That’s a somewhat more nuanced argument than the one his father often makes. Economists are in broad agreement that immigration is good for the economy as a whole. But there’s a more heated debate over how low-skilled immigration — a category that includes a large share of undocumented workers — affects less-educated native-born workers. Some research suggests that when large numbers of relatively unskilled workers enter the country, legally or illegally, that can push down wages for citizens without a college degree. (Other researchers dispute this conclusion.) On the other hand, immigrants are significantly more likely than native-born Americans to start businesses. That entrepreneurial spirit is a powerful force for upward mobility.

Conventions are always about the creation of narrative. Donald Trump Jr. called his father “a boy from Queens” who changed the New York skyline. Although that is technically true, Trump was hardly a working-class boy done good (unlike, say, other famous Queens boys like The Ramones or even a middle-class native, Paul Simon). The candidate’s father, Fred, was one of the wealthiest real estate developers of his day in New York. As The Washington Post put it, “Fred Trump was at one point one of the richest men in America after constructing apartment complexes for the middle-class in Brooklyn and Queens. Donald Trump’s insight was to cross the river and start building in Manhattan, a much more prominent stage for the publicity-conscious would-be billionaire.” Fred also substantially funded Donald Trump Sr.’s forays into real estate. Thus the “Queens boy” narrative is true, technically, but the nuance implies a very different relationship to capital and self-made success than the history shows. Later in his speech, Trump Jr. said, “We’re the only children of billionaires as comfortable in a D-10 Caterpillar” tractor (see below) as a fancy car. The narrative of aspiration — touting credentials as a billionaire family — is being combined here with an up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that is not firmly grounded. But it’s a compelling mix of all-American stories to appeal to an electorate anxious about jobs and the American Dream.

In the hall, Donald J. Trump Jr. has gotten the second-best reception tonight, after Christie. Better than Tiffany Trump, who got good reviews on social media but didn’t capture the attention as much here.

One possible risk to the drag-Clinton-down strategy I mentioned earlier is that Clinton’s unfavorables are possibly a little bit softer than Trump’s. According to Gallup, for example — note, this was before the recent round of email-related problems for Clinton — 33 percent of Americans have a very unfavorable view of Clinton, and 42 percent have one of Trump. Also, one source of unfavorables for Clinton is Bernie Sanders voters, who could potentially come around to her later on.

You’re hearing a lot of red meat at the Republican convention so far. It shouldn’t be surprising, given who is probably watching. According to the University of Virginia’s Geoffrey Skelley, viewership on the more conservative-leaning Fox News was much higher during the Republican convention than the Democratic convention in 2012. Meanwhile, viewership on the more liberal-leaning MSNBC was much higher during the Democratic convention than the Republican convention in 2012.

When the speaker list came out, I questioned why the general manager of Trump Winery was on the list. In many ways, Kerry Woolard’s testimonial to the turnaround of the winery is (aside from free advertising) a counter-narrative to the questions about Trump University and Trump’s bankruptcies. Perhaps it’s a picture painted on a smaller canvas, but Woolard made a case for Trump as an ethical businessman even as he faces questions about his practices.

I was confused by the order of speakers last night. Prime time closed with a poorly received speech from Michael Flynn. Tonight, the people watching on the major television networks were greeted by the general manager of Trump Winery. It’s another interesting choice.

It’s pretty clear that Chris Christie will be in line for a big role if Trump wins, but what’s Christie’s future if Trump loses? As Harry implied, given his abysmal favorability back home, Christie may not have any real future in New Jersey politics. So it’s easy to imagine him becoming a Republican analog of someone like Wendy Davis of Texas — people who take a stand, become a hero to some in their party’s national base, but are confined to national interest group politics because they lack a realistic path to elected office in their home state.

We still have two-plus nights of the convention to go, so I’m at the risk of getting a little bit ahead of myself here. But Christie was one of the “swing votes,” so to speak, in terms of the strategy that Trump might pursue. As a personal friend of Trump’s, Christie could fairly easily have made the case for Trump. Instead, he made the case against Clinton (rather effectively, as far as the crowd here was concerned). Maybe Trump figures that it’s easier to drag Clinton’s personal ratings down even further, as opposed to bringing his own numbers back up. And so far, the approach is arguably working. The head-to-head polls have tightened, even as Trump’s favorability ratings have gotten no better.

Chris Christie, who has been having a no-good, very bad couple of weeks (including guilty pleas and indictments of key aides on the Bridge-gate issue) proved to be one of the speakers able to wind up the crowd. “She fights for the wrong people. She never fights for us,” he said while listing several of her policy decisions on trade and international relations. “Is she guilty or not guilty?” he asked in a call-and-response with an audience, who broke into calls of “lock her up.” This may be good political theater inside the hall, but the question is how it plays on the outside. I’ll be curious to see what overnight polls — which only measure blips in movement, at times — say. Negative campaigning does work. But according to one set of studies, it can also backfire. If there is a drip-drip of negative allegations in advertisements, for example, it works better than a full-on barrage, which then seems to provoke a backlash. An analysis in the online publication of JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, puts its literature survey this way: “Of 43 studies that directly tested ads’ effects on voting patterns, only five found appreciable benefits for the attacker. Five others found backlash effects that hurt the aggressor more than the target. The truth, the authors write, is that there is simply no evidence that attack ads are a smart move for political campaigns.” Christie ended with an appeal to people watching at home. That’s the real metric of how tonight and the convention plays, of course.

As Christie continues to “prosecute” Clinton, check out this quick interview Farai did with former Obama adviser David Axelrod today: https://abcnews.go.com/video/55766495

Chris Christie is soaking up this crowd, but New Jersey voters aren’t soaking him up. His approval rating in the state is just 26 percent, according to a recent Monmouth University poll. Moreover, 79 percent say that Christie is more concerned with his own political future than governing the state of New Jersey.

Surprise! Chris Christie’s red meat isn’t red enough for these delegates — and even he appears a bit bewildered. He’s trying to lead a call-and-response to find Hillary Clinton “guilty” on all kinds of counts, but he can barely get through his remarks without delegates chanting “lock her up.” It’s throwing off the cadence of his speech.

A round of “lock her up,” led by the rowdy California delegation. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is literally laying out the case against Clinton, as a prosecutor might. It’s about the first thing that’s really working in the convention hall. The delegates’ priorities are pretty clear: They love Trump, they hate Clinton, and they don’t really give a crap about the boilerplate policies that people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell care about.

Tonight was supposed to be about the economy. I haven’t heard very much about the economy so far. It’s again mostly stuff against Clinton and her time as secretary of state. Will it work? We’ll find out.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/755533636695363588

The phrasing of language around who deserves the government’s help is a fascinating part of the Trump-era Republican Party. U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California spoke about people who are suffering economically “through no fault of your own.” The issue of entitlements splits the Trump GOP from the establishment GOP, as Trump says he will not touch spending. In places like Trumbull County, Ohio, which I visited on a recent reporting trip, longtime Republicans and cross-over Reagan Democrats supporting Trump also showed a strong support for Trump’s call to preserve entitlements, as well as to build a border wall and restrict immigration.

At the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012, speakers were averaging about 20 minutes each in prime time, from what I can tell. At this convention, the speeches have been much shorter — a lot of quick hits of 10 minutes or so. In theory, that could be just fine, given the short attention spans of the networks and the viewers. But the speechwriting hasn’t been all that clever, the programming hasn’t been all that sharp, and few speakers — again, Giuliani is an exception — have really built up to a crescendo.

That Paul Ryan speech was meant to be a soothing balm to the movement conservatives who are quivering with fear beneath their convention boater hats — the people afraid that Donald Trump might not have all that much respect for the notions of small government and constitutionalism. The line in the speech that will be quoted for the next couple of days is when Ryan said, “what do you say we unify this party at this crucial moment when unity is everything?” but there were a lot of other interesting nuggets in there that give hints about what a potential Candidate Ryan might talk about in 2020. He brought up the issue of poverty a couple of times — not getting back overseas jobs or “bad trade deals” — he used the word “poverty” as a broader term. When I spoke with conservative scholar Yuval Levin recently, he talked about welfare reform as being one of the ripest areas for Republicans to develop a more empathetic image with Americans who might be inclined to see them as bankers with no sympathy for the middle and lower class. “It all comes down to a contest of ideas,” Ryan said, assuring the crowd that was good for Republicans. Notably, he did not mention the nominee all that much. “In the plainest terms I know,” Ryan said, “it’s all on the line.” The message was clear to the Trump-reluctant conservatives in the crowd: choose the lesser of two evils.

Paul Ryan has tried to brand himself as a conservative who cares about reducing poverty. Like many Republicans, he has criticized traditional welfare programs, but he has also advocated for expanding the earned income tax credit, one of the best-regarded anti-poverty programs among economists. Progressives, predictably, have criticized Ryan’s approach. But Ryan has at least embraced the need to talk seriously about policy issues — something that was largely lacking from the Republican primary contest this year.

One more thought on that Paul Ryan speech: Ryan said the party needed to fight the Democrats with “better ideas.” But the ones he mentioned were all from his own playbook, not Trump’s. He didn’t mention a single proposal from the party nominee.

Paul Ryan said, decrying what he sees as Democratic Party identity politics, “real social progress is always a widening of the circle. … We are all neighbors and countrymen.” He added tonight, “Everyone is equal … because there is worth and goodness in every life … that is the Republican ideal.” However, just a month ago, the speaker criticized the nominee, saying, “I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party, but as a country. And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test, not a religious test.” He pushed the crowd with calls for unity, something the party has struggled with this primary season.

Paul Ryan made the case that Trump will change things more than Clinton. Voters agree. The problem is that voters aren’t necessarily sure that Trump will bring the right type of change. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of voters said Trump would bring the wrong type of change. Just 33 percent said he’d bring the right type of change. That compares with 25 percent who said Clinton would bring the wrong type of change. Most voters (53 percent) said she wouldn’t change much.

To my ear, Paul Ryan didn’t show much more genuine enthusiasm for Trump in his speech than he did when he tucked a low-key endorsement into the bottom of a letter to the Janesville Gazette in early June. He “checked the box” on Trump by including a perfunctory applause line about the rostrum lineup at next year’s State of the Union, but he spent far more time outlining his own philosophy and laying out how the House GOP’s agenda can be signed into law. In fact, it felt more like Ryan was setting himself up for life beyond Trump.

Big finish for Ryan on party unity — the best moment of the night so far, and very warmly received. He barely mentioned Trump, though.

Paul Ryan says “poverty is worse” under Obama. That’s pretty much right. When Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. poverty rate was 14.3 percent. It rose to 15.1 percent in 2010 and then began falling. But at 14.8 percent in 2014 (the most recent data available), poverty is still higher than when Obama’s term began.

Paul Ryan’s speech is also getting a mostly lackluster response here at the Q. And this seems to be part of a pattern. There are people who have delivered very enthusiastic endorsements of Trump, but they’re mostly not the household names. Whereas the people who have some star power, like Ryan, are delivering perfunctory, boilerplate remarks. You haven’t had many overlaps yet between a big name and a big speech, although Rudy Giuliani came close last night.

https://twitter.com/jdickerson/status/755574798370177028

If you want a popular Republican politician in this country, you could do a lot worse than House Speaker Paul Ryan. According to a June CNN/ORC poll, Ryan had a net favorability rating of +10 percentage points. Trump’s net favorability in the same poll was -22 percentage points.