What Went Down On Night 2 Of The RNC

Sarah, I think tonight will be similar to last night, in that it will play to the GOP base. One change I anticipate is more focus on immigration, which Trump’s 2016 campaign (and the 2018 midterms) leaned into, hard. According to a Pew poll from September 2019, there is a huge gap in Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions that illegal immigration is a “major problem” facing the U.S. Nearly 70 percent of Republicans say “illegal immigration” is a “major problem” compared with just 23 percent of Democrats.

I would not expect a big ratings bounce. Night 1 ratings were also heavily concentrated on Fox News (whose ratings were higher than all the broadcast networks combined), which may explain all of the preaching to the choir. One question is whether the Republicans can land any more specific blows on Biden tonight. Another is whether Melania Trump can humanize her husband, as the Democratic convention did overall for Biden.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s nominees, just got a shout-out for his support of Native American rights. That’s certainly true — Gorsuch was a judge on the 10th Circuit in Colorado, which gave him experience with Indian law. But ironically, that has resulted in a few swings to the left side of the bench, putting him at odds with his Republican-appointed colleagues, since he tends to be more sympathetic to Indian rights than other Republican judges and justices.