What Went Down During President Trump’s Closing Speech At The RNC

Trump enters the immigration portion of the speech, a topic that has been notably absent from much of this convention in comparison to 2016. The campaign has made the calculation that unrest in American cities is a bigger motivator than immigration this time around.

This is a pretty perfunctory political speech — not the kind of address you’d expect from someone who really needs to make up ground in the polls. According to our forecast, Biden currently has a 70 in 100 chance of winning the Electoral College.

Yes, Julia, I keep thinking about Lynn Vavreck’s book “The Message Matters.” Vavreck argues that when conditions are good, incumbents should run clarifying campaigns that highlight those conditions. Since conditions aren’t helpful to Trump right now, he’s got to find an insurgent issue on which Biden is constrained.