Five things you should know about the final day of the Republican National Convention:
Donald Trump is a rarity – a presidential nominee who hasn’t held elected office: If he wins the White House, Donald Trump would become only the seventh U.S. President who’d never been elected to anything before. Four of the others were military heroes: George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor and Dwight Eisenhower. The others are Herbert Hoover, a business leader and former Commerce Secretary and William Howard Taft, who was a Secretary of War and an appointed Governor of the U.S. Territories in the Philippines.
There are two other U.S. Presidents who were “light” on political experience when they ran and won. Woodrow Wilson was an academic from Princeton but also a former Governor. Grover Cleveland was a former mayor and one-term governor before winning the White House.
Of the ten low/no-experience Presidents, seven were elected to second terms. The ones that weren’t were Taft, Taylor and Hoover.
Sometimes there are under-card convention speakers who are more memorable than the nominee: Jesse Jackson’s 1988 convention speech was considered a watershed moment. He sounded a call for unity with a theme of “your patch is too small.” But Michael Dukakis was the democrat’s nominee in ’88, and he would lose soundly to George H.W. Bush. Barack Obama’s first convention speech in 2004 launched him to national prominence. At the time he was a state senator from Illinois running for U.S. Senate. He’d become his party’s nominee just four years later. Governor Ronald Reagan’s concession speech at the 1976 GOP convention had many delegates convinced they’d nominated the wrong candidate – Gerald Ford. Some political observers said if there was a motion to reconsider, Reagan would have won on a second ballot.
Donald Trump has done this before, just on a much smaller scale: Trump was a presidential candidate for the Progressive Party in 2001. He dropped out of the race when former KKK leader David Duke became prominent in the party. Trump still won two primaries – Michigan and California — after discontinuing his campaign.
Prior to 1987 no one’s sure of Trump’s political affiliation. He’s spoken admiringly about President Reagan and President Clinton. He’s made political donations to both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Trump arrived at the convention with a plurality of the Republican vote: Of the 28-million GOP primary votes cast, 45.6% voted for Donald Trump. He was still unable to get a majority of the overall Republican vote while facing no opposition for the final 10 primaries after Ted Cruz exited the race.
A Rasmussen Reports poll, which is widely considered a Republican-friendly survey, gives Trump 80% support among self-identified GOP voters. In a head-to-head match-up he beats Hillary Clinton among white males by 17-points, but he trails badly among woman and minorities. 27% of independent voters told Rasmussen that they are undecided and could be persuaded to back either candidate at this point in the race.
Convention coverage is a classic case of less-is-more: Until 1984 there was no gavel-to-gavel convention coverage. The afternoon sessions were mostly quiet affairs attended by party operatives and newspaper political reporters. Conventions were choreographed around prime time coverage, where networks would be live for four or five hours a night. With the advent of CNN and C-SPAN, more daytime coverage found its way into U.S. homes.Saturation coverage hasn’t been kind to viewership. About 22-million people per night are watching the convention coverage, with a typical spike expected for the nominee’s speech on Thursday. The broadcast networks are limiting their convention coverage to an hour at 10pm ET, and additional coverage within their network and affiliate newscasts. Regular programming is much more popular. 4-out-of-5 ABC-TV viewers disappeared from when The Bachelorette ended and convention coverage began.
The GOP convention of 1984 (Ronald Reagan’s second term) had a TV rating of 47, with nearly five hours of prime time network coverage on closing night. The networks’ one-hour broadcasts this year have a combined 6-share.It appears as though there’s more coverage than ever before, but political junkies, not everyday people, are doing most of the watching.
Chris Conley7.21.16
