Republican convention could yet fire up Trump supporters and reboot the President’s campaign

If the Democratic convention sought to showcase the breadth of the Biden coalition, the Republican National Convention this week is about one man – Donald Trump. The man himself not only spoke last night but will speak Thursday night. Meanwhile, his family, and others personally connected to him, have also taken starring roles.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee, as if seeking to confirm the party’s now total subordination to Trump, decided that for the first time ever there would be no official party platform – the US equivalent of a party manifesto. Instead, it simply resolved: “That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America First agenda”. Meanwhile, the 2016 platform officially still remains in place, an artefact adrift in time.

So what did the Republican speakers offer?

After a Democratic event marked by a sense of national disaster the Republicans had promised a more optimistic gathering. Some speakers, notably Senator Tim Scott and former governor of South Carolina and ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley, did try to fulfil this promise. The former, the Republican’s one black Senator, and the latter, the daughter of Indian immigrants, both held up their personal stories to show how far America had come. They argued that opportunity does exist in the US, in the face of gloomier Democratic views about racial divides and the state of the nation.

There was ecstatic praise of Trump, of course. Kimberly Guilfoyle, once the wife of California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., perhaps set the bar by projecting a manic, rather alarming energy, as she screamed that Trump had “built the greatest economy the world has ever known” and that the best was yet to come.

The flipside of this praise was a deep-seated sense of fear. Only Trump stood between honest decent Americans and terrible destructive forces. The president’s son, Don Jr., proclaimed: “this election is shaping up to be church, work and school versus rioting, looting, and vandalism”.

Congressman Matt Gaetz declared “They’ll [the Democrats] disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 [a notorious Salvadoran gang] to live next door.”

Trump, difficult as ever to follow, offered a similar message in his speech. Boasting of his supposed achievements in office, especially the excellent pre-pandemic economy, he was keen to promise that the economic good times would soon return for America. He also promised a slew of treatments and vaccines soon to be released – never mind reservations of various experts.

He was surrounded on all sides by the hobgoblins of his imagination. Attacking the idea of mail-in-ballots, the logical response to voting during a pandemic, he accused the Democrats of “using Covid to steal an election”.

So, will this Trumpian convention deliver a boost for the Republican campaign?

Some will be tempted to say no. Despite some attempts to win over undecided voters and minorities, the focus seemed to be on energising the Trumpian base. While this base has stuck with him through thick and thin, it is, according to the vast majority of current polls, by some way not enough to win him this election. Equally, attempts to portray Democrats as extremists is not particularly convincing when their nominee is the impeccably centrist Joe Biden.

Finally, it’s difficult to imagine a president who has overseen the deaths of 177,000 Americans in a pandemic and an unemployment rate that hit 14.7% being re-elected.

However, if 2016 proved anything it is that under-rating Trump’s chances is a dangerous game. Republican voter turnout surges in key states like Florida upended the law of averages on which polls inevitably relied. Furthermore, as Democratic polling analyst David Shor has noted, the Electoral College structure skews so heavily towards the Republicans, that Democrats could need a majority of as much as 3.5%-4% of the vote to be sure of victory.

As for Trump’s apparently disastrous record, one should not underestimate how partisanship is so pronounced in America as to create its own realities. An FT-Peterson Economic Monitor poll that took place this August found that even mid-pandemic, 66% of Republicans declared they were better off financially than 4 years ago – a figure which is almost unchanged since last year.

Almost no Democrats, this year or the last, felt this to be the case.

Under these circumstances geeing up the Republican base base could well pay off for Trump.

Finally, amid all the red meat for the base were some messages that could appeal beyond it – particularly on law and order.

While a majority of Americans were initially supportive of the protests that followed George Floyd’s death, there does seem to be an increasing exhaustion setting in, at least among white Americans, as they continue to rumble on, invigorated by another scandalous shooting yesterday.

Part of Biden’s appeal is a promise of return to normality. If Democrats struggle to articulate a way to end the protests and riots, then Trump could begin to poach this mantle for himself.

Trump may be down, but he’s not out yet.