Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump got a poll boost from last week’s convention, rising 5 points in RealClearPolitics.com’s weighted poll average since it began, putting him almost a point above Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. This was despite a convention that by any standard was a raucous mess, suggesting that maybe controlled, tightly scripted conventions aren’t the benefit they are assumed to be.
The Republican event in Cleveland including numerous stories of last-minute resistance by the “Never Trump” folks, pundit Laura Ingraham providing liberals with fodder to claim she ended her speech with a Hitler salute, the Trump campaign getting caught up in a plagiarism controversy for lifting from one of first lady Michelle Obama’s convention speeches and an uproar over Sen. Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement of the party’s presidential candidate.
As with so many things involving Trump in this election cycle, the poll boost runs counter to what the conventional wisdom would suggest. Surely, such a disastrous spectacle should have dragged him down. How to explain this?
It may be that Trump benefited because of, not in spite of, the chaos. Most of the convention controversies were “inside the Beltway” stuff that regular voters don’t bother with. For the proverbial “Joe Sixpack” it is probably bewildering that he is supposed to be outraged that a speech the candidate’s wife didn’t write herself took sections from a speech that the president’s wife didn’t write herself.
Beyond that, putting all of the GOP’s dirty laundry on display may have helped Trump. It is not without precedent. Major political conventions were notoriously raucous events throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century. That ended after television became commonplace. Coverage of riots during the Democratic Party’s 1968 convention were widely believed to have badly damaged the party. Since then, both major parties have strived to avoid such spectacles, turning the conventions into what are essentially lengthy primetime ads for the parties.
There’s something very off-putting about the nature of the modern political convention, though. It may avoid gaffes and, as party strategists say, “get the message out,” but they typically have the tacky quality of an informercial relentlessly trying to sell the viewer something. The watcher knows it has been scrubbed clean of anything the salesman doesn’t want him to notice, which makes the viewer wonder what it is that he isn’t being told.
Trump’s convention had all of the conventional, on-message stuff in the prime-time when most viewers are paying attention, but it also gave viewers a glimpse behind the scenes. They could see that not everyone in the GOP liked or wanted Trump, that there were still serious disputes on some issues, that some folks just plain didn’t like where the party was going, but that they were still going to fall behind Trump because they could all agree he was still better than Clinton.
That may have helped Trump with nominal Republicans and other undecideds who are wavering on backing him. The chaos sent a signal that the party is indeed a big tent where people can have lively disputes and that casting a vote for Trump doesn’t mean backing him without reservation or that they cannot be critical of him themselves.
Democrats have had similar moments in their convention this week, mainly involving the Sen. Bernie Sanders die-hards, as well a leak of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, and an apparent gaffe by Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., a close Clinton ally, saying that she will flip-flop and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal the administration negotiated that organized labor and other progressive groups staunchly oppose.
By and large, though, the Democrats’ convention has been more orderly and controlled than the Republican one. Sanders gave Clinton his full endorsement, avoiding the possibility of a “Ted Cruz” moment. The other party elders were all there for Clinton’s coronation.
We’ll know in a few days if it gives Clinton a poll boost. After such a protracted, bitter primary race, a traditional show of unity may be exactly what the party needs, so her numbers may very well go up.
If they don’t, though, it may be because the party didn’t let Sanders’ fans run riot in the convention and get it out of their system or have a genuine debate on TPP or in some other way signal that you don’t have to love the party or the candidate to nevertheless join up with it.
