They browsed Trump bobbleheads, Trump mugs (“Make coffee great again!”) and Trump T-shirts, including a new line celebrating his defiance of an assassin’s bullet. They lined up at food stalls for beef sticks, gourmet popcorn, Puerto Rican roasted chicken and the local speciality, fried cheese curds. Beer was flowing, the sun was shining and Republicans were experiencing something they had not felt for a long time: joy.
This year’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee had the swagger of a party that believes it is on a glide path to the White House. Entirely in thrall to Donald Trump, it was more united than it has been in decades. The former US president might offer a notoriously dark and divisive vision but his supporters exuded optimism in what one journalist dubbed “the happiest place on Earth”.
That was based not only on 78-year-old Trump’s strength but the weakness of his opponent. Joe Biden, 81, reeling from a calamitous debate performance and now suffering from the coronavirus, was facing growing calls from his party to quit the race. In contrast with Republicans’ harmony, Democrats are locked in a circular firing squad and painful struggle over the best way forward.
With just over a hundred days until the election, Republicans have the momentum. An Emerson College poll published on Thursday found 46% of registered voters said they support Trump, compared with 42% for Biden and 12% undecided. Crucially, Trump was ahead in all seven battleground states that will decide the all-important electoral college.
“It’s very clear the path to the electoral college for Trump has widened and for Biden it’s narrowed,” Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Milwaukee convention. “Even before the debate, before the assassination attempt, Biden was trailing.
“The fundamental challenge for Biden and his campaign is they’ve been on their heels for months. The debate was the opportunity to get back on offence; obviously, it’s not. You feel it while you’re here that Trump is ahead and it’s his race to lose and Biden is behind with a divided party and without an obvious path forward.”
This week’s Republican convention set out to consolidate the lead by appealing to moderate voters. It proved to be a disciplined operation, mostly avoiding topics such as abortion rights and the January 6 insurrection while toning down attacks on the media. There was no repeat of the “Lock her up!” chants aimed at Hillary Clinton that filled the low-morale convention hall in 2016.
Walter added: “In 2016, because the party was so divided, what was unifying Republicans was their disdain for Hillary Clinton – all of the chants of ‘Lock her up’, all of the signs and T-shirts to ‘put Hillary in jail’. There’s not a whole lot of anti-Biden or anti-Harris stuff here that I’ve seen. It’s all pro-Trump, we’re united, we believe we can do this and don’t give Democrats, don’t give Biden, don’t give Harris any opportunity to get back in this game.”
Trump himself may have given Democrats at least a half-chance with a Thursday night speech that rambled for more than an hour and a half – the longest televised convention speech in history – and regressed into his characteristic divisive themes and lies.
But whereas the 2016 convention was marred by boos and infighting as Trump seized control, this one was defined by overwhelming displays of solidarity and a full embrace of his Maga agenda. Delegates brandished signs that included “Make America great again”, “Trump = success, Biden = failure”, “Trump America First. Biden America Last”, “American oil from American soil” and “Mass deportation now!”
The cult of personality extended to a Trump bust made of Indiana limestone, a book of Trump poetry fashioned from his tweets and Trump’s shoe in an exhibition of presidential footwear.
Danny Willis, 25, chair of Delaware Young Republicans, said: “Now we have people taking shots at him – attempted assassination. We’re all here even more engaged, more inspired, more proud to vote here and make sure we get Donald Trump back in the White House.”
That the ex-president’s life had been spared by a quarter of an inch was widely seen as divine intervention, elevating him to the status of a martyr. Some delegates wore ear bandages on the convention floor to express their support. Trump’s erstwhile primary election foes, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, showed up with full-throated endorsements.
Even Asa Hutchinson, a Trump critic who also contested the primary, acknowledged: “Confidence is the right word. I’ve been to six Republican conventions and I’ve never seen a higher level of confidence as they go into the fall election.”
Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, advised Democrats to replace Biden before it is too late: “You got to switch. You got to roll the dice. Take a chance on somebody else. It’s strength versus weakness. Strength wins every time.”
Self-isolating at his Delaware beach house, after testing positive for Covid-19, Biden now faces the biggest decision of his political career. But the walls are closing in on the embattled Democrat.
A stream of dismal polling has deepened Democrats’ pessimism about the president’s chances of winning re-election. A survey this week by AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research found that among his own supporters, two-thirds of Democrats now say Biden should not be the nominee.
His latest bout of Covid-19 was terribly timed – interrupting a trip to battleground Nevada, a multi-day trip designed to confront a host of compounding weaknesses: the president’s poor standing on immigration and the economy as well as his sliding support among Latinos and Black voters.
A fiery speech at the NAACP annual convention in Las Vegas, during which the president touted his accomplishments on behalf of “Black America” and declared that Kamala Harris, the 59-year-old vice-president, “could be president of the United States”, did little to quell widening dissent within the party. Online clips of his flubbed lines circulated, ensuring that even one of his most vigorous appearances since the debate came up short.
Daniella Ballou-Aares, the chief executive of a coalition of business leaders called Leadership Now Project, which has urged the president to “pass the torch” to protect American democracy, acknowledged: “Every scenario is risky right now. There’s no risk-free scenario.
“But there’s a very strong bench in the Democratic party so the feasibility of getting a good ticket is certainly there,” she added. “Of course it’s going to be a hard run to win, but that risk seems like a better bet than the current path that we’re on.”
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As of Friday, more than 30 congressional Democrats, including three US senators, had called on the president to step aside, while the party’s top leaders, including Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader; Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader; and Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, all reportedly telling the president in private that his path to victory is all but extinguished.
In their pleas to the president, they praise his half-century of public service and his accomplishments in the White House, which included the passage of landmark climate legislation, an infrastructure package, a gun control measure and billions in dollars in aid to Ukraine. But they also appeal to his patriotism, saying he helped to “save” the country from Trump in 2020, but now risks handing the former president a second term.
Some high-profile Democrats are rising to Biden’s defense, notably two progressive powerhouses, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative. In a 50-minute Instagram live stream, Ocasio-Cortez blamed Democratic “elites” for belatedly coming forward with their concerns about the president’s age without considering the amount of chaos replacing him would inject into the race.
Biden ally Rev Al Sharpton, who spoke to the president on Monday before his NAACP speech, also cautioned against pressuring Biden to resign.
“Let him make up his mind,” he said. “If he decides to walk, let him walk with his dignity, and if he decides to stay in it, he’s earned the right.”
Sharpton was skeptical of certain members’ motivations for calling on Biden to drop out and said he was dismayed by the degree of “disrespect” being extended to a president with a lengthy record of legislative accomplishments. He said some of the calls appeared to be playing to a “centrist kind of voting base”as many progressive, Black and Hispanic leaders stand by the president.
“If you want to talk about contrast, look at how incoherent Donald Trump was last night. He was all over the place,” Sharpton said, noting that “not one Republican has asked him to step aside, so what’s the standard?”
Publicly, Biden has dug in. In recent media appearances, he’s said he was “1,000%” certain he would continue as the party’s nominee, unless he was “hit by a train” or diagnosed with a “medical condition”. But his campaign is struggling to break through, with every attempt to turn the attention back on Trump and his anti-democratic agenda swamped by questions about the president’s mental acuity and fitness for office.
“They don’t know how to turn this around,” Frank Luntz, a pollster and consultant, said recently, warning that Biden risked suffering a “death of a thousands cuts”.
An overwhelming majority of Democratic delegates are pledged to Biden, who was expected to be formally nominated as the party’s standard-bearer at the party’s convention in Chicago next month. But amid the turmoil, the thousands of delegates elected to decide the party’s nominee are suddenly unsure how to proceed and say they are being given little direction from the party.
They are wrestling with technical questions – what would an open convention look like, how should they vote – but also how do they, as the rules state, “reflect the sentiments” of those who elected them if the candidate ends his campaign?
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, said: “We’ve never had a situation quite like this where the primaries were over, very clearcut winner, and yet something was discovered, unclosed, whatever you want to call it, after the end of the primaries that caused people to severely doubt whether or not their nominee should proceed. We’ve never faced this.”
Speaking on a briefing call organized by Delegates Are Democracy, a newly launched initiative intended to help educate delegates about the nomination process, Kamarck said Harris was the most likely replacement for Biden at this late stage in the election cycle – not because she is necessarily the best candidate but because she has major advantages, including that she has already been vetted at the national level and is privy to daily security briefings.
“With every day, with every minute,” she said, “we’re running out of time.”
Yet if the past month has proved anything, it is that there are more twists, turns and unknowns to come. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “The editor of my book said to me yesterday: ‘Is it over?’ I said: ‘Absolutely not!’ Not only barring the unforeseen – we’ve already had the unforeseen a few times already.
“Imagine what could happen over the next four months.”