MILWAUKEE — The last time Republicans gathered for a full convention, they were plagued by internal divisions and fear. Morale was near rock bottom. And the party’s presidential nominee showed little desire, or ability, to add new voters to his political coalition.
What a difference eight years can make.
The Republican officials, strategists and activists who packed Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week expressed a collective confidence not seen in decades. Boos and infighting marred Donald Trump’s first convention in 2016, but it was defined by overwhelming expressions of unity while GOP leaders — including Trump skeptics — enjoyed what most saw as a near-certain victory in November.
Trumps surviving after nearly being killed At a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend, they said, it was the last opportunity to bring everyone together, despite the former president’s extraordinary personal and political baggage.
“It feels like 1980,” Ed Cox, a smiling chairman of the New York GOP, said on the red-carpet floor of the convention this week, referring to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in the presidential election. Cox pointed to a sense of inevitability building around Trump and the GOP. “We finally came together.”
These are the worst of times for Democrats.
Back in Washington, the party a public and private lobbying effort intensified to force President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race after his disastrous debate against Trump last month. Donors, elected officials and leaders within Biden’s own campaign believe he can’t win. And an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that the vast majority of Democratic voters have lost confidence in Biden’s ability to govern and want him to resign before it is too late to stop Trump.
Only about a third of Democrats believe Biden has a better chance of winning in November than Trump, the poll found. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats also said Biden should drop out of the presidential race and let his party nominate another candidate.
By contrast, about 7 in 10 Republicans say Trump is better positioned to win the election. Almost no Republicans think Biden is better positioned to win. The undecided include black Democrats, who are the backbone of Biden’s political coalition. Only about half of black Democrats think Biden is better positioned to win, the poll found.
Many Democrats now privately expect — or perhaps hope — that someone other than Biden will be on stage to accept the party’s nomination when the Democratic National Convention starts in Chicago in a month.
Hours before Trump’s triumphant speech at the convention On Thursday, a senior Biden campaign official repeatedly pushed back against a flood of new questions about whether the president would leave office.
“I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t know how many more times I can answer that,” Quentin Fulks, deputy director of Biden’s reelection campaign, told a news conference in Milwaukee when asked whether the president’s commitment to reelection might be waning. “There are no plans being made to replace Biden on the ballot.”
Election Day is 109 days away. The first early votes will be cast in just eight weeks. And recent elections suggest that conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Some national polls show a close race, while others suggest Trump has a lead. Some state polls also contain warning signs for Biden, including a recent New York Times/Siena poll that suggested a competitive race in Virginia, a state Republicans last won 20 years ago.
But history is replete with examples of staggering political setbacks, including Trump’s own election of 2016 against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“Every time you start to feel confident, you pick up an article about Tom Dewey,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told a congressional luncheon this week, referring to a Republican challenger who was favored to face a struggling Democratic president in 1948.
“Tom Dewey picked his cabinet … in mid-September because the election was over,” Gingrich said. “Republicans had every confidence in him. And Harry Truman won.”
Trump goes into the general election with enormous burdens.
He is the first candidate from a major party who found liable of sexual abuse in a civil lawsuit. In May he was convicted of 34 crimes for trying to cover up hush-money payments to a former porn actor during the 2016 election.
Rioters loyal to Trump flooded the US Capitol less than four years agoinspired by his lies about the election he lost to Biden. In the vast majority of his public appearances in the years since, Trump has spread the same lies about election fraud that provoked the insurrection — and has laid the groundwork for similar calls if he doesn’t win in November.
Politically he is takes the honor before the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wadewhich has led to a flood of unpopular abortion restrictions across the country, even as he tries to distance himself from Republican calls to a national abortion ban.
And Democrats have been associating him with the maximalist ideas of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025staffed by many of his allies and former aides, who proposed laying off tens of thousands of government workers and implementing sweeping changes to American life.
But dozens of Republicans interviewed at the convention this week pointed to a rare coincidence — of a judge appointed by Trump to the case of the secret documents against him in Florida, to Biden’s fight, to the failed assassination attempt on July 13 — that gives them the utmost confidence.
Republican National Committee member Henry Barbour, who did not endorse Trump in the recent primaries, predicted that Trump would become the first Republican in 20 years to win the most votes.
“I didn’t vote for Trump in the primaries. I voted for Nikki Haley. But I was moved by his words about his desire to unite the country,” Barbour said. “Having a near-death experience, which I have, really does have a way of focusing the mind.”
Matt Mowers, a strategist who worked on Trump’s first political campaign, said Trump’s worst day in the 2024 campaign is, politically speaking, better than his best day during that 2016 campaign.
And Trump pollster and senior adviser Tony Fabrizio said Trump now has more than two dozen realistic options to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
The most likely option, he said, is to add Georgia and Pennsylvania to the states Trump carried in 2020. But Fabrizio also pointed to legitimate opportunities to compete in the Democratic states of Minnesota and Virginia and even Democratic strongholds like New Mexico, New Jersey and Maine.
“The more they deny the situation, the better it is for us,” Fabrizio said.
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Associated Press reporters Thomas Beaumont in Milwaukee and Will Weissert in Washington contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.