Republican convention crowds thinned as delegates went through stages of grief over Trump’s nomination
Reporting from Cleveland — As the roll call vote to award Donald Trump the GOP presidential nomination began this week, Ryan Davenport slipped out of the convention hall here to a nearby restaurant where a group of Republicans were brainstorming how to find a new candidate before November’s election.
Davenport, a 25-year-old high school teacher, wasn’t the only convention-goer to take a pass on the big moment. Images showed a partially empty arena as the night dragged on. Speeches by Trump’s children, a manager of his winery and a soap-opera-star-turned-avocado-grower topped that night’s prime-time lineup.
Trump may be a highly rated former reality TV star, especially adept at generating media attention, but he struggled this week to hold onto the audience with his takeover of the Republican Party.
“While they’re striking matches and lighting fire to the place, I didn’t want to be in there,” said Davenport, an alternate delegate from Texas, who has been video-chatting with his teenage government-class students back home in Dallas.
“I can’t make the case for Donald Trump. And I won’t. I’m going to hang on to whatever last shred of hope I have that someone’s going to ride in.”
Disunity was evident beyond the arena. Ratings showed TV audiences also shrank from opening night, as viewers apparently lost interest in the B-list celebrities and Trump-backing members of Congress on the convention stage.
Veteran GOP operatives say the problem wasn’t just the convention’s disorganized schedule and lack of top-notch political rock stars – the two living former Republican presidents did not participate — that caused burnout. It’s reflective of the broader struggle within the Republican Party that just can’t quite fully embrace Trump.
“The party is not yet unified,” said one Republican strategist who has been attending conventions since 1996 and was granted anonymity to speak frankly.
“Nobody cares about Trump’s kids. If it was Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio or Joni Ernst in a reasonable hour there’d be a lot more interest,” he said about the up-and-coming Republican leaders.
But by the third night, it was almost impossible to ignore the stage as Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, was booed for his refusal to back the nominee in a remarkable moment.
“Arena was packed, totally electric!” Trump marveled afterward in a tweet.
And when he accepted the party nomination Thursday, the energy in the arena showed the strength of the Trump train. His address was interrupted repeatedly with cheers and chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and “Build the wall!” from the crowd, a reference to his vow to secure the U.S.-Mexico border with a wall.
Trump has brought many new voters to the party, including those who have sat out past primaries and now passionately support the businessman as an outsider alternative to stale politicians.
Among those who are all-in for Trump, the mood was decisively more upbeat, another example of how the party remains so divided that even its reviews of the convention were split.
Don Halle, a building contractor from Gulfport, Miss., and his wife, Linda, said the convention floor felt much more alive than it did just four years ago, when Republicans gave a lackluster nomination to Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan.
“This was a lot more enthusiastic,” said Don Halle, a Trump supporter from “Day 1.” “In 2012, I left there not feeling very good about Mitt Romney. We feel already so good about this.”
The couple particularly enjoyed seeing Trump’s family on the stage, a portrait of the nominee beyond his sometimes crass rhetoric that has captured voters’ attention and broken the conventional rules of political decorum.
“Little Don Jr.… He knocked it out of the park,” Halle said about the candidate’s son. The couple also were wowed by Melania Trump’s speech, even though it has been roundly criticized for plagiarizing from an earlier address by First Lady Michelle Obama.
“We were overwhelmed with not just her beauty but her poise,” Halle said of Trump’s Slovenian-born third wife. “This is not even her language. Where those words came from are not as important as what she said, and how she said it.”
Aimee Winder Newton wasn’t sure what to expect at her first convention, but she definitely noticed the emptying hall those first nights as she watched the proceedings from seats high in the stands.
The Utah mother of four wondered whether folks were leaving because of the lineup or if they were just tired after the long day. Certainly, delegates could have opted to hob-nob at the many off-site parties.
She stuck around, even though she had little interest in the parade of actors and Trump backers — and said many of her Utah colleagues were moving through the stages of grief, as she put it, that Trump is the nominee.
“Once we move past his messaging and some of his rude comments, we want to know who Donald Trump is, so we can feel better about him,” she said.
She was heartened to hear from Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., with his upbeat tone. “I’m looking for those things that can help me feel comfortable about the nominee,” she said.
Longtime Republican strategist Kevin Madden, a former top Romney aide, said he understood delegates’ dilemma. He, too, stayed away from the Quicken Loans Arena on that historic night when delegates gave Trump the nomination.
“It’s not a happy occasion inside, so they’re looking at ways to get outside,” he said. “There is a bit of an Irish wake quality to it.”
Twitter: @LisaMascaro
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