Which convention was better

And so that calculus, too, might well be something the GOP convention aims to make more widespread. Another area where Republicans differ with voters overall is on views of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Most voters agree with the ideas of the movement, while most Republicans do not. In fact, two-thirds strongly disagree. Like Democrats did for theirs, Republicans say they want their party's convention to be positive in tone. Nine in 10 want to hear good things about Mr.

Meanwhile, the Democrats' convention — which was watched mostly by Democrats — appears to have solidified Biden's existing support, and those who watched said it made them feel more positively. It also shifted some of his voters' rationale for backing him. Heading in, many of Biden's backers were with him predominantly to oppose the president, but today, relatively more Democrats are backing Biden because they're for Biden — that portion is up by nine points. For these measures, we surveyed respondents immediately following the close of the Democrats' convention, recontacting voters whom we'd previously interviewed.

The Electoral College will decide the presidency, but Biden keeps his overall national preference lead over Mr. Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump struck the needed conversational tone. In other words, you want the audience to fear the opponent, not you. Jamieson has studied the power of fear in campaign rhetoric. Support for BLM has decreased thirteen points in the battleground state of Wisconsin in last two months. Some called it flat. But a bombastic rally-style speech would not have worked, and while the speech itself was poorly organized, he stuck to the teleprompter and avoided being too hot for television.

Each of the conventions got roughly 50 million social media interactions. Obama at 7. The GOP had the benefit of President Trump retweeting every convention speaker to his 85 million followers.

Both parties leveraged the power of local media. These conventions reflected two different pandemic realities: a Biden reality and a Trump reality. Visuals of masked Democrats socially distancing and talking to each other through Zoom in a mostly virtual convention vs.

The visual contrast was stark—the pandemic still raging or the pandemic controlled and in the past tense. The visuals also presented two different realities of the movement for racial justice: riots in the streets of cities with Democratic mayors vs. And finally, the visuals showed two different realities of the economy: people thriving in a recovering economy vs. To appeal to different regions, both parties moved their conventions every four years — a tradition maintained to this day.

Another technological shift came in , when Franklin Roosevelt became the first major party nominee to address a convention in person. Until then, custom dictated that the nominee stayed home under the pretense of not being too ambitious for office. Only then did the nominee give brief prepared remarks and start actively campaigning.

Roosevelt blew through that custom by catching a plane from New York to the Democratic convention site in Chicago and addressing the delegates the day after his nomination. Traveling to Chicago was not just a metaphor for Roosevelt. By dominating the attention of the convention at precisely the time voters were paying attention to it, FDR signaled his intention to not only be a nominee of the party, but the leader of the party.

And it made his transformative political message part of the news. Television further changed the conventions. For much of the 19th century, presidential nominations were contested by multiple candidates , causing difficult convention battles; the Democratic convention went through rounds of balloting before settling on John W.

Starting in , conventions permitted television cameras, which reduced the incentives for endless ballots. Instead, conventions became visible celebrations of party unity. In , the parties started using primary elections to select delegates pledged to vote for specific candidates, so the delegate count was publicly known before the conventions were gaveled to order. Conventions became days-long infomercials for the nominee.

The pandemic has struck at just the right moment for another technological shift. Network television news — the medium through which most 20th century conventions were viewed — commands less voter attention.

Moving the convention spectacle online allows the party to control their message more effectively — as Republican efforts to exclude journalists from the proceedings highlight. We get it. Sign up for good Sunday reading. Democrats recorded some speeches in advance, allowing the party to release focused content compatible with the pace and packaging of social media.