MILWAUKEE – The last time Republicans gathered for a full convention, they were plagued by internal division and fear. Morale was near rock bottom. And the party's presidential nominee showed little desire, or capacity, to add new voters to his political coalition.
What a difference eight years make.
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The Republican officials, strategists and activists who packed Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week expressed a collective confidence at levels not seen in decades. Boos and infighting marred Donald Trump's first convention in 2016, but this one was defined by overwhelming displays of unity as GOP leaders — Trump skeptics among them — reveled in what most view as an all but certain victory come November.
Trump's survival after nearly being assassinated at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend, they said, was the last piece to bring everyone together in spite of the former president's extraordinary personal and political baggage.
“It feels like 1980,” said a smiling New York GOP Chair Ed Cox on the convention's red-carpeted floor this week, referring to Ronald Reagan's landslide presidential victory. Cox pointed to a sense of inevitability building around Trump and the GOP. “We finally came completely together.”
For Democrats, it is the worst of times.
Back in Washington, the party intensified a public and private lobbying effort to force President Joe Biden to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate against Trump last month. Donors, elected officials and leaders within Biden's own campaign believe he cannot win. And an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll indicated that the vast majority of Democratic voters have lost confidence in Biden's ability to govern and want him to step aside before it is too late to stop Trump.
Only about a third of Democrats believe Biden is more capable than Trump of winning in November, according to the poll, which also found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats say Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate.
By contrast, about 7 in 10 Republicans say Trump is more capable of winning the election. Almost no Republicans think Biden is more capable of winning. The doubters include Black Democrats, who make up the backbone of Biden’s political coalition. Only about half of Black Democrats think Biden is better able to win, according to the poll.
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 begins in Chicago in a month.
Hours before Trump's triumphant convention speech on Thursday, a top Biden campaign official repeatedly pushed back against a flurry of new questions about whether the president is going to step aside.
"I do not want to be rude, but I don’t know how many more times I can answer that,” Quentin Fulks, principal deputy manager of Biden’s reelection campaign, told a news conference in Milwaukee when asked whether the president's commitment to his reelection may be softening. “There are no plans being made to replace Biden on the ballot.”
There's still plenty of time for surprises
Election Day is 109 days away. The first early votes will be cast in just eight weeks. And recent elections suggest that the conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Some national polls do show a close race, though others suggest Trump with a lead. Some state polls have contained warning signs for Biden, too, 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 littered with examples of stunning political upsets, including Trump's own 2016 election against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“Every time you start to get confident, pick up an article about Tom Dewey,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told a convention luncheon this week, referring to a Republican challenger who was favored against a struggling Democratic president in 1948.
“Tom Dewey was picking his Cabinet ... in mid-September because the election was over,” Gingrich said. “Republicans were totally confident. And Harry Truman won.”
Trump also enters the general election with huge liabilities.
He is the first major party nominee to be found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial. In May, he was convicted of 34 felonies for trying to hide hush money payments to a former porn actor during the 2016 election.
Rioters loyal to Trump swarmed the U.S. Capitol less than four years ago, inspired 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 triggered the insurrection — and he has laid the foundation for similar calls if he does not win in November.
Politically, he takes credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which has led to a crush of unpopular abortion restrictions across the nation, even as he tries to distance himself from Republican calls for a national abortion ban.
And Democrats have spent months linking him to the maximalist ideas of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, staffed by many of his allies and former aides, which has proposed firing tens of thousands of government workers and imposing sweeping changes across American life.
Trump's campaign is eying longtime Democratic states
But dozens of Republicans interviewed at the convention this week pointed to a rare confluence of events — from a judge Trump appointed dismissing the classified documents case against him in Florida, to Biden's struggles, to the failed July 13 assassination attempt — that give them supreme confidence.
Republican National Committee member Henry Barbour, who did not support Trump in the recent primary, predicted that Trump is poised to become the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.
“I didn’t vote for Trump in the primary. I voted for Nikki Haley. But I am moved by him talking about his desire to bring the country together,” Barbour said. “Going through a near-death experience, and I’ve done it, it really tends to focus the mind.”
Matt Mowers, a strategist who worked on Trump’s first political campaign, said that Trump’s worst day in the 2024 campaign, politically speaking, is 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 paths to clinch the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
The most likely, he said, comes by adding Georgia and Pennsylvania to the states Trump carried in 2020. But Fabrizio also pointed to legitimate opportunities to compete in Democratic-leaning Minnesota and Virginia and even Democratic strongholds like New Mexico, New Jersey and Maine.
“The more they are in denial about the situation, the better it is for us,” Fabrizio said.
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Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Milwaukee and Will Weissert in Washington contributed.
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Follow the AP's coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.