Do presidential conventions matter?
“The audience numbers are terrible. People aren’t watching,” political expert Larry Sabato said. “Conventions might some day be replaced by some kind of electronic nominating system. I call them dinosaurs that are not yet extinct.” The data may not back this up. Obama’s prime-time address to the nation broke a new Twitter record for political traffic and even before people had time to digest the speech tweets about the Democratic convention were approaching 10 million.
Figures also showed that 25.1 million people tuned in to the second night of the convention Wednesday, when former president Bill Clinton gave an impassioned speech formally nominating Obama.
Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of Pollster.com, admitted it is harder for conventions to provide the kind of poll bounce they used to, but said they still matter. “I wouldn’t write off the impact of the conventions in moving the electorate a little bit,” he said, pointing to Republican nominee John McCain’s significant boost after he and running mate Sarah Palin took the 2008 convention by storm.
For Franklin, the most significant change from the conventions of old is that the rival Democratic and Republican events are now lumped together late in the American summer, closer to election day.
This scenario, he believes, gives a significant advantage to whoever comes second. This time around that was the Democrats, who on Thursday night nominated Barack Obama for a second term during three days of overblown political pomp.
“There is certainly the advantage of going second because you know what the other guy said and didn’t say and anything you want to respond to you’re now well-positioned to do so,” Franklin said.
This year’s conventions, just 10 and nine weeks from elections day, were seen as offering Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney a crucial chance to make their cases to the American people and rally their troops in key swing states.
But Kyle Kondik, an analyst at Sabato’s department in Virginia, said public interest was on the wane and conventions had little leverage. “Americans just have more choices in entertainment, and the conventions largely attract partisan viewers,” he said. “Combine that with a highly polarized electorate and it’s just hard for the conventions to have a dramatic effect.”
At the same time conventions may have become less dramatic. Political parties are a lot more ideologically cohesive than in times gone by. Gone are the dramatic floor fights of old when liberal Republicans from the northeastern states and conservative Democrats from the south would take on their respective establishments.
“I think there has been a conversion to a line-up of speakers orchestrated to produce variations on a theme, variations on the same message that you want to build through the three nights of the convention,” Franklin said.
“I think is more controlled than it was a couple of decades ago. More strategic planning: you’re gonna talk about women, you’re gonna talk about small business, you’re gonna talk about Latinos.”
In 2012, after all the hoopla, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the thousands of repetitive pleas to voters in swing states to get out there and whip up support, Sabato said he didn’t think there would be much of an impact.
“We will end up where we were before with an incumbent who has a slight edge,” he said. Franklin agreed with that basic premise — maybe Obama will carry forward a bit of a bounce — but he pointed out that the conventions also still have the potential to surprise, and to help or hinder a political career.
“Certainly the Barack Obama example was a stepping-stone in ‘04 into his eventual ‘08 campaign. Bill Clinton’s famous speech in ‘88 went on and on and on. It was one he had to kind of recover from rather than build on.”
n Agence France Presse
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