Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Giovanni Russonello, typically the morning newsletter writer, covering the evening shift during the conventions. |
 | | Travis Dove for The New York Times |
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At the Democratic National Convention last week, members of George Floyd’s family urged action on police reform, and Joe Biden acknowledged the importance “of rooting out our systemic racism” during his acceptance speech. |
The message was quite different yesterday as the Republican convention got underway. “America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley said, as she portrayed Democrats as unpatriotic for harping on the prevalence of discrimination in American life. |
Instead, many Republican speakers assailed the protesters fighting racial injustice in cities across the country, portraying them as violent and extreme and arguing that as president, Mr. Biden would encourage them to run amok. |
Moments after Ms. Haley’s address, Donald Trump Jr. took her argument a step further. “The other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded,” he said, accusing Democrats of trying to “cancel” the nation’s founders. He went on to paint a gruesome picture of what a Biden presidency would mean for America, arguing that under a Democratic administration, 911 calls would go “to voice mail.” |
That message — that Democrats prefer anarchy over order, and that they are a threat to the safety of the country — has come to define President Trump’s re-election campaign. It’s a message rife with racial undertones, and we’re likely to hear a lot more of it as the Republican convention continues this week. |
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted just before the D.N.C., voters were asked to name one or two top issues they’d be thinking about when they cast their ballots in the November election. Just 15 percent mentioned crime. They were more likely to name the economy (51 percent), uniting the country (43 percent), strong leadership (34 percent), health care (29 percent) and the coronavirus (27 percent). |
On most of those topics, a range of polls has shown that voters generally see Mr. Biden as more capable than Mr. Trump. |
When asked in an ABC News/Washington Post poll this month whether they thought they would be safer from crime under Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, registered voters were likeliest to say it wouldn’t really matter who was president. |
Yet the Republicans’ focus on the protests has to do with more than just safety and order: It gives Mr. Trump an opportunity to turn up the dial on an argument that has always been central to his political identity. |
Mr. Trump won the 2016 election largely by playing up white racial resentment, and by targeting those white voters who felt the country’s traditional identity was under attack. |
At the start of the 2016 primaries, with the Black Lives Matter movement and the legalization of same-sex marriage fresh on many voters’ minds, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 78 percent of Trump supporters felt the nation’s culture and values were changing in a way they disagreed with. |
For Mr. Trump’s base, this message still resonates. |
In a Public Religion Research Institute poll conducted in June, even as most Americans across racial lines expressed greater concern than before about police brutality and institutional racism, more than six in 10 Republicans said that discrimination against whites was just as big a problem as discrimination against people of color. |
“The Republican Party has clearly leaned into a kind of white grievance politics,” said Hakeem Jefferson, a professor of political science at Stanford University. He added that the Republican tilt of the Electoral College and the potential for voter suppression in communities of color contributed to making this a viable strategy. “The bottom line is that this is the kind of campaign you can run when you can give up on trying to build a diverse coalition,” Dr. Jefferson said. |
In higher numbers than ever before on record, most Americans now agree that discrimination against Black people is a big problem in the United States — but they remain about evenly split on whether they believe the racism is fundamentally built into the American system. Just 46 percent of respondents said so in an NBC/Journal poll last month. |
Most Americans feel a real attachment to the country’s history, and there is certainly a balance to be struck. Just before the 2018 midterms, a CBS News poll found that most Americans felt it was important to preserve “the cultural heritage of America’s founders.” That included 77 percent of Republicans and six in 10 independents (though most Democrats disagreed). |
Even today, Americans remain divided over whether it’s a good idea to take down monuments to symbols of white supremacy, including those devoted to Confederate leaders. When asked specifically about statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both of whom owned slaves, nearly three-quarters of registered voters told Fox News pollsters last month that they should stay up. |
But there’s a fundamental flaw at the heart of Republicans’ strategy in attempting to portray Mr. Biden as an anti-American radical who wants to “defund the police.” (Mr. Biden has stated that he does not support the defund movement.) Because if the fundamental issue underlying all of this is the need to improve race relations, Mr. Trump may have already lost the fight. |
By a gaping margin, 53 percent to 29 percent, voters said in the most recent NBC/Journal poll that they trusted Mr. Biden to handle race relations more than Mr. Trump. |
Who else is speaking tonight |
You can expect racial resentment to remain a central theme on Night 2 of the convention, where the speakers will include Nicholas Sandmann, the teenager who got in a dispute with a Native American man at a protest last year; Mary Ann Mendoza, a consultant to the embattled We Build the Wall organization; and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who made headlines in June for his opposition to anti-lynching legislation. |
Also speaking will be Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. Three members of Mr. Trump’s family will also speak: his wife, Melania, his son Eric, and his daughter Tiffany. |
As usual, you can watch the full two-hour broadcast beginning at 9 p.m., at nytimes.com. Our reporters will be online dishing out their analysis — and fact checks — in real time. CNN, MSNBC and PBS will show the full two-hour event, but Fox News and the major broadcast TV networks will air only the second half. |
- With little fanfare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to say that people without symptoms should not receive tests.
- The move drew criticism from health experts, who pointed to statistics showing that as many as half of virus infections can be traced back to people who had not yet started to show symptoms.
- “This is potentially dangerous,” said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician in Palo Alto, Calif. Forgoing testing among asymptomatic people means “you’re not looking for a lot of people who are potential spreaders of disease,” she added.
- The Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country in the early days of summer had appeared to quiet down in recent weeks. But then Mr. Blake, while unarmed, was shot eight times by police officers in Kenosha, Wis.
- Protesters in Kenosha have taken to the streets in the days since, and last night they lit fires along a strip of businesses in a central neighborhood. “It’s unfortunate, but it has to be done,” said Wayne Gardner, a resident of the area, arguing that the confrontational tactics were needed to bring attention to the problem of police brutality.
- The Kenosha police said that the officers involved in Mr. Blake’s shooting had been placed on administrative leave. Mr. Blake was in stable condition, his father announced this afternoon, but had been paralyzed from the waist down.
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