The two national party conventions have ended, and we now know how the Republicans and the Democrats, or at least their high commands, see the world going into the general election campaign. This is perhaps the biggest single thing that the national conventions tell us. Its implications are hardly graven in stone: strategies that are based on these perceptions but appear not to be working will be cast aside over the next few weeks. Yet there are not all that many weeks left, and we have just spent two of them watching each party set out what its strategists think the 2012 contest is about, and what they think you ought to do in response.

 So, we need to attend centrally to these two strategic views, which gain additional curiosity value because the two parties do not see the necessities of the fall campaign in the same way.…

I spent last week as a guest of the Wisconsin Republicans, and I am spending this week as a guest of the New Jersey Democrats. So it probably time to think a little bit in print about characteristics and differences, though the comparison is not simple: different demographics, different culture, different campaign statuses—not to mention different parties, not just at the state level but as states within their national parties. On the other hand, if the comparison is ultimately impossible, it does lead us to look again comparatively at those national parties.

Living in New Jersey

Just as I was fortunate to be able to stay with Wisconsin in both 2008 and 2012, I have been fortunate to stay with New Jersey in both years as well.…

The directly political story of each national party convention, Democratic and Republican, year by year, is captured in the themes that convention planners want to emphasize and in the themes they feel they have to emphasize, as well, of course, in what they talk about in doing both. Some of these themes are remarkably consistent for each party, year after year. Conversely, some of them are largely dependent on the issues of the day, on concerns that blow up in one election year and disappear by another. This is the sense in which most of us understand ‘politics’—explicit policy-related warfare between two major political parties. But conventions also embody, very concretely, a much larger aspect of democratic politics. This involves nothing less than the links between the general public and party activists.…

There were some good reasons, none of which would appeal to a working journalist, to wait a couple of days before writing about the final evening of the Republican National Convention. For Mitt Romney, this final evening must have been a source of substantial satisfaction. If most working journalists did not hail him as the emerging orator of his time, most did appear to believe that he had checked all the boxes on his rhetorical to-do list. For me, the final evening instead brought back, in a quite intense way, the distinction between the convention on-site and the convention at-home. Important things were seen on-site that, in effect, never occurred for most of those who were watching on network television. I need to talk about these.…

There is a curious interaction at national party conventions between the physical setup of the convention writ large, the effective content of its substantive program, and the technology by which this substance is communicated.  All have changed over time, but they have changed in ways that are at least partially related.  So, now that Hurricane Isaac has moved far enough away to allow programming—though never far enough away to be absent from the strategizing of convention leaders—and now that the hall has actually been used to deliver a program on both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, it is probably time to consider the two sides of this interaction, ‘the Hall’ and ‘the Program’. 

The Hall

There are two grand and gross ways for the convention leadership to organize the podium at a convention, the central physical focus for its substantive output. …

In my time attending national party conventions, I have gone under a wide variety of auspices. Originally, in 1980 and with a smaller reprise in 1984, I sought (and received) official authorization from both the Republican and the Democratic National Committees to come as myself, that is, as head of a research team. But I have also attended under the auspices of interest groups (Coca-Cola for the Democrats in 1988), of other official party bodies (the Republican Governors Association for the Republicans in 1996), of formal arms of the convention itself (program staff for the Democrats in 2000), and even of the news media (as support to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel several times). But the most common auspices have actually been individual states.…

There are several large contextual factors which affect the appropriate strategy for convention leadership at any given national party convention. How divided or united is the convention, on the candidate and on the issues? What idiosyncratic characteristics does the nominee bring with him, characteristics that must be either meliorated or harvested? But the biggest—and most strategically tricky—involves the overarching electoral context for this particular election campaign. A crude way to distinguish these contexts is to call them re-elections, successions, or open contests. But as we shall see, there is much more to these distinctions than that. From one side, whether the campaign judges these correctly or incorrectly just may determine its fortunes. From the other side, whether the convention uses its resources to maximize candidate fortunes under even a correctly judged context can also matter hugely.…

I attended my first national party conventions in 1980, and I have gone to them all ever since. Some were more intriguing than others, but I like to think that I learned something from each. In thinking about the 2012 versions, however, I discovered that I do have roughly recurrent strategies for making sense of them. My first two posts from Tampa, today and tomorrow, especially given that the Monday sessions have been cancelled (about which, more below), take off from these strategies. In no particular order, I need a key delegation or a sample thereof, in order to follow convention politics at their most concrete. I need familiarity with (and then access to) the convention hall, as the framework to what is being produced from the podium.…