Trump’s Florida Convention Could Be The First That Actually Helps Lose A State
When Donald Trump moved his Republican nominating convention to Florida after yanking it from North Carolina last month, the extra hassle and cost at least carried the benefit of shoring up his support in the country’s highest-value swing state.
Four weeks later, with coronavirus cases flaring across the state, the move may instead make it that much harder for Trump to win Florida’s 29 electoral votes ― votes that, if he loses them, would almost certainly guarantee his loss nationally.
“If they move forward with that convention, with the numbers the way they are, people are just going to think they’re crazy,” said Kim Nymeyer, president of the North Pinellas County Democratic Club, adding that Trump’s insistence on holding an in-person coronation amid a pandemic gives her side yet another argument. “I do think Trump is taking the rope and hanging himself without any help from us.”
Trump seemed to back away from his demand for a packed house in an interview with Voice of America on Tuesday. “When we signed a few weeks ago, it looked good. And now all of a sudden it’s spiking up a little bit and that’s going to go down. It really depends on the timing. . . . We can do a lot of things, but we’re very flexible.”
Plans for the three days of rallies at a minor league hockey arena in Jacksonville in late August, meanwhile, continued moving forward Wednesday.
One top Republican close to the White House acknowledged things could, indeed, go badly and wind up hurting Trump’s chances of winning the all-important state.
“It could be OK. If he has a decent crowd, and he gets up and knocks the speech out of the park. That’s the best case,” he said on condition of anonymity. “Worst case? No one comes, it looks empty and there’s a bunch of protests, which becomes the big story in the middle of a pandemic.”
Complications for that best-case scenario are already apparent. Under Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s standing executive order,...
