CHICAGO — The political star power and unity on display at the Democratic National Convention, where Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama have lauded Vice President Harris, is putting in stark contrast the divisions in the GOP led by former President Trump.
While former President Clinton on Wednesday became the third Democratic president to speak at the United Center in Chicago, there were no Bushes or Cheneys at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
There wasn’t anyone representing the memory of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the party’s nominee in 2008. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the party’s 2012 nominee who says he won’t even vote for Trump, wasn’t there either.
Even Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, was absent from Milwaukee and has said he will be voting for someone other than Trump as president.
To be sure, Republicans had rallied behind Trump as their nominee at their convention last month, held days after the former president survived an assassin’s attempt to take his life during a Pennsylvania rally. During that week in Milwaukee, Republicans seemed more unified behind Trump than they had in some time, while Democrats looked hopelessly divided over President Biden’s fate.
What a difference a month makes.
With Biden’s exit from the race and Harris’s ascension as the nominee, it is Democrats who are now winning the unity war.
Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster who was an architect of the strategy behind the 1994 Republican revolution that vaulted former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to power, said while the Milwaukee convention was all about Trump, the Chicago convention is more like a “movement.”
“One is about an individual and the other is about a movement,” said Luntz, who was in Chicago on Wednesday to help moderate a panel discussion about promoting career technical education in high school.
“And in the end, a movement usually does better. This is why Harris is doing so well and he’s doing so badly,” Luntz added. “With Harris, there are so many people on the same side. With Trump, it’s just Donald Trump.”
The coalescing of Democrats behind Harris has been helped by the validation of the biggest Democratic stars of the past, including the Clintons and Obamas.
“Kamala has the character, experience, and vision to lead us forward. I know her heart and her integrity,” Hillary Clinton declared Monday night.
The former first lady and secretary of State seemed genuinely enthusiastic, even joyous, about Harris becoming the nation’s first woman president, something she deeply wanted to become herself in the 2008 and 2016 elections.
Former President Obama delivered a rousing endorsement of Harris on Tuesday evening, proclaiming, “Kamala Harris is ready for the job.”
“This is a person who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion,” he said.
In Milwaukee, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has been in his post for a little less than a year, urged his party to “unite” and “send President Donald Trump back to the White House.”
But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the longest-serving Senate party leader in history who played a major role in confirming three Trump-appointed justices to the Supreme Court, attended but did not get a speaking slot.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.), the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate who helped Trump deliver his signature legislative achievement, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, skipped the event entirely, even though he is from nearby Janesville, Wis.
He made the decision to boycott a Trump-centered convention in early 2023, telling a local television station: “I’ll be here if it’s not someone named Trump.”
Republican strategists said Trump could have benefited by inviting some of his party’s elder statesmen to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, arguing they could have helped nudge “Trump-skeptical” Republicans to vote for him.
“The Republican Party has been substantially transformed in the years of Donald Trump,” said Republican strategist Vin Weber.
Weber noted the GOP convention in Milwaukee was a moment of euphoria for many Republicans.
“When we had the Republican convention, people were talking about the party never having been so unified,” he noted.
But that unity left out key Republicans, including former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, both of whom Trump has frequently criticized. Bush has not been to a GOP convention in person since 2004, when he was renominated for president.
Cheney’s daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), was obviously nowhere to be seen in Milwaukee. She’s a high-profile Trump critic in the GOP who sat on the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Her differences with Trump effectively ended her political career.
Other prominent members of Congress, such as Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), also skipped the festivities.
Weber said Trump could have been helped if George W. Bush or another prominent Republican with strong credibility with the Reagan-Bush wing of the party showed up in Milwaukee to endorse him.
“There are lot of Trump-skeptical Republicans and independents out there, and Trump’s campaign would have done well to get people to validate to them that it’s OK to vote for Donald Trump,” he said. “That would have been a plus for the campaign.
“But I also have to look at the other side of that. I don’t think it’s … entirely a question of those people not having been invited. I think a lot of them wouldn’t have participated, because their hostility is so intense,” he said of former Republican leaders, such as former President Bush or former Vice President Cheney, who are now effectively banished from the MAGA-dominated GOP.
The question going forward is whether Democrats will remain unified through November, and whether the unity battle will make a difference when voters go to the polls this fall.