Party conventions set tone for a combative presidential campaign

WASHINGTON — The Democratic and Republican conventions have set a combative and harsh tone for presidential candidates Joe Biden and President Donald Trump as they begin their campaigns in earnest with about two months to go to the election. 

While the conventions also featured aspirational and hopeful messages by the candidates and other speakers, on each of the four days of their programs Democrats and Republicans laid out their differences on politics and culture, often in stark terms. 

In his acceptance speech, Biden described Trump’s presidency as a time of “darkness” and charged that Trump is “a president who takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division.” 

Trump responded with his own blistering critique of Biden, calling him “weak” and accused him of being responsible for “the most catastrophic betrayals and blunders in our lifetime. He has spent his entire career on the wrong side of history.” 

Speakers at the Democratic convention accused Trump of being autocratic and at best racially insensitive, and Republicans at their convention charged that Biden is a willing tool of socialists who want to upend the United States’ capitalist economy. 

And the conventions showed the main battle line: Biden attacked Trump for his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic that took more than 170,000 lives and Trump pivoted to law and order to blame Biden for lawlessness, rioting and violence in cities. 

“Both conventions are really setting the tone for what the rest of this election will look like,” said Matt Terrill, chief of staff on Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and now a partner at Firehouse Strategies advising private sector clients. 

“Part of that is going to be both candidates working to counter the narratives that both campaigns are launching against each other,” he said. 

As with most presidential campaigns for a second term, this year’s election will be a referendum on Trump and his first four years in office. Both the Republican and Democratic conventions focused heavily on Trump.

“Trump is the commanding and overriding factor in everything up and down the ticket across the country. So much of it is just about him and his leadership,” said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. 

The Democrats sought to present themselves as a big tent party, with a politically and racially diverse set of speakers that reflected the base of the party. But speakers also took shots at Trump and his party's policies. 

Steve Israel, a former Democratic Long Island congressman who is advising the Biden campaign, blames Trump for the harshness of the campaign. 

“With or without the conventions, this will be the most combative presidential campaign in history. The tone was set not in 2020, but Donald Trump’s first campaign in 2016,” Israel said. “The convention is an overture. The debates are intermission. The finale is the election.” 

But former Suffolk GOP chairman John Jay LaValle, a member of the Trump 2020 National Finance Committee, praised the tone of the GOP convention and doubted the race will be combative because he said Biden is not “capable of that type of discourse.” 

LaValle said Trump’s emphasis on “law and order” was “incredibly important” to the key voting blocs that traditionally have high voter turnouts: senior citizens and women. A majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016.

“I guarantee you Trump does much better with women than you'd ever imagine, because safety for themselves and their own children and family is going to be a weight on their mind,” said LaValle, even though polls show an erosion of support among those voters for Trump. 

As Trump hit the ground running Friday evening with a mini-rally in a New Hampshire airport hangar, Biden will have to become more actively engaged than he has been, said Brad Bannon, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic campaign strategist. 

“I think we’ll see the race will narrow and it will require Biden to be more aggressive in the next two months of the campaign,” Bannon said. “It's time for Biden to blitz and go real hard after Trump.” 

The conventions will give bumps to both campaigns, but those will fade over time as daily campaigning and events overtake the presidential race and be forgotten once Trump and Biden meet face-to-face in the first debate on Sept. 19. 

“We're getting closer and closer to Election Day, but there still are a lot of long days and short nights in this campaign left,” Terrill said. “So anything can happen.”