Part 3

How Trump Won the White House

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican and Democratic national nominating conventions were raucous affairs.

In those decades, candidates routinely came to the convention to be nominated. There were no primary elections that allowed a candidate prior to the election to gain the required number of delegates to win on the first ballot. Floor fights were common. Even the convention’s rules were frequently debated on the floor. When a candidate was nominated, the candidate’s supporters rose from their seats and conducted a demonstration, marching through the aisles, carrying banners proclaiming their support for the candidate. The band played music as the supporters marched around the convention hall, singing, shouting, and laughing. The size and enthusiasm of the floor demonstration was used as a sign of the candidate’s popularity. In the hotels, state caucuses gathered to hear the candidates and barter delegate votes with other state delegations. Floor managers were assigned by candidates to rove the convention floor and hotel backrooms to gather delegate votes. Throughout the day and night, delegates partied, while liquor flowed. Even the convention hall was filled with cigarette smoke.

The first experiments to televise a national presidential nominating convention began in 1948, covering the Republicans in June and the Democrats in July, with both conventions that year held in Philadelphia. The impact of television was immediately clear, as both parties chose Philadelphia because it was the center point of the Boston to Richmond coaxial cable, then the main carrier of live television in the United States. By 1948, an estimated 10 million people from Boston to Richmond had televisions and could watch the conventions, if they chose to do so. Reports at the time indicated the convention hall in Philadelphia, packed to the rafters during the hot 1948 summer, was like a hot-house heated by blazing television lights in the days before air conditioning was common.1

“By 1956, both parties further amended their convention programs to better fit the demands of television coverage,” the Museum of Broadcast Television notes. “Party officials condensed the length of the convention, created uniform campaign themes for each party, adorned convention halls with banners and patriotic decorations, placed television crews in positions with flattering views of the proceedings, dropped daytime sessions, limited welcoming speeches and parliamentary organization procedures, scheduled sessions to reach a maximum audience in prime time, and eliminated seconding speeches for vice presidential candidates. Additionally, the presence of television cameras encouraged parties to conceal intra-party battling and choose geographic host cities amenable to their party.”2

In 1972, a controversy was created when a reporter found a television minute-by-minute script for the convention lying on the floor backstage of the Republican national nominating convention in Miami Beach, Florida. David Gergen, then a White House speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, subsequently admitted that nothing at the 1972 Republican convention was left to chance. “We actually prepared, down to the minute, a script for the whole convention,” Gergen admitted. That script spelled out everything the television camera would see happening in the convention hall, down to “spontaneous” demonstrations.3 Bill Carruthers, who began his career as a television producer-director launching the pie-throwing Soupy Sales show in Detroit, advanced to working with Steve Allen, Ernie Kovaks, and Johnny Carson, and produced and directed the original Dating Game and Newlywed Game shows, was one of the 1972 Republican national convention’s principal scriptwriters.4 “In my business you don’t go on television unless you have some form of a script,” Carruthers said of the 1972 Republican convention in Miami Beach. “So, yeah, we scripted it, we formatted it, we counseled and coordinated the speeches and the program and the camera positions and the networks and everything else,” Caruthers continued. “And it was one of the best conventions ever done.”5

Author and commentator Zachary Karabel in a 1998 paper entitled, “The Rise and Fall of the Televised Political Convention,” published by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, noted that political conventions had become little more than “scripted infomercials.”6 As national nominating conventions became more scripted, with primaries stealing the actual drama of the presidential nominating process, the Republican and Democratic national conventions became increasingly boring, with television ratings on the skid, dropping nearly fifteen percent between 1992 and 1996, and viewership down as much as a third. Karabel documented that the 1992 conventions were considered a ratings debacle by network news executives, such that at the end of the Republican convention that year, ABC News President Roone Arledge gave serious consideration to pulling ABC out of convention coverage altogether.

Instead of the simple podiums adorned with large, visible microphones so common to national nominating conventions in the 1940s and 1960s, the elaborately colored and glittery, multi-media podiums of the 2016 Republican and Democratic national conventions were visually dynamic, Internet-driven, looking more like a space ship command center or a huge wrap-around movie screen than a speaking stage for today’s mostly humdrum national nominating conventions. Clearly, in today’s era of huge HD flat-screen TVs, smoke-filled convention halls are long-gone—together with the political drama of 1950s-style multi-ballot floor-fights that made national nominating conventions compelling to watch, even when the television was nothing more than a small, hard-to-watch, black-and-white tube.

By 2016, the broadcast networks and major cable news organizations had limited television coverage of the Republican convention in Cleveland and the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to a few hours a night. “If you’ve been watching this week, you know that ABC, CBS and NBC still cover conventions each night for an hour—or a little more, as they did Wednesday, when the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, continued his speech past 11 p.m. Eastern,” wrote Callum Borchers, an expert on the intersection of media and politics, in the Washington Post, on Thursday, July 21, 2016, the last night of the Republican convention in Cleveland.7 “But the broadcast networks aren’t turning over prime-time air as they once did. Such cutbacks might have forced the political parties to stop sanitizing conventions but for the growth of cable news. You won’t cover our staged productions all night, CBS? Fine. CNN will.”

Still, even in 2016, the final night of each convention, some 35 million Americans watched Donald Trump give his acceptance speech, followed by 34 million who watched Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.8 These were the largest television audiences that had seen either candidate to that point. The only other major television opportunity would be the first debate between Clinton and Trump—a television event that drew some 84 million American viewers to become the most watched televised presidential debate in US history, beating the 80.6 million who watched the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and contender Ronald Reagan in 1980.9 Viewership for the second debate between Clinton and Trump fell sharply, to an estimated 66.5 million Americans watching.10 The third and final Clinton-Trump debate rebounded, with an estimated 71.6 million viewers.11

First impressions, in politics as in life in general, are often lasting. While the debates can correct voters’ impressions a presidential candidate might make with their acceptance speech at the party’s national nominating convention, there is no other opportunity like it in any given modern presidential cycle. The acceptance speech is the one time each presidential candidate gets to tell their story without interruptions to one of the largest viewing audiences that candidate will ever have. While the debate audiences are larger, with the first typically commanding the most viewers, each candidate can be expected to command only half the time. Even then, each candidate must spend time on defense, answering attacks leveled during the debate as well as correcting damage that might have been done on the campaign trail. While the national nominating conventions have become largely scripted infomercials today, both parties take their convention opportunity seriously. While prime-time network broadcast time is limited today, the cable news will cover the convention much more extensively, giving each party the opportunity not only to showcase the presidential candidate, but also past political stars and upcoming political prospects, reminding the nation of both the party’s past and the party’s future.