Prof. Martin Wattenberg of UCI on Trump’s Convention Bid

Prof. Martin Wattenberg of UCI on Trump’s Convention Bid

Political Science Prof. Martin Wattenberg of UCI gave an Osher Lifelong Learning Class at UCI on Republican Conventions and on the Trump Republican Convention of 2016.

In recent years, convention coverage by the three major networks has been limited to 24 hours. Conventions are more likely to be watched by older adults, and less likely to be watched by youth. The same is true for the nightly news programs, for debates, for voting participation, and for acceptance speeches. (After watching the C-Span live coverage on the first day, with its repetitiveness of emails and Bengazi, and chants of USA, Jail Hillary, etc., I can see the reason why. The cable networks decided that their commentators were more interesting than the actual convention speakers. It seems to me that the convention speakers are definitely under rating the intelligence of the delegates.) People like to watch debates, since they want to see if there are any “crashes”.

Wattenberg showed us videos of earlier Republican conventions where delegates actually chose the candidate. Speeches were actually allowed that challenged policies or candidates.

A Democratic McGovern Fraser committee in 1980 converted the partial voting delegate system to pure Conventions at 24% and Primaries at 76%. In the next election it was decided to bring back party leaders as Super delegates to give peer review to the choices.

For Republicans, they should add Superdelegates and get rid of winner-take-all primaries to eliminate dominance by a candidate like Trump.

Trump’s approach was to “be outrageous” in order to manipulate media coverage. He has been getting more positive media coverage than others.

Marty predicted that Trump would lose the election, and Republicans lose the Senate and possibly the House too. (Since he is an experienced student of politics, I give this a lot of importance.) His guess was the Clinton would win the election by something like 57% to 43%. When the final polls show this split, he expects a low voter turnout.

He said that the Quinnipac poll, which shows Trump in the lead, doesn’t follow the best polling standards. (The other polls, except for Fox News, all show Clinton in the lead. There is usually a post-convention boost.)

Prof. Wattenberg is co-author of a standard textbook “Government in America, People, Politics, and Policy”. He also authored “Is Voting for Young People”.

Wattenberg worked on the importance of TV and of media and momentum, starting with the Iowa primary.

In looking at the upcoming campaign, Wattenberg argues that Trump is not good in the debates, as seen in the Republican debates. He has a lack of knowledge. Clinton has much better organization. An estimate was that Clinton’s campaign was at 55% of preparation, while Trump’s was at 5%.   One media source called all 50 state Trump centers, and only six of them answered.  Clinton has better surrogates to campaign for her than Trump has.

He summarized that Trump has zero chance of winning.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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