CLEVELAND – A street vendor outside the Republican convention needs barely a nanosecond to reply when asked to identify his top-selling T-shirt.
Joe Nester motions to the red, white, blue one atop his stand that reads: “Hillary For Prison.”
Among the buttons, one of his two hottest sellers is: “Life’s a bitch. Don’t vote for one.”
A few metres away, at this very moment, two men are discussing Hillary Clinton. One says he’s voting for Donald Trump simply to stop her: “She’s a pathological liar.” In a nearby bar, people rave at happy hour about the new anti-Clinton documentary being screened in Cleveland.
Inside the arena, Clinton gets mentioned about three times more often than jobs and work on what’s supposed to be the economy-themed night of the convention. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s speech is a mock trial of Clinton failures: “Is she guilty or not guilty?” The crowd responds: “Guilty!”
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The crowd means it literally. It repeatedly chants, “Lock her up!,” in reference to her email scandal. The mother of a Benghazi victim responded to one of these chants by shouting from the podium, “That’s right. Hillary in prison. She deserves to be in stripes.”
Hatred of Hillary achieves the impossible here sometimes. Semi-somnolent crowds jolt to life at the sound of her name. A speech by retired general Michael Flynn was notable for two things: the indifferent crowd that emptied the arena as he spoke, and its sudden burst of energy when the former military man concurred with the chant that the presidential opponent should be arrested.
“She’s a pathological liar.”
Some speakers made only cursory references to Trump. Christie made the subtext of this explicit: This election, he said, isn’t just about Trump. It’s about Clinton.
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He’s right. And it’s a safe bet that next week, when Democrats gather for their own convention, a similar dynamic will play out in reverse. That party’s fundraising emails routinely focus on Trump, not its own nominee, and progressives disheartened by the defeat of Bernie Sanders are being urged to rally to Clinton’s side to achieve what Sanders calls Goal No. 1 this year: stopping Trump.
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That’s because this election features two of the most unpopular candidates in the history of polling, both of whom survived primaries that divided their parties. Hatred of the other candidate, this year, is a more popular bonding agent than love.
The Cleveland convention is coated in this unifying glue of disdain.
A Minnesota Republican admits he’s had some doubts about Trump. The nominee wasn’t his first choice – that was Sen. Ted Cruz. He’s not even sure Trump was his second choice – that might have been Sen. Marco Rubio.
He worries about the nominee’s contradictory positions. He disagrees with his threats to tax companies that outsource jobs. Jeff Hommedahl runs a plumbing-equipment business, so he’s sensitive to the challenges companies face in the U.S.
But he’s all in for Trump now.
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“I guess the best way to put it is, he’s not my guy but he’s our guy,” said Hommedahl, an alternate delegate.
“I guess I’m gonna get behind him. He doesn’t excite me, in a lot of ways. I guess I’m more ‘Never Hillary’ than anything.”
He estimates 90 per cent of convention-goers now back Trump.
Standing on one street corner outside the arena is Loren Spivack. A staunch conservative, he believes in laissez-faire government – enough that, in his view, the state should deal only with borders, security, foreign affairs, and maybe municipal streets.
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“And that’s it,” he says.
He believes the free market should handle everything else, and would do a far better job. He supports trade deals. The GOP nominee constantly complains about these deals, and he’s anything but hands-off. Trump has talked about punishing people who oppose him, and threatens a 35-per-cent-tax on companies that outscource jobs.
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Spivack isn’t talking about Trump, though. On this street corner, he’s displaying the books he’s published. They’re Dr. Seuss-themed parodies that criticize Democrats, including one portraying Clinton as a witch.
Do people so deeply detest their choices that this year’s race is running on the fuel of hatred for the opponent?
“Yes,” Spivack says. But he adds that it’s unsurprising – because anything having to do with public institutions is bound to disappoint: “It’s an inevitable consequence of the role of government.”
Michele Montgomery is more optimistic.
She’s actually pulling for someone – Trump. She cares about schools, keeping her kids safe, and the price of oil’s effect on her city of Houston. She says she believes Trump will do alright: “I think he’s going to make the best decisions for our country… He won’t always make the best decisions. But I do think he will make more good decisions.”
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She’s in the minority of Americans.
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Trump has a 33-per-cent favourable rating, according to an average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.
Clinton’s is hardly better – 38 per cent.
Jim Todd is a more statistically representative voter.
He runs a B&B in a Victorian House in the mountains in an old steel-mill county of Beaver, Pennsylvania. And he’s not feeling much enthusiasm for either candidate.
“I don’t like any one of the options available to me,” Todd said.
“Trump says a lot of things but he doesn’t say anything – in terms of policy and what he’s going to do.” And he worries about global relations: “Trump has a tendency to spout off his mouth.”
Clinton? “I don’t trust (her),” he says. “I just don’t believe her.”
But he figures he needs to vote for one of them, or he’d be wasting his ballot.
He’s leaning toward the lesser of two evils: “(The) least unappealing – I think that’s Hillary.”
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