The Republican National Convention starts Monday. What should NC voters know?

Republicans from across the country will make their way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by Monday to begin the weeklong process to choose their presidential nominee.

It’s a confusing sentence if you think that’s what the presidential primaries in each state are for.

“Whenever there are primaries or caucuses, what’s happening is that people are picking which sets of delegates they want to go to the convention,” said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. “And those delegates are now pledged to whichever candidates that they said they would support.”

So how do the elections that North Carolina and other states held translate into support at the convention? Is there any possibility for delegates to change their minds based on developments, such as the May jury verdict that made Donald Trump the first former president to be convicted of felonies? And what else will the convention do?

Let’s break down the process of the convention, which runs from July 15 to 18.

How does the delegate math work?

To win the party’s nomination, Trump needs an estimated 1,215 delegates.

North Carolina will have 74 total delegates at the convention. Because former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley secured 22% of state Republicans’ votes, she will receive the votes of 12 delegates, and Trump will receive the rest, according to Matt Mercer, spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party.

On Tuesday, Haley released her delegates to allow them to vote for Trump, but North Carolina’s delegates remain bound to Haley for the first two rounds of roll-call votes.

Of the 74 delegates, 29 are at-large, 42 represent the 14 congressional districts and three are automatic because they serve as the state party’s chairman, committeeman and committeewoman.

There is a complicated formula that determines the number of delegates each state receives that can go up or down based on voter turnout and the number of elected Republicans representing the state at various levels.

Major national parties have been choosing candidates at national conventions since the mid-1800s.

Masket said historically, that was when nomination decisions were made. A bunch of names were floated, and the country didn’t always know who would be the presidential nominee at the start.

Delegates advocating for different states or regions, or different interests, would spend days of the convention working toward compromises.

In the 1970s, reforms were made, first to the Democratic Party, and then to the Republican, that resulted in the states using primaries to cast votes for presidential candidates.

Those reforms came after violent protests erupted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention after the party nominated Hurbert Humphrey as its presidential nominee, despite the then-former vice president having not appeared in any primary.

It became clear then that the nomination process was the will of party insiders, and not the party as a whole. The reform was meant to rectify that, according to the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

That has taken some of the surprise out of the conventions.

“We always know now who the nominee is going to be, just because they always have all these delegates lined up to support them ahead of time,” Masket said. “The nominee is officially being made at the convention itself.”

During the convention, a roll call vote will take place in which each state announces how its delegates are voting.

Masket said there used to be some drama and some potential for controversy behind these roll call votes, because it wasn’t clear what would happen.

This year, voters know Trump will be the nominee.

“There’s no way he’s not going to be the nominee,” Masket said. “That convention hall will be filled with delegates who are very loyal to him. They were picked because they were loyal to him. There’s no reason they would cast a vote for anybody else.”

It’s possible too, Masket said, that the party will skip over the roll call, and vote for Trump on acclamation. That could be a sign of party unity, or that the party doesn’t care how people voted.

President Donald Trump is expected to give his acceptance speech on Thursday.

Who are NC’s delegates to the Republican National Convention, and what will they do?

The Republican Party platform

While choosing a party nomination isn’t expected to cause consternation, a second area of business taken up by the party at the convention is raising tension.

Not only does the party use the convention to nominate its presidential candidate, but it also uses it as a work session where it reshapes its party platform. This is a tool that gives voters an idea of Republicans’ beliefs and where the party plans to lead the country.

But in 2020, the party controversially skipped this step, readopting its 2016 platform. Republicans blamed the COVID-19 pandemic and much fewer delegates than normal attending the convention, which was held partly in Charlotte.

But a resolution adopted to reflect that also included a line that said the party will continue to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” leading many to read the policy as whatever Trump believes, goes.

On Monday, the Republican National Committee released its 2024 draft platform. The 16-page document is much shorter than the 2016 version that spans 66 pages and covers topics ranging from taxes to gun rights to election laws and everything in between.

The New York Times reported that Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles called for a streamlined platform that was “clear, concise and easily digestible” and the shorter version prevents the platform from being used as a weapon against Republicans.

Masket said platforms typically aren’t campaign-focused and can be controversial, but give voters an idea of where the party is heading.

The platform, focused around Trump’s views, includes 20 key points, including Republicans’ desire to build a wall at the nation’s southern border, carry out the country’s largest deportation, keep men out of women’s sports and end the weaponization of the government.

As for abortion, the policy states that the Republican Party opposes late-term abortion but supports prenatal care, access to birth control and in-vitro fertilization.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, on social media, called the platform “a profound disappointment to the million of pro-life Republicans that have always looked to the Republican Party to stand for life.”

For 40 years, C-SPAN televised the process of Republicans reshaping the party’s platform, but this year, the party chose to do so away from cameras and behind closed doors.

Under the Dome

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