Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The first day of the Republican convention? I'll start with the good. First, it moved smoothly, with no more technical glitches than the Democrats had. Republicans were also not as ambitious: The first evening session mostly involved speeches at a podium that were staged pretty much as they would've been at a normal convention. Still, there were enough taped pieces to mix things up and only a few moments really dragged (although granted I like normal conventions, so I'm hardly the typical audience). That's not to say nothing went wrong. The organizers could barely fill the time slot they carved out, for one thing; not only did they repeat one video twice, and toss in a regular television ad for some reason, but they finished about five minutes early. And the morning session, from the original convention site in Charlotte, looked pretty shabby, with speaker after speaker appearing in front of a boring backdrop — hey, this is a billion-dollar campaign! Still, my guess is that no one who was watching the evening session thought it looked amateurish or slapped together, so if the planners can maintain that for the next three nights, it's a win. I'll also give solid marks to the final speaker of the evening, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. Sure, I might question how he characterized Trump's record, and that of former Vice President Joe Biden, but he told his larger story well. Republicans who are inclined to vote the party line but aren't quite sure about Trump might well have found him convincing, which is about the most you can expect from a convention speaker. Now, the bad. Anyone looking for a de facto Republican platform wasn't going to find it on Monday. Yes, Republicans typically talk ideology more than policy, and they certainly did so on this night, but still one might expect some hints about what they'd do if elected. There was very little of that. They're not socialists, they support the police, they're tough on China … that was pretty much it. Also bad? This is a party that has won a plurality of voters in only one of the last six presidential elections, and there's still not even a hint that they consider that a problem. With only a few exceptions, almost every moment of the convention was aimed at their strongest supporters. As political scientist Dave Karpf pointed out, there was an awful lot of "fan service" — that is, treats for the people who regularly tune in to the Republican show and know all the ins and outs of the franchise, even if the themes and sentiments are incomprehensible to those who don't pay close attention to politics. And yes: A lot of the claims Republicans make are just plain false no matter how often they repeat them.But the really ugly parts of day one came from the president himself. Not because he pretty much botched a taped segment in which he was supposed to be showing empathy for those affected by the pandemic, or because he managed to praise the authoritarian who had imprisoned one of the Americans he was speaking with in another clip. No, the ugly part was Trump's appearance at the morning session, a marathon airing of grievances that was almost as long as President Bill Clinton's acceptance speech in 1992. Much of his talk was devoted to false claims about absentee voting — fantasies that, by design or not, undermine faith in democracy and elections. We should be clear: It's disgraceful that the president keeps repeating these fictions. As CNN's fact-checker Daniel Dale put it, "There is way, way more dishonesty in this first convention speech by Trump than in every Democratic convention speech combined." At least the only chants we got were the perfectly ordinary "four more years." 1. Dave Hopkins on Trump, conservatives and the Republicans. 2. Seth Masket on the platform-less Republicans. 3. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on the post-office bill that the House passed over the weekend. 4. Dan Drezner on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 5. Jonathan Cervas and Bernard Grofman on the chances of a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College. 6. Lee Drutman on moderate Republicans. 7. And Claire Gothreau on the invaluable data gathered by the Center for American Women and Politics. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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