Charlotte’s Hosting the 2020 RNC. Here’s How We Got There.

So, how did Charlotte come to land the 2020 Republican National Convention?

It’s actually a 20-year journey, dating back to the late 1990s and two failed attempts to land national political conventions.

Let’s go back to what Charlotte was like 20 years ago.

The city’s population was 510,000 people in 1998, and there are now 872,000 people. There was no 700-room Westin hotel next to the Convention Center. There was no LYNX Blue Line. There was no Spectrum Center uptown, and the Charlotte Coliseum — the first home of the Hornets, now demolished — would have been the host venue.

But the city decided to submit bids for both the 2000 Republican National Convention and the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Former Republican Mayor Pat McCrory remembers the city hosting members of the Republican National Committee, who did come to Charlotte on a site visit.

“It was almost laughable, the bid we put in, and the seriousness that we tried to put on the proposal when in fact we weren’t even in the ball game,” McCrory said. “Because we did not have a viable convention center or hotel or frankly anything to do in downtown Charlotte.”

McCrory’s most vivid memory is taking RNC officials around Charlotte Motor Speedway in a limo.

He said the bid for national political conventions was a natural next step for the city, after it hosted the 1994 Final Four, where Arkansas beat Duke at the old Charlotte Coliseum off Tyvola Road.

Nationally, one of the things that Final Four is remembered for is the infamous Street of Champions.

Twenty-five years ago, there was hardly anything to do uptown, so the city created a Potemkin Village of bars and restaurants.

“We created bars and nighttime activity that disappeared a week later, which is kind of humorous now that we look back it,” said McCrory, who was a City Council member then.

The New York Times called the Street of Champions “an instant downtown as permanent as a movie set.”

Jim Morrill, who has covered politics for 30 years for the Charlotte Observer, said the city knew it was a longshot to host a political convention in 2000.

“Nobody put a whole lot of expectations in getting it,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was kind of a pipe dream but kind of a cool one, and nobody had ever tried it here in Charlotte.”

For the 2000 convention, the GOP did name Charlotte as one of eight cities under consideration. But its five finalists were Indianapolis, New Orleans, New York, San Antonio and Philadelphia.

It picked Philadelphia, where the GOP nominated George W. Bush. Bush’s slogan during that campaign was that he was a compassionate conservative.

“Big government is not the answer, but the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference,” Bush said during his speech in Philadelphia. “It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity. This is what I mean by compassionate conservatism. And on this ground, we will lead our nation.”

Charlotte didn’t host the RNC that year, but it did host another large convention, which is probably remembered more: The National Rifle Association’s annual meeting.

The actor Charlton Heston gave a famous speech.

“So, as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: ‘From my cold, dead hands!’” Heston said.

But after the failed 2000 bid, Charlotte would benefit from a change in strategies by both parties.

The major political parties used to hold their conventions in big cities that could show visitors a good time, like Miami Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

But starting in 2008, the Democrats and Republicans began at mid-size cities in swing states. The Democrats decided to put their 2008 convention in Denver because the party then thought the road to victory went through the West – since the South was considered lost to the Democrats.

The Republicans convened in St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota – a formerly deep blue state that had been shifting purple.

In 2008, Barack Obama won North Carolina by less than half a percentage point. That made it an attractive place for a convention because Democrats thought he could win it again in 2012.

But as the city considered bidding for the 2012 convention, it’s important to remember the Great Recession and how hard the financial crisis hit Charlotte. Wachovia was absorbed by Wells Fargo, and Bank of America would buy Merrill Lynch – but would be hobbled by that for years.

Unemployment in the Charlotte region was more than 12% in 2009. And an example of how the financial crisis impacted the city came in the spring of 2009. A wealth manager at the old Wachovia had decided it was time for her clients to go back into the market, but the idea of investing again made her physically ill. She was so nervous about investing again that she threw up on the sidewalk of College Street.

But that year, the city decided to bid on the 2012 DNC. The idea came from the late Susan Burgess, a Democratic council member. Anthony Foxx, who would be elected mayor later that year, initially didn’t want to bid.

“I initially had no intention of putting an application in for the DNC,” Foxx said. “I thought it was a bridge too far, quite frankly. I knew we would have challenges with hotel rooms, I thought it would be great for the city but it just seemed like something that we couldn’t do, and frankly back in those times we were in the midst of digging out of a recession and that’s also another factor that initially played into my thinking.”

But Burgess brought a former DNC chair to Charlotte in 2009. He came with an eight-page memo detailing what it would take to host a convention.

“And the more he laid out his detail, the more doable it seemed to be,” Foxx said. “And that conversation was elemental in changing my thinking. So we decided to apply not knowing how we’d fare, but we figured, Why not?”

When the city decided to bid, the lack of convention infrastructure in the late 1990s was, for the most part, fixed. The Spectrum Center – then known as Time Warner Cable Arena – had been open for six years. The light-rail line had been open for five years. The city had more hotels.

And the Democrats, for the most part, thought Charlotte was a great host city in 2012.

Probably the biggest complaint was that Charlotte just didn’t have that many fancy hotels at the time. The California delegation was put up at the old Blake Hotel, which wasn’t up to its standards and I think California was pretty much right. and other people had to stay all the way up at Concord mills – 15 miles from uptown.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, who was a super delegate in 2012, says Charlotte was a great host – though a little overwhelmed.

“I had a great time,” Dean said. “I thought the Democratic convention was a little big for Charlotte. But we have about twice as many people who come to ours (compared to the Republican National Convention). We just have a lot more delegates. So I think Charlotte will be very well sized for the Republicans.”

Delegates, and the media, liked that they could leave the arena, walk a few blocks and grab a drink or dinner. Eighteen years after the city created the Street of Champions, Charlotte had a real downtown.

Now, there was some drama about President Obama’s acceptance speech, which was supposed to be at Bank of America Stadium. But they moved it inside to the arena – arguably because of the threat of rain, but the last night of the convention ended up having perfect weather.

The convention itself was mostly unmemorable. President Obama had delivered such a long list of great speeches during his 2008 campaign that his acceptance speech in Charlotte was workman-like by comparison.

The convention’s highlight was arguably Bill Clinton’s 48-minute speech on the second night that laid out why Obama should be reelected. Politico said the 42^nd president did so in language that “was crisper and more compelling than the case Obama so far has made for himself.”

“Now, folks, in Tampa a few days ago, we heard a lot of talk all about how the president and the Democrats don’t really believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everybody to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy,” Clinton said during his speech.

He continued: “We Democrats — we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor folks to work their way into it — with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly share prosperity. You see, we believe that “We’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than ‘You’re on your own.’”

Five years after the DNC, the Republican National Committee sent the Charlotte mayor a letter in December 2017 asking if the city was interested in bidding. The letter was addressed to Jennifer Roberts, even though Vi Lyles had become mayor that month.

Lyles and the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority discussed whether the city should bid. And Lyles then met individually with City Council members.

And during those meetings, there was only one council member who said the city shouldn’t bid: LaWana Mayfield.

Other council members were OK with the bid. Council member Dimple Ajmera had, a few months earlier, said that Trump supporters had no place on council. But when asked about the RNC, she said she was “looking forward to showing off the city’s Southern hospitality.”

But when the city announced in February that it was going to bid, no other cities made a similar announcement. In the past, cities often wanted the world to know they were bidding.

On the Democratic side, there were a handful of cities saying they wanted to it – including Houston, Miami Beach, Denver and Milwaukee.

But city officials were saying that a lot of other cities were bidding, but they wanted to keep it a secret, in part because President Trump is so polarizing.

Republican City Council member Tariq Bokhari was defensive about the perception that Charlotte was alone.

“The fact of the matter is, when this started after all the serious contenders we’re weeded down into this list, seven cities wanted this, they absolutely wanted it, and it was narrowed down to five and then four and then two,” he said during a council meeting. “And now that we are at the altar, we can say, it’s just us and Las Vegas, but it’s an absolutely false narrative that no other city wanted this.”

There may have been seven cities that were curious about hosting the RNC, but seven cities did not bid on the convention.

The RNC held an “Interested Cities Day” about the convention in D.C. in late January 2018. At that time, the RNC hosted people from Charlotte, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Nashville, Tennessee, and Phoenix. And Dallas said they participated by conference call.

But when contacted by the media, those cities said they didn’t follow through with an actual bid.

When Bokhari referenced a bid by Las Vegas, he was referring to a big by the chair of the state Republican Party there. The city of Las Vegas and the tourism authority did not submit a big. And the GOP there didn’t have a venue or a detailed plan about hosting.

Meanwhile, Democratic activists were questioning why the city had bid. And council members were getting uneasy with the prospect of hosting.

“I don’t know where the quote comes from but I know somebody said, if there’s a fool in every room. And if you look around and can’t find him, then maybe it’s you,” said former council member Justin Harlow. “It’s important to ask why no other local government in America is bidding on this convention or no single city government has endorsed it. Not even the states where this president carried the electorate and still has a lot of supporters. For me, that’s odd at best. And I think certainly telling.

The City Council did approve the contract to host in a 6-5 vote.

Council member Braxton Winston, a Democrat, said the president is a “human avatar of white supremacy.”

On the other side, Republican council member Ed Driggs said the city couldn’t reject the RNC because of Trump.

“You don’t make exceptions,” he said. “You don’t abandon the things on which our democracy is based because you don’t like a man. And that man – like it or not- was duly elected and holds the office of president.”  

Lyles has been in an odd position over the RNC. She’s pushed the city’s bid, but last summer, she said she wasn’t going to speak at the convention.

That’s unusual because host mayors almost always speak. CSPAN archives show that host mayors always give welcoming speeches, at least going back to 1976.

In addition to that, Charlotte will also be making history in another way. The city’s RNC will likely be the first convention in which an impeached president is nominated for a second term.

Bill Clinton was in his second term and couldn’t run again. And Andrew Johnson did not win the nomination at the 1868 convention in New York.

That’s assuming the Senate acquits the president, and Trump runs again, which he has said he’s going to do.

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