Podcast: Ovations, podiums, and balloons: Where are we post-conventions?

We’re only a few days removed from convention madness – two straight weeks of an almost dizzying amount of Republican and Democratic pride (and spin)– with the most interesting stretch of the presidential campaign still to come. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump effectively used the platform of the conventions and the millions of eyeballs they drew to sell themselves as the next leader of the free world, albeit with sharply different tactics and messaging.

For this week’s episode of The Slant Podcast, we invited New York state Democratic Party Executive Director Basil Smikle and state Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox to help us parse the diametrically different strategies of their respective parties’ conventions.

What ensued was an engaging proxy debate for the national election, in which both Smikle and Cox actually reached common ground on at least one subject: that the state of the economy and national security will be the issues that define the electoral outcome. Cox even suggested that a healthy economy could be bad politics for Republicans, in the sense that it affirms that the party in charge – in this case, the Democrats – is managing it well.

"For a while I thought the stock market is at an all-time high – I thought it was going fairly well. That made me a little nervous,” Cox said. “But now I see it's below 2 percent again. It's a sour economy. That's going to continue."

Overall, it was a cordial, informative discussion between two keen political observers, setting the stage for what’s to come, including whether the “post-convention bounce” is a legitimate electoral harbinger at this juncture of the race.

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