The RNC started with a bang. There was a floor fight almost immediately in which anti-Trump forces tried to initiate a roll call vote and got into a shouting match with pro-Trump delegates in the process. By the evening, things settled down a bit. The crowd stopped turning on itself and instead coalesced around demanding Hillary Clinton’s immediate imprisonment.
With “Lock Her Up” chants resounding in the hall in Philadelphia, there has been as much disunity on display so far at the DNC as there was at the RNC. Every mention of Hillary Clinton has been met with a rousing chorus of boos—coming mainly, it seems, from the California delegation. There have also been shouting matches between Clinton and Sanders voters.
It’s an inauspicious start for the DNC, whose organizers clearly wanted to disassociate their convention from the raucous RNC and show the country that adults were in charge of at least one of America’s two major parties.