The anti-Clinton protest dwarfed the anti-Trump one. What does that tell us?

There are certain things about political conventions you only notice when you are watching on TV – like Bill Clinton seeming to fall asleep momentarily during his wife’s speech last night. And there are things you only notice when you go along to conventions and spend your afternoons out on the street, under the hot sun, waiting for something to happen.

Any of the journalists working in Cleveland and Philadelphia in the past fortnight had a curious thing to relate: lots of things happened on the streets of Philly, and almost nothing happened in Ohio. Before we leave behind the conventions and head into three months of stage-managed swing state rallies, it’s worth asking why that was.

In the primary campaign that led to Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate, his opponents were said to be too numerous. On the streets of Cleveland last week, where tens of thousands were expected to protest his anointment, the opposite was true: his activist opponents were too few to register on the news.