The Republicans had the advantage of going second, as the incumbent presidential party traditionally does, and they capitalized on it. After the Democrats confidently assumed that everyone thinks Trump is a racist and xenophobe, his convention spotlighted former Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India, and Sen. Tim Scott, whose family “went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”

The message is that America is not permeated with “systemic racism,” as the New York Times’s 1619 Project would have you believe but rather is a land of opportunity. Even Haley’s and Scott’s South Carolina. And progress is both possible and in fact happening. Scott holds the seat once held for 35 years by segregationist “Cotton Ed” Smith.

Another contrast: Democrats had their virtual sessions introduced by Hollywood figures, one of whom somehow got the idea that it would be funny to mispronounce the current vice president’s one-syllable surname. Republicans interspersed their first two sessions with ordinary people from target states who have come to support Trump strongly.