By Will Weissert, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In 1948, the Republican and Democratic parties did something unthinkable in today’s climate of ferocious political animosity: They not only held their national conventions in the same city, but shared some of the props.

Both gathered in Philadelphia, largely because its Municipal Auditorium had already been fitted with the wiring needed for then-groundbreaking live convention coverage on national television.

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To save money, Democrats asked Republicans to leave the American flags and bunting up to be reused at its event 17 days later. The GOP complied, though some items became faded and worn in the interval.

Like party comradery, the more informal way conventions were staged has evaporated. Once bare-knuckled showdowns to hammer out presidential nominees, modern gatherings have evolved into carefully scripted, made-for-TV events meant to showcase party unity.

Republicans are largely on track to deliver that as they nominate former President Donald Trump in Milwaukee this week. The Democratic convention could feature more drama when it opens on Aug. 19, given the bitter debate over whether President Joe Biden should stay atop the party’s ticket.

But even with conventions now choreographed down to tiny details, the unexpected can still happen. Here’s a look at the floor fights, street battles, and other memorable convention scenes that were uplifting, outlandish or just plain awkward:

Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement

As the last candidate Donald Trump defeated during the 2016 GOP primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz amassed enough delegates to address the party’s convention in Cleveland — but balked at endorsing his former rival.

Still smarting over Trump calling him “Lyin’ Ted,” mocking his wife Heidi Cruz’s appearance and suggesting that the senator’s Cuba-born father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Cruz implored delegates to “vote your conscience.” It drew prolonged boos.

Cruz reversed himself and endorsed Trump that fall, and today is among his staunchest defenders. But, at the time, the vitriol was high enough that Heidi Cruz was led from the convention floor, just in case.

Clint Eastwood’s empty chair

A head-scratching moment came in 2012, when Clint Eastwood addressed the Republican gathering in Tampa, Florida, with an empty chair standing in for then-President Barack Obama.

Actor Clint Eastwood speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 30, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The actor and director spent 12 minutes conversing with the piece of furniture, and even dodging barrages of imaginary obscenities from it.

“What do you mean shut up?” Eastwood crowed.

He also joked about then-Vice President Biden’s reputation for gaffes — launching criticisms that may prove prescient given current questions about whether Biden can handle a second term, following his disastrous debate performance.

“Of course, we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party,” Eastwood told the chair. “Just kind of a grin, with a body behind it.”

‘Audacity of hope’

The year 2004 was otherwise terrible for Democrats, President George W. Bush won reelection and Republicans retained control of Congress. But one bright spot came from Obama, then a little-known Illinois state senator, electrifying his party’s Boston convention.

Obama dubbed himself “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too” and summed up his political philosophy as being built around “the audacity of hope.”

Gore’s extra-long kiss

As he stepped on stage to deliver a speech accepting his party’s 2000 presidential nomination in Los Angeles, Al Gore embraced his wife Tipper and gave her a full-mouthed kiss, hanging on much longer than usual for a display of passion in public.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore kisses his wife Tipper after she introduced him to the Democratic National Convention at the Staples Center, August 17, 2000 in Los Angeles, California. (LUCY NICHOLSON/AFP via Getty Images)

The crow cheered, but the kiss eventually encompassed an uncomfortable three seconds of screen time.

Gore had been battling criticisms that he was too stiff during public appearances, which may have explained how hard he leaned in. Regardless, the smooch was remembered more than Gore’s speech.

He went on to narrowly lose that November to Bush. A decade later, the Gores separated after 40 years of marriage.

Women on the ticket

At the Democrats’ 1984 convention in San Francisco, presidential nominee Walter Mondale announced Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, making her the first woman on a major presidential ticket. Ferraro declared, “America is the land where dreams can come true for all of us,” though she and Mondale went on to win just 13 electoral votes compared to President Ronald Reagan ‘s 525.

Twenty years later, Sen. John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate, and her speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a hit, mixing the then-Alaska governor’s compelling personal story with humor and political punch. It gave McCain a boost, but he still lost to Obama.

At the 2016 Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton became the first major party female presidential nominee, declaring, “When any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone.” She eventually lost to Trump.

Kamala Harris was the first woman on a winning ticket, accepting being Biden’s running mate during a mostly virtual convention last cycle — and now is some Democrats’ choice to replace Biden in this year’s presidential race.

Opposing the incumbent

In 1976, Reagan, then California’s governor, challenged President Gerald Ford from the right and touched off a bitter struggle at the GOP’s convention in Kansas City. Ford narrowly prevailed with 1,187 votes to 1,070, but lost that November to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Four years later, at the Democratic convention in New York, Carter himself faced a floor challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, who badly trailed the president in delegates but tried to loosen rules on how they were pledged to vote. Tensions ran high and, though the change was defeated, Carter later lost to Reagan.

Eagleton’s 18-day vice presidential candidacy

Biden facing increasing pressure to leave the race is without modern precedent at the top of a presidential ticket — but not when it comes to a nominee’s running mate.

Shortly after the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, reports surfaced that Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern ’s vice presidential pick, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had previously undergone electroshock therapy to treat depression.

A divided convention had prompted McGovern to tap Eagleton on its final day, after he was turned down by several alternatives. Eagleton therefore didn’t receive much vetting of his record, which might have surfaced the medical disclosures earlier.

Eagleton resigned after 18 days on the ticket and was replaced by Sargent Shriver. Incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon went on to win 49 out of 50 states that November.

Chaos in Chicago

After President Lyndon B. Johnson opted not to seek reelection and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the 1968 Democratic nomination at the party’s convention. But that was only after a raucous floor fight which ended with delegates defeating a peace platform seeking an end to the Vietnam war.

A police officer escorts a protestor to a squad car surrounded by dozens of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, August 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

What happened at the convention was overshadowed by thousands of anti-war protesters who marched in the streets. Demonstrators were attacked by police, sparking such turmoil that the tear gas fired reached the 25th floor hotel suite where Humphrey was preparing for his appearance at a hotel five miles from the convention site.

The Democratic convention returns to Chicago in a few weeks, and widespread demonstrations are being planned to oppose the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas — leaving some to wonder whether a 1968 redux could be coming. With questions about Biden staying in the race still being raised, things inside the convention might get equally heated.

By Josh Boak, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump goes into the Republican National Convention with bold promises about the U.S. economy, but he has sketched out notably few details about how his plans would actually work.

The convention’s first day is still expected to focus on the economy even after Saturday’s shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania in which the former president was injured.

If the program goes ahead as planned, expect speakers to argue that Trump’s agenda of sweeping tariffs and lower taxes would jump-start the economy.

The former president says he wants tariffs on trade partners and no taxes on tips and would like to knock the corporate tax rate down a tick. The Republican platform also promises to “defeat” inflation and “quickly bring down all prices,” in addition to pumping out more oil, natural gas and coal.

View of a Make America Great Again art installation in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 14, 2024, ahead of the 2024 Republican National Convention. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

The platform would address illegal immigration in part with the “largest deportation program in American history.” And Trump would also scrap President Joe Biden’s policies to develop the market for electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Democrats and several leading economists say the math shows that Trump’s ideas would cause an explosive bout of inflation, wallop the middle class and — by his extending his soon-to-expire tax cuts — heap another $5 trillion-plus onto the national debt.

Trump has released few hard numbers and no real policy language or legislative blueprints. Instead, his campaign is betting that voters care more about attitude than policy specifics.

The Associated Press sent the Trump campaign 20 basic questions in June to clarify his economic views and the campaign declined to answer any of them. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted that Trump best speaks for himself and directed the AP to video clips of him.

By contrast, Biden has an exhaustive 188-page budget proposal that lays out his economic vision, even as his campaign had increasingly devolved before Saturday’s rally shooting into questions about his age and whether he should remain the nominee after a self-defeating June 27 debate.

A recent analysis by the Peterson Institute of International Economics showed that deporting 1.3 million workers would cause the size of the U.S. economy to shrink by 2.1%, essentially creating a recession.

Stephen Moore, an informal Trump adviser and economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said Trump is unique in that he’s already been president and voters can judge him off his record in office.

“You want to know what he’s going to do in his second term, look at what he did in his first term,” Moore said.

Democrats have argued that Trump would be more extreme in his second term, using his own remarks to say he would put independent federal agencies under his direct control and use the federal government to settle scores with his perceived enemies. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint is a template for what a second term would look like, they argue, a claim that Trump has disputed.

But Moore said he believes that Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth.

“There is an idea that it’s going to be like slash and burn — I don’t think it’s going to be a radical agenda,” Moore said.

Some of Trump’s plans have gotten bipartisan backing. Both of Nevada’s senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, are Democrats who would like to ban taxes on tips paid to workers, even as the Biden White House favors a higher minimum wage for tipped workers.

Companies do like Trump’s ideas to cut regulations and further lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%. The tax rate had been 35% when he became president in 2017. Democrats, by comparison, want a 28% corporate tax rate in order to fund programs for the middle class and deficit reduction.

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But Trump has also floated huge tariffs that he says would protect U.S. manufacturing jobs. Biden preserved the tariffs on China that Trump introduced and went a step further by banning exports of advanced computer chips to China.

Companies generally dislike tariffs — which are taxes on imports — because they can raise costs, which are then likely borne by consumers. An analysis by the economists Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely found that Trump’s tariffs would cost a typical U.S. household $1,700 a year in what would effectively be a tax hike.

Trump’s tariff plans could worsen inflation as a result, even though the Republican says in videos that he would reduce inflation. It’s unclear how Trump would lower inflation, which peaked in 2022 at 9.1% and has since eased to 3% annually.

“The tariff issue is extremely important — and people are not paying enough attention to the magnitude of the Trump tariff policy, what the consequences would be,” said Clausing, a former Biden Treasury Department official and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But tariffs might be more of a political winner than an economic strategy, according to a research paper earlier this year by the economists David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. The research found that the tariffs during Trump’s first term did not increase employment, but the tariffs did help Trump politically in the 2020 election in the industrial areas that lost jobs to China and other countries.

Clausing noted that Trump is proposing tariffs on more than $3 trillion of imports, a 10-fold increase over what he did in his first term. She noted that the tariffs could make it more expensive to bring in the raw materials that U.S. factories need while also raising prices for consumers already struggling with high inflation. She said she wants people to understand the risks Trump’s economic policies could pose before it’s too late.

““I think people will notice when everything gets wildly expensive,” she said. “This is going to be a huge disaster.”