Thanks to Trump, Jacksonville Becomes Political Roadkill – The New York Times

MIAMI — For Jacksonville, it wasn’t all that fun while it lasted.

Over 43 long days, Florida’s largest city insisted it could play host to the Republican National Convention in the middle of a pandemic.

Republicans bowed out of Charlotte, N.C., the previous host city, after the state’s Democratic governor insisted that the convention would follow health protocols Mr. Trump resisted. Public health experts in Florida and elsewhere warned the city against mass gatherings. The people of Jacksonville expressed skepticism that the city should take on a shotgun political convention.

Mayor Lenny Curry, a Republican, grabbed the hot potato anyway. And on Thursday, he got burned.

Jacksonville’s brief time as a convention city ended ignominiously when President Trump, facing mounting pressure by local and party officials concerned about the virus surge, on Thursday abruptly called off the event in his adopted home state. What might have been a rare moment in the sun for Jacksonville, a city often eclipsed by Atlanta and its Florida counterparts, went poof.

“It has a place near and dear to my heart, but the ‘first coast’ has always been very much the last coast in Florida politics and culture,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Florida political strategist and former Republican who grew up in Gainesville, about 70 miles away. “They strive mightily and frequently come up short — and this would be another example of that.”

Jacksonville’s R.N.C. experiment was painful. But at least it was short — and probably for the best, everyone agrees. In retrospect.

“They may have inadvertently dodged a bullet,” Mr. Stipanovich said. “Despite no small amount of embarrassment and perhaps some disappointment, I suspect that behind closed doors there’s a big sigh of relief.”

Out in the open, too.

“How do I feel? Relieved,” said Tommy Hazouri, a Democrat and the president of the Jacksonville City Council. “Turn off the lights — the party’s over.”

By virtue of its consolidated county and city governments, Jacksonville, a Navy and shipping town, is the largest city by area in the continental United States. But it hardly attracts the tourists, media attention or big business as its neighbors. Mr. Hazouri recalled how, as a state legislator in the 1970s and 1980s, his Miami colleagues would tease his city over its toll roads and the exhaust from its paper mill, which made parts of Jacksonville smell like rotten eggs.

The city cleaned its air and got rid of the tolls. Then came Jacksonville’s long courtship of the National Football League, an effort that lasted well over a decade before the Jacksonville Jaguars debuted in 1995.