MILWAUKEE — “Positive” was the watchword at day one of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee yesterday. It was how attendees described the mood at the event, in line with Donald Trump’s own directive to stress unity and tone down incendiary rhetoric; it was their response to the former president’s close dodging of an assassination attempt this past weekend; and it was how they felt about this coming election, one in which Trump has taken the lead in battleground states in multiple polls and the respected Cook Political Report predicts six states moving toward the Republicans.

Only two days after a bullet nearly ended their candidate’s life, Republicans had practically, like the candidate himself, come face-to-face with death and come out the other side defiant. One attendee had burst into tears when she heard the news. One said she hadn’t been surprised. Another had been getting a haircut.

Many described a sense of relief. Trump’s death would have not only been the end of a beloved political figure, it seemed, but of an irreplaceable political force, no matter how deep they imagined their bench.

Many others described the political equivalent of a shot of adrenaline.

“We’re all jacked up,” said one. “We’re more determined than ever.”

The candidate’s near-death experience had, for attendees, made clear the election’s existential stakes, as it hit home how quickly and easily their political project could have collapsed. Like their political opponents, these Republicans talked about November as a must-win election that will decide the country’s future.

These pitched emotions spiraled into the night’s climax, when a bandaged-up Trump emerged, on camera, from a stadium corridor into the convention hall to a rapturous, extended ovation. Nearby fire-service workers rushed to the gate to witness the scene, before one lamented, “Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

But the big news of the day was the announcement of J. D. Vance as vice presidential candidate. Vance was not necessarily the top pick of many of those I spoke with, but they gamely identified benefits he would bring to the ticket: he has potential Rust Belt appeal, is more on the same page with Trump than the “turncoat” Mike Pence, and, most of all, unlike the political leadership of both major parties, he is young. (Vance is thirty-nine.)

One such person was Shalira Taylor-Jackson, a backup delegate from Ohio, who was attending her second Republican Convention after 2016’s in her hometown of Cleveland. Jackson, who is black and chafed at charges that the GOP is the party of “rich, white men,” had started out as a Barack Obama volunteer in 2008.

“They had me with the ‘Hope and Change,’ but nothing changed,” she told me. “Honestly, they sold us out.”

Jackson’s first pick had been South Carolina senator Tim Scott, pointing to his work on the First Step criminal justice reform legislation and his move to defund police departments that didn’t implement certain reforms after the murder of George Floyd. But Jackson, whose husband is a police officer, was happy with the Vance pick, believing that his “Never Trump” past would help unite the party, and appreciated the fact that the senator had campaigned with her during her 2022 run for a blue House seat.

At the end of the day, for many, it was simply enough that Vance was Trump’s pick. The Republican rank and file have inherent trust in the former president, and not just for the sake of the presidential ticket but for the man himself.

Still, for all the confidence convention attendees said they had going into November, many were wary of counting their chickens, anticipating “shenanigans” from the Democrats, as one put it. Those shenanigans ranged from lawsuits and electoral tampering to “importing” voters. Many believed the assassination attempt this past weekend — carried out, based on what we know so far, by a single, disturbed shooter with unclear motives, who was a registered Republican, grew up in a house with pro-Trump yard signs, and was described by one classmate as conservative — had been the doing of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

“A wounded serpent bites the deepest,” one twenty-four-year-old Republican warned.

Attendees resented what they viewed as cynical Democratic efforts to thwart Trump’s presidency and the “lawfare” waged against him after he lost the previous election. Some predicted Trump would wage his own in return.

“If they win, there are going to be investigations, and people will go to jail,” one attendee told me.

Despite the Trump team’s directive, plenty in the convention night’s official programming did not point to unity or cooled-down rhetoric. The first speaker of the night was North Carolina gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, who, among other things, has a history of Holocaust denial and recently told a crowd that “some folks need killing” as “a matter of necessity.” Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson called the other side’s policies “a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people” in his speech, then claimed the teleprompter simply hadn’t been updated with a more positive message. Tim Scott declared America wasn’t a racist country, except for those parts governed by Democrats. Numerous speakers used insulting language toward LGBTQ people. Messages on trucks around the convention area implored participants to “fight left-wing media.”

Regardless, the inescapable takeaway from day one of the convention was that the movement behind Trump is unified, fired up, more committed than ever to the president and his political program, and laser-focused on winning. By contrast, polls leading into the event showed that more than two-thirds of Democrats are unhappy with Biden as their nominee, including 46 percent in the must-win battleground state of Pennsylvania. The same night, Biden sat down for a twenty-minute interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which he again struggled to speak coherently and lost his train of thought several times. For Democrats, it’s looking like a very worrying matchup.