GOP convention wasn’t going to fly in S.A.

This isn’t meant as a knock on the fine city of Jacksonville, Fla.

But there’s only one reason why the home of the Jaguars landed (was saddled with?) the big-ticket items for the Republican National Convention in August.

That reason goes by the name of Lenny Curry, Jacksonville’s mayor and a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party.

Jacksonville is that rare American city led by a member of the GOP. For a Republican National Committee scrambling to find a new location for President Donald Trump’s convention acceptance speech, Curry’s eagerness to play ball with the RNC meant everything to the party.

Two years ago, the party’s Site Selection Committee might have been searching for Mr. Right when it came to convention locales. Over the past two weeks, however, it was more than happy to settle for Mr. Right Now.

The late change of plans came about because of conflicting partisan politics on the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Charlotte, N.C., had locked down the contract for the convention back in 2018, but North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat,

had recently expressed reluctance to allow a full-scale arena gathering in Charlotte, fearing that it would contribute to the spread of the coronavirus.

Trump refused to scale back the convention’s pageantry, so the RNC settled on a weird compromise — keeping the convention’s wonky parliamentary business in Charlotte but moving the prime-time glitter to another city.

Recent history shows that it’s tough for the GOP, in the best of circumstances, to find big-city mayors (who tend to be Democrats or Democratic-leaning) willing to back a convention bid.

In early 2018, Ron Kaufman, the Republican Party’s Site Selection Committee chairman, paid two visits to San Antonio and quickly became besotted with the city. He bonded with business leaders and hit it off with Casandra

Matej, the CEO of Visit San Antonio.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg, however, opposed bidding on the convention, and that basically brought an end to the talks. (While bids are actually made by a host committee, and not city governments, the party likes to get a municipal commitment of about $5 million, so the city has skin in the game.)

The RNC faced similar challenges in other cities. The party played footsie with Las Vegas, and Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald took it upon himself to make a pitch for Sin City.

But the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau refused to bid on the 2020 convention.

That’s the way the site selection process has gone for the RNC in the era of Trump: all kinds of division between municipal and state governments, business leaders and political activists.

Generally, I’m inclined to have a welcoming attitude when it comes to conventions. I don’t believe that providing convention space for tourists amounts to an endorsement of all their beliefs.

After all, San Antonio has routinely hosted both the Republican

and Democratic state conventions, without much controversy.

In fact, at the same time that San Antonians were getting into passionate arguments in 2018 about whether this city should host Trump’s convention, we quietly hosted a GOP state convention that brought Trump acolytes Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton to downtown San Antonio.

In 2018, the issues were basically economic and political: the need to raise about $65 million, with a potential windfall of $200 million; and the political implications of welcoming a president who infamously called Mexican undocumented immigrants rapists, drug dealers and criminals to a city with a 63 percent Latino population.

In recent weeks, as some local Republicans advocated for San Antonio to take a mulligan on an RNC bid, the issues were more complex.

We had the question of whether it made sense to allow 20,000 people to congregate in the Alamodome at a time when we’re grappling with the prospect of a second wave of COVID-19 infection. We also had the question of what it would do to this city, on the heels of Black Lives Matter protests against the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, to bring Trump, and all the discord that comes with him, to San Antonio.

Matej, staring down a local hospitality industry that has lost 36 conventions and an estimated $140 million to the COVID-19 shutdown, couldn’t resist attempting an 11th-hour Hail Mary pass.

“This is a new day and a new environment,” she wrote to City Manager Erik Walsh. “Pursuing significant meeting opportunities like this will play a large role in that revitalization.”

Before anyone had time to process the idea, the RNC settled on Jacksonville.

The RNC was never going to fly in San Antonio. Nirenberg remained staunch in his opposition, and his case had only grown stronger in the two years since he first slammed the door on the RNC.

The Republican Party had little time and few choices. Hello, Jacksonville.