“Covid-19 is changing U.S. politics, and the conventions were getting long in the tooth, anyway,” concluded Rove. “Their reinvention will be a test of each party’s leadership in both communicating its message and responding to a pandemic.”
There are two questions to tackle here: 1) Will the parties hold conventions this summer and 2) Will we ever have in-person political conventions again?
The first question, to me, is far easier to answer. And that answer is “no.”
Democrats already seem to be headed that way. “We may have to do a virtual convention,” Joe Biden, the party’s de facto 2020 nominee, acknowledged earlier this month. “I think we should be thinking about that right now. The idea of holding the convention is going to be necessary. We may not be able to put 10, 20, 30,000 people in one place.”
The staff for the Democratic convention committee in Milwaukee was also recently cut in half.
On the other hand, President Donald Trump has insisted that the Republican convention will go forward no matter what. “We’re not going to cancel,” Trump said on Fox News at the end of March. “I think we’re going to be in great shape long before then.”
But cracks have begun to emerge. “I don’t even know if we’ll have a Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina,” retiring Sen. Lamar Alexander said on C-SPAN Thursday morning. “We need the tests, the screening tests — lots of them — in order to have any chance of going to a Republican National Convention or any other big event.”
Trump may well be able to keep the convention on track by sheer force of will. But how many people will still go?
As for the broader question of whether this is the end of political conventions forever, well, that’s a tougher one. As Rove rightly notes, conventions do more than just formally pick a nominee. They also debate party rules and what the party platform should look like.
But for the most part, they are badly outmoded. A series of speeches no one watches. Lots of back-slapping, expensive parties and self-congratulation. Pomp and circumstance to no real end.
The Point: I could never go to another political convention and be perfectly happy. At a minimum, the parties need to drastically rethink what conventions should be for — and how to make that happen.
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