The coronavirus outbreak has wrought enormous changes to American life over the past several months, and politics have been no exception. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has basically been nowhere but his basement, hosting public teleconferences and podcasts that have garnered virtually no public interest. Meanwhile, President Trump has had to suspend his usual practice of hosting raucous public rallies, although his big return to the stage was set for June 20 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But rallies are one thing; four-day nominating conventions — loud, indoor extravaganzas for the better part of a week — are quite another. Right now, the Republicans look set to push forward. Originally planned to be held in late August in Charlotte, North Carolina, the GOP moved its public nomination of Trump to Jacksonville, Florida, after Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of the Tarheel State, told the party it could not have the mass gathering it anticipated.
And what kind of convention matters greatly to Trump. The point, this year, is not the nomination itself (obviously a formality) but the message the party sends. Trump will aim to run on the idea that America has turned the corner on the coronavirus and is up off the mat. The optics will need to portray a post-fear atmosphere: celebratory, hopeful, renewed.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a Democratic convention remains murky at best. Scheduled for mid-August in Milwaukee, the Democrats still look to be planning something, but it is unclear how many delegates will participate in person and how many will be virtual. That, too, is important: It would deprive Biden of the kind of convention that would project strength, optimism, and momentum. Yet this is a bit of a trap for Democrats because if they take the bait and try to match Trump’s showmanship, they will in the process confirm Trump’s narrative of the country’s upswing.
The conventions, in other words, may matter more than usual, if only for the statement they make about the competing visions of the state of the country. At the same time, the public will be looking for an answer to the question of whether we need conventions at all anymore. One could make the argument that, under normal circumstances, they are like a political appendix, no longer useful to the functioning of the party system.
Originally, the conventions served an important purpose. Presidential nominations were made in legislative caucuses, both at the state and national levels, but that changed starting in the 1830s. The first major political party to hold a convention was the Whigs in 1832, and since 1836, both major parties have had a quadrennial affair — regardless of what was happening in the country at that moment.
The reason is that they were for a long time extremely useful for party governance in the United States. A combination of rapid democratization and westward expansion made it unfeasible to leave nomination decision-making to a handful of elites. Party leaders from across the whole country had to make the choices collectively, which required an actual meeting. This is a big reason why nominating conventions were often held in cities such as Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis — they were centrally located, making it reasonably easy for party officials to attend.
Likewise, the platform was of critical importance, as it could be printed in every local newspaper so that voters could easily discover what the party stood for.
Until the 1960s, the party officials at these conventions were literally in charge of deciding who would be the nominee. Presidential primaries had been instituted in the early 20th century, but they were often nonbinding and far from determinative. Democrat Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 nomination despite having run in no primaries. But the Democratic leadership underestimated the frustration of the activist base of the party, which pushed through major reforms that ultimately led to the rise of today’s system. That process took a few cycles to take full effect, but it has more or less run its course. Today, voters in primaries and open caucuses choose presidential nominees, and conventions merely affirm those choices. Meanwhile, party platforms have ballooned in length — so much so that hardly anybody reads them anymore.
So, why should we bother with party conventions at all? Shouldn’t we take the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to excise a vestigial part of our body politic? The answer is no, for several very good reasons.
First, what about spectacle? That is an easy factor to undercount, but we should not. Too much of our politics today is stridently ideological, driven by grim scolds. Party conventions are fun. They are full of hyperbolic boasts and claims, and outlandish criticisms of the other side. The delegates are laughing and smiling and hooting and hollering. They have a tongue-in-cheek quality to them that makes them a welcome departure from the usual apocalyptic quality of today’s politics.
They are also, thanks to modern communications technology, a shared moment for the partisans of both sides. Again, this is a rare and welcome departure from the way media are mostly consumed in this country, where everybody gravitates to specific sources that cater to his or her unique needs. Granted, Republicans tend not to watch the Democratic convention, and vice versa, but there is something to be said for a mass televised event that draws partisan viewers from all across the nation.
The conventions also help prime party voters in the electorate. They remind them that the election is coming, introduce them to the major themes the party will carry into the contest, and encourage them to engage actively in local political activities. These are all very good things.
And just like most major professional organizations have conferences, so, too, should the parties. They are a great opportunity to mingle casually, exchanging business cards over breakfast, sharing ideas about policy over dinner, or evaluating campaign tactics over a cocktail. Every major industry in the U.S. subsidizes these kinds of events because they know it is good for their employees and managers to interact with one another. The same is true for the parties.
All told, the conventions represent one of the few remaining ways in which politics is still a lived, communal experience. It is something that we as a country do together, which is an important part of politics that is so easily overlooked in our cyber-connected world.
These are all reasons the GOP and Trump campaign are rolling the dice on a traditional convention during the pandemic — and why the Biden campaign will seek to replace, somehow, these aspects of the convention if it chooses to forgo the weeklong frenzy this summer.
In fact, the conventions’ influence on the election should be strengthened, not diluted. Primaries give far too much influence to campaign strategists, donors, the media, state governments, and party activists. They do not directly choose the nominees, but they collectively determine who is and is not seen as a legitimate contender for the nomination. None of these groups is especially representative of either party as a whole, and collectively, they encourage the parties to be maximally strident in their rhetoric.
Any kind of serious reform of the primary nomination process is going to require some alternative institutional arrangements. The conventions are an obvious candidate because they already exist and can be easily retooled for that purpose. Rather than getting rid of them as a needless appendage to our political process, we would be well served instead to consider ways to revitalize the conventions to make the nominees of both parties more representative of the broader sentiment within their respective coalitions, and more qualified to undertake the duties of the presidency should they win election.
So, even if the coronavirus means we cannot have full party conventions in 2020, we should not abandon them. Even in their current form, they are useful. They may be pageantry, but pageantry is good for politics. And hopefully at some point in the future, reformers will finally have an opportunity to inject some substance back into the process.
Jay Cost is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Grove City College.
