We’ve been talking about convention dates for almost 20 years here at DCW, and you have to wonder if this is going to have effects in the future:
The Democratic National Committee announced on Tuesday that it will nominate President Joe Biden through a “virtual roll call” vote ahead of the August convention to ensure he appears on the Ohio ballot this November.
Ohio’s ballot deadline is Aug. 7, two weeks before the DNC planned to hold its official presidential nomination at an in-person convention in Chicago. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, warned last week that Biden would not be on the state’s ballot unless the state lawmakers moved the ballot access deadline to after the Democratic convention.
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There are typically a few states each election year whose ballot certification deadlines do not align with the party’s official nominating convention. These misalignments are almost always quietly resolved by either the state legislature or by the secretary of state.
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The state of Washington and Alabama also have early certification deadlines that fall before the DNC. But Democrats in the former resolved the issue by offering a provisional certification of Biden’s nomination. Lawmakers in Alabama passed legislation earlier this spring that deferred the state’s certification deadline until after the DNC. –Politico
I would note the 2028 Olympics start a bit earlier than normal, in Mid-July, so if Biden wins, and the Democrats go second again, they will likely face the same problem again. (Or, they could stake out the week of July 10, finishing the day before the Olympics start on Friday, July 14, and force the GOP to go July 4th week, or let the GOP go second – and break almost 100 years of tradition of the party in the White House having the later convention!)
The problem with an earlier convention date is the last primary. There are several states that use the first Tuesday in June as a primary date. Going back to 1956, the earliest date for the “challenger’s” party was July 10 in 1972. If you put in a week break between the two conventions, that gives you an earliest possible date for the “incumbent’s” party of July 24, and since 1956, the earliest date for that convention was July 25 in 1960 and 2016.
And if you want a week’s break between the end of the convention and the start of the Olympics or a week’s break between the end of the convention and the start of the Olympics, it’s been about 50-50 as to whether you can have both conventions concluded before the first Tuesday in August. The states should know these basic preferences of the two parties and be able to set a realistic deadline for holding the conventions. September 1 seems tp be a date that would work and that should be enough time to print the ballots even in the states with the earliest starts to absentee voting.
Conventions can go in back-to-back weeks, and the Olympics are not as media dominating as they used to be, so you could finish a convention 2 days before the Olympics start. So I think you can get the conventions done by the end of July if you had to. But there’s really no reason for states to have deadlines before September 1. (And in any case, the Ohio GOP blinked, allowing Biden to be on the ballot regardless).