Six months before the general election and there is very little to say about it. There are no stories from the much clichéd “campaign trail.” There is in fact, no trail at all. Donald Trump is at the White House. Joe Biden is hunkered down in the basement of his Delaware home.
Yet a campaign will eventually have to happen and things attendant to it are happening – mostly out of public view.
We learned yesterday that the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee have each held convention site walk-throughs with the major networks. Both are still planning to hold national conventions in August. As of today, the planning for those conventions assumes that they will be conducted in the traditional way – which is to say upwards of 20,000 people shoved cheek-by-jowl into sports arenas dressed up in funny hats and waving signs.
If the conventions go as planned, we’ll go as planned. We’ll be on the scene live to tell you what happens.
Democrats, for their part, seem to have coalesced behind Joe Biden – anecdotal reports from some quarters in the Democratic Party concerning reservations about his mental capacity and predisposition for gaffes notwithstanding. Former rivals for the nomination – including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – have endorsed him. So has his former boss, Barack Obama.
What remains to be seen is the level of actual enthusiasm among the “Bernie Bros” for Biden. Bernie has, again, done the right thing for the Dems in standing up for the party’s presumptive nominee. What cannot be known at this point is whether or not Bernie’s supporters will turn out for Biden on election day.
It also seems unlikely, at this point, that reported behind-the-scenes “Draft Cuomo” efforts will come to anything. The state primaries that have been postponed will eventually happen and when they do, there will be, for practical purposes, only one name on the ballot. Joe Biden will go into Milwaukee with something that Hillary Clinton lacked four years ago – a nominally united party.
Biden, for his part, has committed to picking a female running mate. There has been some news coverage of that. Yesterday, on the subject of a VP choice, he said this:
No I commit that it [will] be a woman. Because I think it is very important that the, uh, that my administration look like, look like the public, look like the nation. And, uh, there will be, I’ve committed there will be a woman of color on the Supreme Court, doesn’t mean there won’t be a vice president as well…”
As to which woman his VP choice might be, he said this when asked about Michelle Obama:
Well, I’d take her in a heartbeat. She’s uh, she’s brilliant, she’s, she knows the way around, she is a really fine woman…”
And finally, for this report, there’s the subject of money. Biden took in a bit more than $47 million in March. But that still puts him $187 million behind Donald Trump.
There, we’ve done it. Some news in a presidential election cycle that is generating no news.