Little about this campaign season has followed a prototypical election year script.
The big events every campaign season summer are the party national conventions. Originally, the Democratic National Convention was to have taken place last week in Milwaukee. When the COVID pandemic descended upon the world, the event was rescheduled for the week of August 17. Now the convention is set to be “virtual,” with no delegates actually in physical attendance.
The Republicans were originally set to meet in Charlotte, North Carolina the week of August 24. The Democratic mayor of Charlotte indicated that he might not allow a large gathering due to COVID concerns, so the Republican National Committee hastily made arrangements to move the convention to Jacksonville, Florida. With COVID cases spiking in Florida, the RNC is now planning a much scaled back event, as Fox News’s Jared Halpern reports.
The first three days of the Republican National Convention next month in Jacksonville, Florida will be attended by only a few thousand delegates. The final night, however, will be expanded – likely to several thousand when President Trump accepts his nomination for re-election.
LIZ HARRINGTON: ‘We want to do the event in the safest, best way possible, but to gather together and celebrate and not completely up end our way of life and the way we nominate our president.’
The party’s national spokeswoman Liz Harrington says attendees will be tested for coronavirus and masks and sanitation stations will be on site. Democrats have greatly scaled down their convention plans, asking delegates not to travel and instead conduct business remotely.”
Few campaign events. Little resembling the clichéd “campaign trail.” No massive Trump rallies. This election cycle will be remembered as the “soundbite campaign.”
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is attacking President Trump on his response to the pandemic.
This man simply doesn’t understand. You can’t deal with our economic crisis without serving and saving and solving the public health crisis. For all his bluster about his expertise on the economy, he’s unable to explain how he’ll help working families hit the hardest.”
For his part, President Trump, in a Sunday morning interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, attacked Biden on his competence.
I say he’s not competent to be president. To be president you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things. He doesn’t even come out of his basement. They think, oh, this is a great campaign. So he goes in…I’ll then make a speech, it’ll be a great speech, and some young guys start writing, ‘Vice President said, this, this, this, this.’ He didn’t say it. Joe doesn’t know he’s alive. He doesn’t know he’s alive.”
Perhaps the best analysis of the campaign so far comes from our own Senator Ted Cruz.
If the focus is on a contrast between free enterprise and socialism, on a contrast between the Constitution and Bill of Rights and rule of law versus anarchy and violence, we win. But if it’s just a personality contest that’s what the Democrats want it to be because they think they win that election.”