State Democratic parties are scrambling to reconfigure their conventions and delegate selection rules ahead of the national convention this summer as the coronavirus upends months of detailed planning and forces delays of nominating contests nationwide.
Several parties have already announced contingency plans, including massive “virtual conventions” and mail-in voting for delegates that state Democratic officials say could act as a model for the national convention in August should the coronavirus outbreak prompt the cancellation of an in-person gathering.
But scratching plans that have been in place for months comes with a slew of logistical challenges. Financial commitments with the venues and hotels where the in-person conventions were set to take place have to be canceled. Delegate selection plans, usually approved months in advance, have to be altered. And parties are still trying to determine exactly what an online convention will look like.
“We know that we’re moving to virtual, but all the details need to be determined,” said George Hornedo, the former deputy political director for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and a member of the Indiana Democratic Party’s central committee.
Indiana Democrats called off their in-person state convention last week in favor of a virtual gathering. State delegates will be able to cast their votes by mail for the party’s contested state attorney general nomination, and party officials are looking into online voting options to select delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
“Step one for us had to be: can we get out of the financial commitment we made to the hotel?” Hornedo said. “Who’s a vendor that can help? How are we going to make sure that all that information gets out to the state delegates? How do we make sure that we have simple systems and processes by which we’re going to secure votes?”
The state party conventions are critical because they ultimately determine who will serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, when the party formally chooses its presidential nominee. They also play a crucial role in debating and approving party platforms and nominating candidates for statewide offices.
But with the coronavirus pandemic still in full swing — and no clear indication of when it will subside — Democrats at the state level are racing to make sure critical party business gets done in advance of the national convention.
In Arizona, the state Democratic Party has put a contingency plan in place that would require district-level delegates to cast their vote for delegates to the national convention by mail if the party’s state convention on May 16 is canceled.
In Georgia, where the state’s presidential primaries have been postponed until June 9, state Democrats reworked their delegate selection rules to allow for remote voting and virtual meetings.
And in Virginia, the state Democratic Party announced that it would hold its June 20 convention entirely online after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced that the Richmond Convention Center, where the Democratic gathering was to be held, would be temporarily transformed into a field hospital to free up capacity in existing hospitals treating coronavirus cases.
“All these 50 different party organizations had to essentially replan everything,” Grant Fox, the communications director for the Virginia Democratic Party, said. “That can be a really cumbersome process.”
In total, more than a dozen states in recent weeks have proposed changes to delegate selection rules that were approved by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) months ago.
The Texas Democratic Party became one of the first state parties to announce that it would hold its June convention online. Gilberto Hinojosa, the state party chairman, said that officials began cobbling together contingency plans as soon as cities in the state began issuing emergency declarations and restrictions on public gatherings.
While state party officials held out hopes for an in-person convention, Hinojosa said that looming deadlines for the party to cancel financial obligations to vendors and the decision by officials in Bexar County, where the convention was to take place, to extend an emergency public health declaration through June 15 left party leaders with no choice but to switch to a virtual convention.
“We always had in mind these deadlines we were facing and we were going to go as close as we could to the deadlines before canceling, because we wanted to get our money back,” Hinojosa told The Hill in a phone interview on Thursday.
In recent weeks, Texas Democrats and affiliated groups have been mapping out how the new convention format will work.
Committee business that would usually be conducted during the state convention — selecting delegates to the national convention and laying out the party’s platform — will now happen a few days ahead of time, though party members will still vote on those matters during the convention. Unlike in an in-person convention, however, those votes will be cast entirely online.
Hinojosa said that one of the biggest challenges for the Texas Democratic Party has been ensuring transparency in the new format.
“It’s important for people that there be transparency — that people feel that delegates were selected in a fair way, that the platform is decided in a fair way,” he said.
“It’s hard to do that in a virtual convention. We’re trying to set up processes that will let us achieve that as much as possible. But that’s probably one of the biggest concerns that we have in designing this convention. We certainly hope we can achieve that transparency.”
What happens at the state conventions could very well become a model for Democrats nationally.
The DNC announced earlier this month that it would postpone its convention in Milwaukee from July to August because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, a handful of prominent party members, including Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, have floated the notion of a virtual national convention.
“We may have to do a virtual convention. I know I think we should be thinking about that right now,” Biden said earlier this month during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “The idea of holding a convention is going to be necessary, but we may not be able to put 10-, 20-, 30,000 people in one place, and that’s very possible.”
The committee in charge of planning the Democratic National Convention in August has already said that it is looking at a range of “contingency options” for the gathering. Meanwhile, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said this week that the party is moving “full steam ahead” in planning its late-August convention in Charlotte, N.C.
The DNC hasn’t given any indication that it’s moving toward a virtual convention, and the party’s chairman, Tom Perez, said in an interview this week with Yahoo News’s “Skullduggery” podcast that he is “really looking forward to having an in-person convention” in Milwaukee in August.
But Hinojosa said that he expects the DNC to pay close attention to the Texas Democratic Party’s virtual convention.
“I would think that the DNC is going to be looking closely at Texas and what happens at our convention,” he said.
“Like with anything else, there will be mistakes and we’ll learn how to get through those mistakes.”