The campaign was already creating such online con-
tent, but it’s newly central in a world where rallies
risk becoming super spreader events.
The Biden campaign has also moved online,
where its presence, like its candidate, is more se-
date and traditional. “Events” are advertised to
local supporters and organized around constituency
groups or issues, just as they would be in a normal
campaign. Biden’s wife Jill appears, via Zoom, at
a “virtual campaign stop” with the mayor of West
Palm Beach, Fla., to talk about his plans for seniors;
former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey
Abrams hosts an online “racial and economic jus-
tice roundtable” with business owners in Detroit;
Biden himself joins his former running mate, Barack
Obama, for a stagey 15-minute “conversation” about
the Trump Administration’s failures.
Despite the pandemic, Trump had hoped to keep
up the rallies central to his political mythology. But
an attempted return to the stage in Tulsa, Okla., on
June 20 turned into a debacle, with a sparse, mostly
maskless crowd that barely filled the bottom deck
of the indoor arena. Lately he’s settled for online
“tele-rallies,” glorified conference calls that Trump
supporters in key states are invited to tune in to a
couple of times a week. At a recent one targeting
voters in Maine and New Hampshire, Trump du-
tifully shouts out the local Republican candidates,
extols lobster fishermen and vows to get tough on
Canadian currency manipulation. Almost 13,000
people are listening live, and hundreds of thousands
more will eventually “view” the half-hour audio
stream. “The future of our nation will be defined
by patriots who love our country and want to build
it up and make it bigger and better and stronger—
or it will be defined by the radical left. And usually
radical left Democrats are left-wing extremists who
hate our country,” he intones.
In person, this kind of line would draw a roar
from Trump’s throngs of admirers, but online, the
only feedback is the silent scroll of Facebook com-
ments. Trump’s political adviser Jason Miller says
the tele-rallies have been a hit. “The genius of Don-
ald Trump is that he knows how to foster and build
one-on-one relationships with his voters,” he says.
But it’s clear the virtual gatherings are no substi-
tute for the real thing. Lacking his usual source of
mass adulation, the President has taken to touting
the crowds that line the streets when he visits vari-
ous states on official business.
Some local candidates—mainly Republicans—
are still holding in-person events despite the risks.
But the pandemic has become a vector for partisan
attacks. When a GOP Senate candidate in Virginia
posted a video of himself attending an indoor po-
litical event without a mask, the state Democratic
Party seized on the image to call him “dangerously
irresponsible.” Many state Democratic parties have
chosen to hold all-virtual conventions, but sev-
eral of their GOP counterparts have tried to blaze
ahead. The Republican Party of Texas took its case
all the way to the state Supreme Court, which sided
with the Houston mayor who had canceled its in-
person convention. The hastily assembled virtual
confab that ensued featured extensive technical
difficulties—at one point, Texas Monthly reported, pranksters invaded an
online planning document and added “Peepeepoopoo” to the schedule—
and by the end angry delegates ousted the state chairman.
It’s been a similar story at the national level. Democrats decided early
on that the planned July convention in Milwaukee would not be feasible;
it was pushed back to mid-August and radically scaled down, with dele-
gates staying home and voting remotely and Biden himself staying away.
The GOP has had a bumpier road. In June, Trump moved the convention
from Charlotte, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla., in a fit of pique over the North
Carolina Democratic governor’s insistence on safety protocols. As Florida’s
COVID-19 caseload surged this summer, party officials made a series of
frantic adjustments, culminating in a last-ditch effort to hold the festivi-
ties in an outdoor stadium in the August heat. Finally, in late July, Trump
announced the Jacksonville program would be scotched; the current plan,
which is still being developed, is to hold a small number of party meet-
ings in North Carolina and have the President accept the nomination with
a televised speech at a location to be determined.
The lack of traditional conventions is perhaps not such a loss. Events
where party insiders in smoke-filled rooms once actually picked presiden-
tial nominees and running mates have become, in the modern era, little^
Campaign
volunteers watch
as an election
official displays
a mail-in ballot
in Manhattan