COVID-19 has scrambled the presidential campaign — and that’s bad news for Democrats

The Founding Fathers were rightly suspicious of political parties as venal bands of very human politicians whose primary instincts were more self-serving than public-serving. We got them anyway.

Now in the United States’ 59th presidential election campaign, an invisible little critter called the coronavirus is forcing drastic change on both major political parties and the ways they compete to capture the nation’s highest office on Nov. 3.

It remains to be seen how lasting some of these changes will be. One suspects, for instance, that the current imposition of social distancing on baby-kissing and handshaking will not endure long in the people business of politics.

But for now, the unprecedented political problems of the pandemic seem more challenging for Democrats with their less than dynamic likely nominee than for incumbent Republicans with their behaviorally-challenged certain nominee.

For starters, there’s money. Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee already have $225 million in the bank. That’s 17 times more than Joe Biden’s campaign has on hand now.

The coronavirus has prohibited the kinds of back-slapping, elbow-cupping, look-them-right-in-the-eye access for solicitations that donors cherish in person. So, Biden is left to play catch-up from his Delaware mansion via time-consuming Skyping or Facetiming with small bands of rich people.

Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee based on his current delegate lead and poll standing against Bernie Sanders. But the Vermont senator isn’t really a Democrat and holds the allegiance of a significant sector of left-leaning Democrats that Biden needs come fall. So, Sanders has no real incentive to abandon his Don Quixote campaign just yet. (See the Founding Fathers’ suspicion of self-serving political partisans.)

The COVID-19 outbreak has delayed many primary votes, meaning Biden can’t clinch the nomination for weeks. And he’s struggling from his basement studio to join the national conversation.

So far, like virtually every Democrat since that stunning election night in 2016 when Hillary Clinton went speechless, Biden’s statements have focused on criticizing Trump.

That’s certainly fair game, though it can backfire during a national crisis. Criticism is an integral part of any challenger’s challenge and Trump has provided ample ammo for critics.

Historically, however, American voters expect presidential challengers to also offer a detailed, perhaps realistic set of alternate plans for comparison.

Do you have any sense of exactly what a President Biden would do once he no longer had a Donald Trump to kick around?

No, you don’t. Because all the six-term ex-senator and two-term ex-vice president has done recently is endorse whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer want. Which is also what would likely happen once Nancy and Chuck had their own presidential puppet in the Oval Office.

An incumbent of either party has a built-in fundraising advantage based on his prominence and accumulated power. The odds of incumbents winning are excellent in modern times.

Perhaps you’ve noticed President Trump on TV daily talking about the national health crisis and anything else that crosses his mind. Perhaps you also remember the summer of 2012 when incumbent Barack Obama was assuring us that al-Qaeda was on the run just before militants sacked the Benghazi consulate and killed four Americans..

With his built-in fundraising advantage, Obama’s campaign spent that summer on TV defining Mitt Romney as a wealthy elitist who transported the family dog on his car roof and may have caused cancer in elderly women. The under-funded Romney could not respond until his official nomination the last week of August gave him access to federal funds and general election donations. Too late.

Come this June or July at the latest, expect to see the immense Trump campaign treasury financing a barrage of anti-Biden ads that make D-Day’s pre-invasion bombardment look like a beach picnic. Biden’s very long public record, his family’s sometimes shady shenanigans and his own unique panoply of verbal gaffes and garbled syntactical nonsense provide a target-rich environment of damaging video clips.

Oh, look! That invisible virus just conspired to prompt Democrats to delay their national convention by five weeks to mid-August. That’s five fewer weeks of federal funding for the Biden camp to respond. With the Summer Olympics also postponed, that leaves the entire summer wide open for Trump’s team to define old Joe as, well, old, perhaps too old mentally for the demands of the commander-in-chief job.

Major political parties waited until the Founding Fathers were dead before Andrew Jackson invented the national convention in Baltimore in 1832.

For generations, these conclaves did real business; Jackson’s was to select Martin Van Buren as his running mate. As late as 1924, Democrats took 15 days and 103 ballots to settle on John Davis as a sacrificial offering to GOP incumbent Calvin Coolidge’s landslide win.

Since the advent of television, whose cameras adore delegates’ funny hats, most national conventions have become scripted TV shows with little substance and absolutely no social distancing. They do include endless speeches, pro forma voting on platform planks, much partying and a kind of pep rally for the hard slog through October’s early voting to November’s election night results, barring hanging chads. Such assemblies can involve 50,000 visitors and a $200 million municipal economic boost.

Twenty-two cities have hosted major party conventions led by Chicago with 25, including the first two on TV in 1952 and Democrats’ doomed riotous gathering 16 years later. According to Trump, nothing will prevent his re-nomination the last week of August during Charlotte’s second convention.

Milwaukee is scheduled to host its first national convention the previous week.

But Democratic officials at Biden’s suggestion are simultaneously diagraming a possibly curtailed or pep rally-free virtual convention online in case that microscopic you-know-what persists in fouling up the plans of Andrew Jackson’s political descendants.

This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "COVID-19 has scrambled the presidential campaign — and that’s bad news for Democrats."