| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The Democrats have pushed their national convention back from July to August, most likely as a prelude to scrapping the event in its traditional form altogether in this pandemic year. The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty argues that this is a good excuse to kill off the conventions for good. She's correct that the old (pre-1972) function of the convention as a deliberative body representing state parties and selecting the nominee is long gone. But that doesn't mean the conventions are useless. To be sure: The parties could easily replicate the main formal function of the convention, which is to ratify the decision made by voters in primaries and caucuses, in some other format. But the other functions would be more difficult to replace, and there's no real reason (in normal years) to fix something that's not broken. For one thing, a convention works the way that a national meeting of any large organization does: It allows party actors to meet each other face-to-face, network, make deals, renew friendships and so on. It's true that such gatherings tend to have a fair amount of boring meetings and speeches, not to mention terrible behavior by some people, but there's a reason that so many cities build large convention halls and have little trouble keeping them full. Parties are organizations, and in-person meetings are valuable. The other major function is advertising. Conventions don't really force party actors to reconcile, although many treat them as a deadline for switching from internal nomination combat to general-election mode. But their real importance is for partisan voters. Many of those voters don't pay much attention during the nomination process, and the convention offers them an opportunity to get to know their nominee. Many voters, after all, don't consider themselves partisans; they say that they vote the candidate, not the party. And yet it turns out that they always somehow think the better of the two candidates belongs to the same party. Conventions are a way to trigger that partisanship. Democrats remind voters of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and his brothers, Barack Obama, and whichever of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are at that point thought to be popular within the party and not offensive outside of it. Republicans remind voters of Ronald Reagan and … well, just Reagan. (Perhaps that will change in the future, but my bet would be that by the 2028 convention either they will ignore Donald Trump or the nominee will be someone related to Trump.) Anyway, grouping the nominee with the party's heroes not only makes the nominee look good, it also reminds people why they like the party in the first place. Voters, of course, don't watch much of the convention itself, but many do wind up picking up enough of it through media coverage that the conventions "work" as advertising for partisans. And there's one more thing. Sure, the nomination process usually works to produce a winner in the primaries and caucuses. But it's not entirely foolproof. The convention serves as a backstop to the regular delegate-accumulation process. It wouldn't be ideal if this ever came into play, but the parties need to have something that serves this function. So, yes, we almost certainly won't have regular conventions this time around, but there's every reason to expect the parties to bring them back in 2024. 1. Dave Hopkins on time and the pandemic. Must-read. 2. James Bisbee and Dan Honig at the Monkey Cage find that former Vice President Joe Biden was helped in the most recent primaries by anxiety about the coronavirus. 3. Lydia DePillis and Lisa Song report on how badly procurement is going in New York. 4. Susan Glasser on how the Trump administration barely has the capacity to get anything done. Very good. 5. Michelle Goldberg on Jared Kushner. 6. And Jonathan V. Last on Rush Limbaugh and the coronavirus. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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