| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. A few leftover items from this year's Democratic convention: - The virtual format basically worked, but let's not get carried away. We're going to return to normal four years from now, once the pandemic has subsided. Mainly that's because party actors want to spend the week together, networking and hanging out and taking care of business. But it's also because the full convention setting really does make for good television. That said, these events have been making use of taped material for some time, and I suspect we'll see more of that and live-from-other-locations segments. Don't forget: The nominee's campaign loves that kind of stuff, because it's (even) more scripted and predictable than the live-from-the-podium speeches.
- We didn't get all the candidates raising hands together on the stage in support of former Vice President Joe Biden, but we did see a lot of former presidential contenders over the past four days. It seemed to me that the Democrats were defining themselves by their candidates more than parties usually do. Although Senator Bernie Sanders was the only also-ran who "earned" a convention speech, we saw quite a few of the others. It surely helps that the candidates themselves are a demographically diverse bunch, and it obviously helps that the party now appears to be unified behind Biden.
- What we didn't see was the normal effort to use the convention to help the rest of the ticket. I might've missed a couple, but I think only Alabama's Doug Jones, Maine's Sara Gideon and South Carolina's Jaime Harrison were featured, and even then only briefly. That leaves 11 other Senate candidates with at least some chance of winning who didn't get a chance to boost their visibility and raise some quick money. National conventions are always primarily about the presidential election and not the thousands of other races on the ballot, but this one seemed even more single-minded than usual.
- I have no idea what the relationship is between competence in putting on a convention and ability to run the government, but to the extent one implies the other, Democrats have to be happy. This wasn't a party in disarray, or one that couldn't handle the basics. I'll give Democratic campaign professional Geoff Garin the last word: "Remember, there was no model for a virtual convention. The DNC didn't just have to fly the plane while building it, they had to invent the plane."
1. Seth Masket on the 2020 Democratic nomination as the aftermath of 2016. 2. Julia Azari on vice presidents as candidates for president. 3. Dave Hopkins on the convention. 4. Mort Halperin and Soren Dayton at the Monkey Cage on reclaiming Congress's authority. 5. Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz on delivering mail-in ballots. 6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on Biden's speech. 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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