| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Here come the conventions. My sense is that the Democrats, who begin theirs on Monday, have put a fair amount of thought into how to do a virtual event so that it will make for good video. The Republicans? A lot less so. How either party's convention will actually work out — whether they're at all watchable or good at generating clips for various platforms, and whether the more ambitious Democrats or the less prepared Republicans can avoid embarrassing technical glitches — is anyone's guess. Does it matter? Conventions for the past 50 years or so have served two big functions. As quadrennial meetings of party actors, they offer the same socializing and networking and identity-building opportunities that any large organization's convention does. And they advertise the party and its presidential ticket. For the latter, the official podium program is only part of the effort. Media norms dictate in normal cycles that the broadcast networks relocate much of their news and even some of their other personnel to the convention's host city and devote a week's worth of coverage to the party. The cable news networks, too, usually make the conventions their dominant story for the week, as do all the online political sites. This suggests that as long as both the partisan and the neutral political media still treat this year's conventions as the real thing, they will actually function a lot like normal, even without having all the delegates as a backdrop. Political advertising isn't usually very successful at persuading voters to switch their support from one candidate to the other, and that's not usually the main function of conventions. What conventions can do is trigger weak partisans — those who generally support the party but don't pay a lot of attention to politics and don't think of themselves as automatic party voters — by reminding them of their political orientation. That's why Democrats will be featuring Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and other popular-within-the-party leaders — so that those who like them will see the new nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, as the logical choice in 2020. Put it this way: Democratic voters are almost all going to vote for Biden, and Republican voters are almost all going to vote for President Donald Trump. Some have already decided to do so; others may not have thought about it much yet. The convention supplies them with lots of reasons for the decision that they've already made or are about to make. That also applies to the relatively small number of voters who are ready to switch parties; the convention is less about convincing them to do so than about giving them good reasons for the decision. That's why Democrats will feature former Ohio Governor John Kasich; he's not going to convince any real Trump voters to join him in backing Biden, but he might make the handful of voters headed in that direction feel that it's okay to do so. Another question about this year's conventions involves norms. In 2016, Trump ended the norm of leaving the other party's convention week to them and did what he could to generate media attention for himself. This year, he has already scheduled events to compete with the Democrats. Perhaps to retaliate, House Democrats have now scheduled a hearing on potential scandals involving the U.S. Postal Service for Aug. 24, the first day of the Republican National Convention. As John Sides put it, "the campaign's information environment tends to shift during conventions," and each party's nominee "will typically get more news, and more favorable news, than at other times during the campaign." That norm held much less than usual for Hillary Clinton in 2016. We'll see whether this year is different. 1. Paul Musgrave on Trump and demands on his opponents' time. 2. Sara Sadhwani on Kamala Harris and the Indian American vote. 3. Steven Taylor on potential political-system reforms in the U.S. Not the things I'd like to see for the most part, but worth seeing what could be on the table. 4. Jamelle Bouie on Harris and identity. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Sarah Green Carmichael on fighting for the vote. 6. Jennifer Senior on Richard Ben Cramer's portrayal of Biden. 7. Harry Enten on Biden's polling lead. 8. Olivia Nuzzi reports inside the Trump campaign. 9. And Jeffrey Isaac on political scientists and the 2020 election. 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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