Inspired by Kos's straw polls, I started noodling around looking at some things related to the 2008 election. And lo and behold I noticed
this disturbing fact regarding the schedule for the parties' conventions:
The 2008 Democratic National Convention will be the 2008 United States presidential nominating convention of the Democratic Party. It will be held from Monday, August 25, through Thursday, August 28, 2008, after the Summer Olympics in Beijing. (The 2008 Republican National Convention will start just 4 days later, on September 1, 2008).
WTF? The Republican convention will start just four days after the Democratic convention? That will give the Democratic candidate almost no time to enjoy a "bounce" or a "honeymoon" or anything else. Any message developed by the candidates at the convention will be immediately swamped by the Republicans, just four days later.
In 2000, the last time both parties had a wide-open field, George W. Bush had a huge and extended bounce after his convention, going up by 17 points, a lead Gore never erased in the polls until the election itself. (Most people don't remember that Gore's popular vote victory in the 2000 election was a huge surprise, as the polls showed Bush with a 3-4 point lead on the weekend before the election.). That extended post-convention period allowed Bush to bond with uninvolved voters, and it is going to be quite important in 2008 with two relatively unknown candidates, since the convention and post convention period will be the best time to get the kind of exposure needed for the candidates to reach uninvolved voters.
Perhaps there's a really cool strategy here I'm missing (I can think of several plausible strategies, but none of them strike me as particularly effective). But, overall, this just strikes me as really counterproductive, and something that we could easily fix by having the convention before the Olympics.
(Yes, I know there is an issue of matching funds and spending caps, but Kerry has said that his biggest mistake in '04 was taking the matching funds and subjecting himself to the caps, and it's quite likely the '08 candidates will both forego the caps altogether).
So, is it too late to change this potential scheduling fiasco? Or is there a method to this madness that I'm missing?
Anybody know?