Less than three weeks ago, we had Echo Tuesday with six states holding primary contests.  At that point in time, COVID 19 was a growing concern.  In short order, the party moved the debate between Vice-President Biden and Senator Sanders from Arizona with a full audience to D.C. and no audience and states began to move their primaries to minimize the impact of COVID 19.  Now, we have an entirely new schedule for the last three months of the primary season.

Before going into the details of the current schedule, as Matt noted yesterday, there are real issues with holding the Democratic convention in mid-July.  Aside from the health issues, there are also issues caused by the revisions to the primary calendar.

First, while the media pays a lot of attention to the initial results on election night, those results are merely the initial results.  There are still some absentee ballots and provisional ballots to count (and in the case of vote-by-mail states that number can be very significant).   So it can take two weeks or more for the local election authority to finalize their counts.  Those counts then have to be sent to the state election authority which has to add all of those results together to get the final official result.  In part for this reason, the current rules require that primaries be held no later than June 9.    However, some of the primaries are now scheduled for June 23 (and more may join them if the current shutdown is extended).  It is almost impossible that those states will have a final result before a July 13 convention. Continue Reading...