Democratic National Convention goes virtual; Trump counterprograms

Jon Lieber, who leads Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, offers insight on this week's DNC:

The Democratic Party is supposed to have their convention this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. However, plans changed due to the coronavirus and now you're basically looking at a week-long zoom call. There will be a lot of traditional elements at the convention that feel the same to viewers at home. Several hours of primetime coverage every night, you are going to have the primetime speeches by the big party luminaries, you're going to have daily themes highlighting the ideas that Joe Biden wants to focus on, and then you're going to have smaller speeches during the day from kind of up and comers in the party, but it's just all taking place in a virtual environment that's going to look a lot different.

All the evidence suggests that there's usually a short bounce in the polls coming out of the partisan conventions. This week, Biden should expect to get one. Next week, Trump will expect to get one. That's probably because they get about a week of nice press and a lot of attention. And that helps them in the short-term, but it always fades. No reason to think that would be any different this year. One element that's going to be really different this year, however, is that President Trump is attempting to counterprogram against the Biden convention. He's giving speeches in Minnesota and Wisconsin, today. And on Thursday, the day that Joe Biden is giving his acceptance speech, he's going to give a speech in Biden's hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He wants to keep the attention on him and try to limit that bounce for Joe Biden.