After tonight, political conventions may never be the same

With the balloon drop scrapped and the cheering crowds banished, Democratic convention planners faced the grim prospect this summer of throwing Joe Biden a party in a pandemic without any apparent celebration.

“At a regular convention, audience reaction is a huge part of the speeches,” Andrew Binns, the event’s chief operating officer, explained. “We needed a way to do that technologically and virtually.”

Faced with a complex problem, Democrats decided to go big, aiming for a solution that has more in common with Netflix, Facebook Live and the cheering fan screens courtside in Orlando’s NBA bubble than the C-Span-style cattle call typical of past national party gatherings.

Over four nights starting tonight, a behind-the-scenes crew of about 400 with operation centers in New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Del., plans to broadcast to the nation hundreds of live video feeds from living rooms, national monuments and stages around the country, according to interviews with three people involved in planning the event.

That includes dozens of speakers who have been mailed video-production kits, with basic equipment such as microphones, lighting and advanced routers, so they can produce and transmit their own shots. Other homebound delegates will be dialed in to quick feeds of the live speeches, so their real-time reactions can be broadcast to the country as if they were in the same room as the speakers.

In two-hour nightly chunks, only one hour of which the broadcast networks have vowed to air, the live footage will be mixed in real time with a roughly equal share of prerecorded performances, mini-documentaries and speeches. Artists such as Billie Eilish, Prince Royce and the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — now simply the Chicks — have already filed video of their acts. Voters picked to excite key demographic targets — a Florida paramedic who emigrated from Mexico City and a former Trump voter from Pennsylvania, for example — have also cut video testimonials.

For a typically antiquated and long-winded event, the remade unconventional convention could set a new standard for national political gatherings, which have evolved since the 1960s from their roots as actual smoke-filled rooms where presidents were picked to suspenseless televised spectacles that even partisans struggled to justify.

The new circus could also flop, especially if the broadcast and cable networks have their on-air talent talk over all of the carefully prepared set pieces and less-partisan viewers decide to dismiss the spectacle as an overlong propaganda film. In addition to ubiquitous online streaming options, broadcast networks are expected to give the event the 10 p.m. EDT hour for each of the nights, while the cable networks will be on the air for hours before and after the events. But how much of the feed is rebroadcast directly remains an open question.

“This is not a question of people being interested or people watching. I think it is a question of what gets through the filter,” said Erik Smith, a Democratic consultant who helped organize the past three conventions but is not involved in this one. “The real undecided swing voters are typically the ones finding it on network television.”

The event’s producer since 1992, Ricky Kirshner, promises that, if nothing else, it will not be predictable television, because far more has been left to chance than other coronavirus-era, social-media-driven specials, such as May’s “Graduate Together” or the “One World: Together At Home” broadcast in April. Even the 2020 NFL Draft, a live television show that roped together reaction shots from more than 100 home-recording kits, did not try to juggle as many balls at once.

Kirshner has been around long enough to know that conventions tend to be remembered for what was not planned, such as Al Gore’s forceful kiss of his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic gathering in 2000 or actor Clint Eastwood’s bizarre conversation with an empty chair at the 2012 Republican convention.

“Anything can happen. It is not scripted, I can tell you that,” said Kirshner, a veteran of staging Super Bowl halftime shows, the Tony Awards and Kennedy Center Honors. “There is so much live in this show.”