Quoted: Asked if there is any precedent for two parties holding such very different modes of convention, political scientist Byron Shafer paused before reaching back to the year 1872, when the much-weakened post-Civil War Democratic Party simply endorsed another party’s presidential candidate at its six-hour convention (the shortest ever) without even adopting its own platform.
“There is no sensible prior analog” to the contrasting conventions that may be held in 2020, said Shafer, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who writes about conventions. “If the Democrats are all virtual and the Republicans are all live (and in person), we really don’t have anything to compare that to.”