American political parties usually make a big production out of nominating their presidential candidate, but not this year. The Democratic Party plans to nominate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over Zoom, according to CBS News, ahead of a previously scheduled convention in late August.
The virtual nomination is the product of a partisan spat amongst Ohio legislators who have failed to reach a deal that will get the sitting President on the ballot this fall. Currently, Ohio has an Aug. 7 ballot certification deadline, which means Biden will not be on the state’s ballot if he waits to be nominated until the 2024 Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago from Aug. 19 – 22. Instead of moving the convention, or Ohio changing its deadline, the Democratic Party is having a virtual nomination beforehand.
“Joe Biden will be on the ballot in Ohio and all 50 states, and Ohio Republicans agree. But when the time has come for action, they have failed to act every time, so Democrats will land this plane on our own,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement to CBS. “Through a virtual roll call, we will ensure that Republicans can’t chip away at our democracy through incompetence or partisan tricks and that Ohioans can exercise their right to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice.”
The nomination is purely a formality at this point since President Biden has widely been expected to be the 2024 nominee for some time. However, the Zoom nomination would be a repeat of 2020 when Biden and Harris were virtually chosen as the Democratic Party’s nominees due to pandemic restrictions.
CBS reports that the Chicago convention will still take place in late August, despite the virtual nomination. The incident reveals deep divisions within Ohio’s legislature, which failed to create a quick fix for Biden’s ballot problem. Republicans proposed a bill that would move the Ohio deadline back but paired it with a provision that would ban foreign contributions to ballot initiatives that Democrats rejected.
Ultimately, the “let’s just do it over Zoom” decision is a modern solution representative of the times. Though we no longer have to do things over Zoom like in 2020, when this first happened to Biden and Harris, it’s a convenient compromise that still occurs shockingly often in America four years later.
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