I’d better rush out this post because this election season– heck, this week– double-heck, today there’s a greater risk than usual of getting caught behind the curve.

This election season offers the first opportunity in ages for a meaningful nominating convention.

Normally, the parties want to identify their presidential nominee as early as possible. Finalize your candidate early, and you have more time to raise cash for the big campaign. You have more time to get your message out there. You have more time to attack your opponents. And you have more time to heal the divisions within your own party. Otherwise, you risk some ugly surprises at the convention like splitting your party at the worst possible moment. Look at 1860, 1912, and 1968, and you’ll see what can go wrong.

Thus are candidacies announced early; both Biden and Trump officially announced over 18 months before the election. Thus do primaries normally start in January these days, instead of March as they did up until 1968.

So with Biden possibly dropping out less than a month before the Democratic convention, the Ds look to be at a massive disadvantage. They have to figure out whether Harris (who, again, should be President right now) should inherit the nomination or if she should have to duke it out at the convention, and if it’s the latter they need to figure out who else’s hats should be in the ring. They have less time to raise cash, to attack Trump and the Republicans, to soothe slighted egos, and so on. At first glance it looks like a disaster in the making.

But once the Republican convention is out of the way, which will be in the next few hours as of this writing, all the attention can be on the Democrats having those discussions and arguments. They can dominate the headlines for all that time. All that attention can turn into momentum heading into the final sprint. If it works, and if Democrat-To-Be-Named-Later ends up winning, maybe we’ll see both parties move their 2028 primaries and conventions later in the year.

(I say “can” instead of “will” because Trump is unusually good at stealing headlines.)

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Anyhow, I’ve long thought this would be a neat little experiment, but that neither party would ever have the guts to try it. It’s too risky. It would only make sense if your party were in horrible shape (say 25 points down in the polls) a year before the election, so that you’d still have time to tinker with the primary and convention calendar.

The Democrats aren’t in that position, but they may be forced to run this experiment anyways. It’s not because of the polls– Biden’s not that far behind, and anything can happen in the next three months. It’s because Biden just plain might not be the candidate (or President) much longer, and the Ds don’t have much confidence in Harris.

If they did have enough confidence in Harris, she’d be the nominee right now. But whOever pulled the strings in 2020 to get the Ds in lock-step behind Biden neglected to find a VP who’d have solid support in this situation. That was shameful, because this situation– having to replace an elderly, addled Biden who may not want to step aside– was so predictable.

We were once warned, by sOmebody in a position to know, not to underestimate Joe’s ability to [mess] things up. That sOmebody should’ve taken that into greater consideration four years ago. But he didn’t, and here we are.

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All that said, I stopped underestimating Biden and Harris and Trump a long time ago. Each of them has been counted out before, and each of them has ended up well above where conventional wisdom would put them. So who knows what’ll happen.