The Virtual Conventions

When Senator Kamala Harris kicked off her presidential campaign in January 2019, more than 20,000 cheering supporters filled the downtown streets of Oakland, California. When Joe Biden introduced her as his running mate a year and a half later, silence greeted their speeches in an empty high school gymnasium where they stood well more than six feet apart. Welcome to the craziest election season our nation has ever seen.

As both U.S. political parties are preparing virtual nominating conventions this month, campaigns are adapting to a trend that’s playing out in many industries. In sports, the question of playing team sports during a pandemic is raising concerns and forcing real-time adaptations, like the NBA’s bubble and MLB’s rough-draft scheduling. For the first time, the Consumer Electronics Show, usually a big event in Vegas every January, will be virtual. Everywhere you turn, the pandemic has challenged businesses to translate what used to be analog experiences into the virtual world.

In politics, that means, literally, no shaking hands and no kissing babies. How do you campaign when that can, and in at least one case perhaps has, kill your own supporters? As we venture into the world of virtual conventions next week, I am interested to see how both parties attempt to fire up their bases without all of the traditional pomp and circumstance. But let’s be honest, I imagine both parties are struggling to devise creative ways to win their constituents’ attention when there are endless options at one’s fingertips for digital content.

Back when it was safe to stand in a room together, creating memorable campaign experiences was a lot easier. My background is as an advance man. If you know anything about former advance staffers, then you know our love of telling stories from previous campaign trips. Often, the art of advance is a dance of compromise between two conflicting camps. The Secret Service wants a protectee in as tightly controlled an environment as possible. But campaign staff are all about facilitating and maximizing interactions with supporters and the public.

Let me tell you briefly about a 2012 fundraiser that was hosted by celebrity chef Alice Walters at which First Lady Michelle Obama was the keynote speaker. This particular trip remains one of my all-time favorites. For those of you unfamiliar with Chef Waters, she “has been a champion of local sustainable agriculture for over four decades” and is an overall farm-to-table badass. When one enjoys a meal from Chez Panisse, Chef Waters’s legendary farm-to-table restaurant, it’s a multi-sensory experience, and that’s exactly what she wanted to create for Obama’s donors.

The Secret Service was not prepared for just how memorable an experience Waters had planned. At our first walk-through with the Secret Service, I asked the chef if she would explain her vision of the event so that we could plan the elaborate logistics. The facial expression of the lead Secret Service agent’s face was priceless as Waters described the location of a wood-burning station near the then-First Lady’s point of arrival. The wood-burning stove was positioned so that the guests would be struck with the soft aromatics of smoke as they entered the room.

As skilled as I like to think my negotiation abilities are, some things I cannot square with the Secret Service’s concern for safety. One such thing was an open fire in a room with a crowd that exceeded the capacity set by the fire marshal as well as the current First Lady of the United States. Fortunately, Chef Waters being Chef Waters, she was able to adjust. The end result was a Chez Panisse-level multi-sensory experience. I have never seen nor smelled a more beautiful event space. Chef had people clad in tuxedos grinding coffee beans as guests entered the room. To me, few things smell better than freshly ground coffee. Chef’s friends supplied roses freshly cut from Berkeley gardens. The roses complemented the table centerpieces, simple bowls of cherries. The event was a hit, and the practice of utilizing chefs in the service of campaigns is now cemented at every level.

We are seeing similar safety-driven adaptations today. This week in Texas, I was invited to a virtual fundraiser organized by the Biden campaign billed as a “Virtual Cook Along” with Senator Jon Tester and chefs Tom Colicchio and Sam Kass. The campaign sent out a supply list beforehand, and during the event guests learned, step by step, how to make a proper cacio e pepe in real time—all while raising money for the cause.

Many campaigns are offering richer experiences online than the traditional wine-and-cheese grip-and-grins of the pre-COVID era. Some are simply recreating musical appearances, to be sure, but we’re increasingly seeing examples of campaigns offering participatory, sensory experiences online that more closely approximate the multi-sensory overload created by Chef Waters. One statewide Texas campaign, for example, is hosting a cigar tasting with donors, shipping out the same stogies to participants so that they can taste and compare notes together with the candidate and a cigar expert in real time via a video conferencing app.

There will be no big balloon drops with thousands of party diehards enthusiastically waving signs this year, but I am looking forward to seeing what creative techniques the campaigns employ to replicate the excitement and exhilaration of a national party convention.