Who decided the dates of this years national party conventions?
It seems to me it gave the GOP a great opportunity to go so late, a full month after the Democrats. — Rodger McDaniel, Cheyenne, Wyo. A: As to who decided which party held its convention first, tradition — at least since 1956, when Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was running for re-election – says that the out-of-power party goes first. That’s the way it’s been in the past 13 election cycles. You could make the argument that the party going second might have an advantage in that they get the last word. But that wasn’t the case in 1960, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1992 or 2000, where each time the incumbent party held its convention second but lost in November anyway. As for why the Democrats held their 2004 convention a full five weeks before the GOP, that’s another story. There was a lot of angst in Democratic circles earlier this year that by holding their convention so much later, the Republicans were being given a financial advantage. Campaign finance rules state that once a candidate
