What will happen is that they’ll spend all their time indoors, in recirculating air with a bunch of elderly people who believe wearing a mask is a sign of cowardice.
Masque of the Red Death.
You can deal with the recirculating air problem by turning off the air conditioning. Then they can get a pretaste of the hell they are heading for.
I was program chair of a conference held at the Charlotte Convention Center. Unless things have changed in 10 years the hotels and restaurants are all several blocks away, which means hordes of possibly infected people would be swarming on the streets. Lovely.
This is an interesting situation. I’m involved in a conference scheduled for November, and we’re trying to figure out what to do to keep our attendees safe. Hardly anyone expect things to be normal in November, let alone August.
When you run a conference, you sign a contract with the convention center often with a big food and beverage requirement, and also reserve room blocks at hotels, with minimum stays. There are financial penalties for not meeting these. If the government says that you are not allowed to have the conference, since the convention center is shut down, say, you are okay. But if Trump forces the RNC to cancel to move someplace else now, before the city has shut things down, they will be in hock for a lot of money. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re talking six figures here, maybe more.
Some places are allowing you to rebook for next year without penalty, but that doesn’t work for a political convention.
So the RNC could be in for a big financial hit, which is a good thing.
I fully expect Trump’s RNC not to bother paying off their debts.
Easily six figures. There are 2550 convention delegates, plus a few hundred RNC people, probably, to run the show, plus another few hundred people in the Trump entourage, plus a few hundred Secret Service, let’s say they reserved hotel space for 3500 people for five nights at $150 a night. That’s a bill of $2.6M that they’d be on the hook for. Plus they’ve also probably reserved space to have various events and stuff.
I may be off by a bit here and there, but definitely seven figures.
And who’s going to make the RNC pay those bills? The RNC will sue claiming an “act of God” or something and when the appeals ultimately wind up in a court presided over by Republican judges… poof the suit disappears. If it doesn’t die of old age first.
Exactly. They’ll follow their leader’s methods.
Not that bad. You’re not in hock for the full room rates of everyone, just the minimum room block. And it all depends on how well you negotiate with the hotels. I assume the RNC has decent event planners.
What an act of God means is clearly spelled out in the contracts. And this is simple contract law, not likely to make it to the Supreme Court.
Plus if the RNC refuses to pay they might find it hard to find anyone willing to deal with them in the future. They hold a lot more events than just the convention.
At this point event planners and venues are spending most of their time negotiating with events affected by Covid-19. The RNC and the convention are hardly unique.
I didn’t say Supreme Court. I said “appeals court.”
Republicans are now talking about having the convention at more than one city.
I guess this means that rather than 50,000 they were expecting in NC, they can have 100,000 spread over 3 cities.
A couple of questions:
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AIUI there are about 2500 delegates. So 50,000 people would mean that for every delegate there are 19 other people. Who are all these people?
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Would Trump speak at every convention site? If not, could they really attract that many nondelegates to the sites where he doesn’t speak?
This whole thing is starting to feel like the first half of Apple’s 1984 commercial
So it will be a virtual convention after all.
Yes, if come August, everything was shut down again due to The Plague, then act of God would likely come into play. Agent Orange having a temper tantrum now and cancelling wouldn’t fall under that category - I’ve never seen ‘Act of Man-Baby’ on any contract I’ve ever read.
I doubt if it would make it there either. Would they want to set a precedent that would screw the hotels and convention centers worse than they are already being screwed by the pandemic? And I bet Republicans own the hotels.
If ours had such a clause I’d start having a tantrum now. Also not in the contract - the ability to cancel because no one is going to show up.
We checked.
No, sounds like three smaller conventions. With three sites to spread the virus. And more people to spread it to.
This would make sense if they limited attendance at each site to allow for social distancing. But this being Trump, not likely.
Republicans scramble to find RNC delegates after Trump bails on North Carolina
I read the original article that quote came from (NYT, not paywalled for me, but no guarantees), and it said submissions for delegate slots were coming in from people that the party apparatus doesn’t know - meaning they might not be True Believers and could cause a ruckus. That’d be sweet.
Also, in the dumbass department, another quote:
It sounds like you don’t know the risks, idjit. Those masks aren’t to protect YOU, they’re to protect all those other people you’re breathing on!
It’s entirely possible that this distinction has never been mentioned on FoxNews.
So the guy would have no way of knowing it.
(my emphasis in the quote)
reports say they are going to Jacksonville FL