A 30-minute lag

Democrats blame ‘raucous applause’ for massive delays to convention programming

A 30-minute lag that lasted throughout much of the night left two speakers and one performer on the cutting room floor of the first night of the convention.

By Adam Wren and Christopher Cadelago0

It’s something in the way they cheered. Or at least that’s how Democratic convention officials spun it.

Democrats pushed President Joe Biden out of primetime on Monday — just a few weeks after driving him out of the race altogether.

A 30-minute lag that lasted throughout much of the night left Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, herself a former DNC chair, and Grace Meng on the cutting room floor of the first night of the convention. Not to mention musical guest James Taylor, who famously sang the 1968 hit “Something In The Way She Moves.”

But it also pushed the incumbent president well out of primetime on the East Coast, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina, on a night that was supposed to be all about thanking him.

“We have an embarrassment of riches and anyone interested easily switched over to cable,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official. “Not as clean, but definitely not a catastrophe. Also the reality is that a ton of people will watch the highlights tomorrow.”

Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin's former lieutenant governor, was surprised to learn that some speakers got the axe tonight due to the program running too long. "It's hard to believe that some people got cut, because that thing went on forever," he said.

"I know how it can feel if a person was supposed to take quite possibly the biggest stage of their lives and have the moment interrupted because the program went long." But, Barnes said, "You gotta come to expect that kind of thing," recalling when his home state's convention in 2020 got blown up due to Covid-19. "Our whole convention got cancelled!"

Asked for comment, the convention officials said in a statement: “Because of the raucous applause interrupting speaker after speaker, we ultimately skipped elements of our program to ensure we could get to President Biden as quickly as possible so that he could speak directly to the American people. We are proud of the electric atmosphere in our convention hall and proud that our convention is showcasing the broad and diverse coalition behind the Harris-Walz ticket throughout the week on and off the stage.”

Biden finished speaking at around 12:20 a.m. ET.