A woman walks past the elephant logo of the Republican Party on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Dominick Reuter | AFP | Getty Images
Months of tension with North Carolina officials culminated in the GOP deciding to pull its national convention from Charlotte, just three months before it was scheduled to take place there.
The Republican National Convention is now scheduled for Jacksonville, Florida, in August.
The move, pushed by President Donald Trump, leaves only weeks to prepare for a grand-scale convention that typically attracts tens of thousands of people and takes years to plan. Past convention organizers are skeptical that the GOP will be able to pull off an event of such scale on short notice.
“My personal opinion is planning a traditional convention of the size and scale that you normally see in a two-month period is not possible,” said Joe Roman, former vice president of the Cleveland Host Committee, which organized the 2016 convention. “There are so many dots that have to get connected to pull this off.”
Neither planning nor preparation appeared to concern Trump, who repeatedly threatened to move the convention out of North Carolina