When will the candidates start vetting potential running mates?

[Mr. Morden]

In 2012, Mitt Romney named Beth Myers to head his running mate search as early as mid-April:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/04/16/mitt-romney-taps-longtime-aide-beth-myers-lead-running-mate-search/TBsilHHmMnYDW2ppVqGpkL/story.html

This was four months before he announced Ryan as his running mate.  By mid-May (three months before he picked Ryan) the campaign had contacted some of the people they were vetting, in order to get more information:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=153778.0

This year the conventions are in the second half of July, so the timeframe is compressed.  Yet it seems very unlikely that either nomination will be decided before the first week of June.  And in the Republican case, there’s a strong chance that it will go beyond that.  So when are they actually going to start this process?

I would think that the Clinton campaign, at least, would start this earlier than June.  Though actually contacting people who you’re vetting may come off as presumptuous if not every state has voted yet, and Sanders is still in the race.  On the Republican side, it’s a bit different, since the vice presidency could be used as a bargaining chip in a contested convention.

[Mr. Morden]

I would think serious vetting would begin around mid June, but that's just a gut feeling, I have no evidence to back that up. But late July just seems a bit too late, no?

So the vetting will all be done in a month (since the conventions are in July)?  That's a much tighter window of time than we've seen for any recent VP selection.

[Mr. Morden]

If we end up with contested convention on the Republican side, only at the convention floor.

Waiting until the week of the convention to start looking into the background of your potential running mate seems like political malpractice.  (Granted, we've already seen lots of political malpractice in this cycle.  )

If you're in a contested convention scenario, then I look at the VP nomination like an NFL team going into draft day.  Because there could be some horse trading, you don't necessarily know which picks are going to be available to you.  But you still want to be prepared.  You want to look into the background of all of your options, and come with a ranked list of your choices, so that you can be prepared for any scenario.

[Mr. Morden]

The Washington Examiner has a story on this very problem:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-veepstakes-could-spawn-contested-convention-chaos/article/2588097

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[Mr. Morden]

This story looks at the potential VP selection pathways at a contested convention, and even offers a longshot possibility of the delegates voting to delay the decision, in order to give the presidential nominee more time to decide who they want:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-craziest-thing-about-a-contested-gop-183303354.html

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[Mr. Morden]

Dallas Morning News claims that Cruz has already set up a VP vetting committee quietly:

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2016/04/cruz-quietly-opens-vp-search-but-convention-fight-with-trump-complicates-task.html/

Cruz himself confirmed that here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/videos/2016-04-15/is-ted-cruz-vetting-potential-running-mates

He confirms that his campaign has already started vetting potential running mates.

They've presumably started the process of vetting people via public records.  That is, the people being vetted don't yet know that they're being vetted.  But at some point they have to proceed to the stage where they need the cooperation of the potential running mates themselves--e.g., you need the prospective veep to give you a bunch of financial records that aren't already in the public domain.  So this is the potential stumbling block, that might prevent the Republican candidates from picking someone who doesn't already support them.  Since the presidential nomination remains undecided, prospective veeps might not be willing to be vetted by anyone other than the candidate who they've endorsed.