When is the right time to announce a vice presidential choice?

[Suburbia]

Out of the four months: June, July, August, September, when is the right time for a presidential candidate to announce his or her running mate? Before the convention/Olympics, or the second day of the convention to generate buzz?

[Frodo]

Between when you effectively lock up the nomination and the convention.  I refuse to pick a month since the calendar will vary from (presidential election) year to year depending on the climate and the candidates.  

[Mister Mets]

It's probably a good idea to do it early. The campaign gets a major surrogate, so more months of that is useful.

The choice can be dull or exciting. If it's dull it doesn't make sense to wait until the convention, since it won't generate much buzz when the announcement is that someone with typical qualifications got nominated. If it's exciting, why not have several more months of the exciting running mate as an attack dog?

[Never]

It would make sense to announce a vice presidential candidate one or two weeks before the convention, so that the running mate has enough time to adjust to being on the national stage, but has not been a known entity for so long that they seem stale when they are introduced to the Americans who only begin tracking the overall election when the conventions begin.

There doesn't seem to be much of a use waiting until the second day of the convention to announce a running mate, since there is usually only a small bounce for a party after naming vice-presidential candidates.

If there were a unique situation in which a party seemed fractured between two leading candidates, it would probably be best for the presidential nominee to announce their running mate immediately after he or she sewed up the nomination as a means of unity. To make this scenario clearer, imagine an even harsher primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than what actually occurred in 2008. Naturally, Obama would have wanted to quickly unite the party and focus on the general election, so he probably would have made his vice-presidential announcement at the beginning of June when he defeated Hillary, instead of the real-life date of August 23.

[Del Tachi]

At whatever time is most inconvenient for your opponent's campaign

For some reason a Veep announcement immediately sucks all of the air out of the room as the media can literally not think to talk about anything else for at least the next week.  Therefore, scheduling the announcement to coincide with a major press event for your opponent (i.e., a foreign trip, major policy speech, high profile television interview) may be the best bet.   

[Bureaucat]

Maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I prefer announcing it at the Convention.  If not for a little bit of speculation over the VP pick, what's the reason for even televising a political convention anymore? I'm showing my age, but in my youth there was wall-to-wall coverage on all 3 TV network with no cable, and I was one of those nerds who loved it. To paraphrase Joe Biden, "it was a f****** big deal" back then. Now, not so much.