Now that President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris To be the nominee, it will ultimately be up to delegates at the Democratic National Convention to formally select a new nominee for their party. While many associate the convention system with unimpressive candidates, such as obscure Senator Warren G. Harding, the track record is not all that bad. And Harding even managed to win the presidency.
Next month’s Democratic convention will mark the first time in more than 50 years that a major party nominee was selected outside the democratic process of primaries and caucuses. The Republican House speaker has already said it would be a good idea for the convention to replace Biden. “wrong” and “illegal”. Others have evoked the image of the return of the “smoke-filled room,” a term coined in 1920 when Republican Party leaders met secretly at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel and agreed to nominate Harding, a hitherto undistinguished U.S. senator from Ohio, for the presidency. terrible president.
The tradition of choosing a candidate through primaries and party assemblies, and not through what is called “system of conventions” — is relatively recent. In 1968, after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for reelection, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was able to secure the Democratic nomination despite Not to participate in any primary or party assemblyHumphrey won because he had the backing of party leaders, such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and these party leaders controlled the vast majority of the delegates.
Many Democrats viewed this process as fundamentally undemocratic, so the party instituted a series of reforms that opened up the process by requiring delegates to be selected in primaries or caucuses that gave ordinary party members the opportunity The Republican Party quickly followed suit, and since 1972 both parties have nominated their candidates in this manner.
Some Democrats are concerned that a new candidate, selected by the convention, would, like Humphrey, lack legitimacy because he would have secured the nomination without the direct input of Democratic voters across the country. In response, they have suggested what is called a “flash primaries“in which Democratic voters would decide on a candidate after A series of televised meetings of the candidates —a proposal that seems totally unrealistic. There is no mechanism for establishing a viable electoral process in such a short period of time. The decision will have to be made at the convention.
In it The first convention, held in 1831 by the National Republicans. Party leaders and members, ancestors of today's Republican Party, nominated Henry Clay for president. Although Clay lost to Andrew Jackson the following year, he is considered One of the greatest politicians from the 19th century.
The convention systems of both parties ended up nominating Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, all of whom were elected president. Of course, the conventions also nominated lesser figures such as Horatio Seymour, Alton Parker, and John W. Davis.
But who's to say the current system has succeeded in producing better electable candidates?
Yes, there have been strong candidates like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, but there have also been less successful candidates like George McGovern, as well as weaker presidents like Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush.
Had the old system been in place this year, Democrats might have avoided their current predicament. To the extent that Democratic Party leaders were aware of Biden’s decline, they could have bailed him out of bankruptcy in favor of a better candidate, had they been in control of the nominating process. Indeed, in previous decades, party leaders often knew more about candidates than the general public would ever know and could wield veto power over anyone they thought had serious vulnerabilities.
With Biden withdrawing, it remains to be seen whether the new Democratic nominee will be a strong candidate or, if elected, a good president. But there is no reason to think that the unusual path he took this year to the nomination will have any effect on those results.
Philip Klinkner is a professor of government at Hamilton College in New York. This article was produced in collaboration with The conversation.
