Politics Has Been Wild for the Last 24 Days – the Next 30 Might Be Crazier

Fittingly, this is the 100th Anniversary of the 1924 Convention that took 103 ballots

As I predicted on Thursday, the Democrats completed their coup and forced Joe Biden out of the presidential race. As my wife said, “Biden is going to be pretty mad when he wakes up from his nap.”  Apparently, Biden’s staff found out on Twitter.

The one thing we know for sure is that the Democrats will be running a candidate for President who has not faced a single voter on a primary ballot. Joe Biden won over 14 million votes in the 2024 primaries, winning 87% of the delegates. 

President Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him, but as you will recall, she did terribly in the 2020 Democratic primaries. It will be interesting to see how she does between now and the Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 19. 

The Democrats would seemingly want a smooth process that allows them to nominate Harris on the first ballot. The Democrats have not had a brokered convention since Adlai Stevenson won the nomination on the 3rd ballot in 1952. (The last brokered Republican convention was in 1948 when the party nominated Thomas Dewey.)

Yet, not everyone is on board. Former President Barack Obama pointedly did not endorse Harris on Sunday. Instead, he said, “I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” While this is not necessarily a call for an open convention, it seems to open the door for one.

Almost nobody alive has seen a genuinely wide-open convention, and none have ever been televised. It would be fascinating to watch. Here is how it might work.

To win the nomination, a candidate must win 1,968 of the 3936 delegates on the first ballot. If a candidate wins on the first ballot, the nomination is theirs.

However, the Democrats also have “super delegates” who cannot vote on the first ballot. Beginning on the second ballot, the 736 super delegates will be allowed to vote. That means the new majority for the winning candidate will be 2337 votes to win on the second ballot and every ballot thereafter. If no one receives a majority, the convention keeps voting until someone does. In the famous 1924 convention that took 103 ballots, Southern Democrats fought hard to prevent the party from nominating Governor Al Smith of New York, a Catholic. While Smith eventually lost to John Davis, he would win a first-ballot victory in the 1928 Democratic Convention.

The politics played over the next four weeks will be extraordinary, especially if the Democratic elite does not make Vice-President Harris a fait accompli. One of the most valuable political lists will be the convention delegates’ mobile phone numbers and email addresses. 

Harris has some problems. She is tied to the Biden record, and since the President is not resigning, he will remain in office, reminding people of his mental frailty and record on the economy. Harris had lunch with Biden almost every week. She will have to defend against charges that she was a witness to his cognitive breakdown and did nothing. Second, she has a worse approval rating than her boss, who had the lowest approval rating of any president running for reelection before he dropped out. According to the RealClearPolitics average of surveys, Harris has 39% approval and 54% disapproval. And she has given some notoriously bad speeches. Who can forget “what can be unburdened by what has been.”

Not everyone is happy that Joe Biden was pushed out of the race. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman wrote on Twitter: “People pushed out an honorable man, loving father, and a great president before an absolute sleazeball like Menendez. Congratulations.” At this point, it is not at all sure that no one will challenge Harris for the nomination.

Who are these delegates? Most of them are party loyalists and campaign workers loyal to Joe Biden. Since the Democrats did not anticipate that their nominee would drop out of the race after the primary process was completed, many of these delegates were selected as a reward for their hard work. They are not necessarily political insiders. If the nomination is contested, they will likely be inundated with calls, emails, and visits by candidate committees trying to lock up their votes. A sizeable number will receive personal phone calls from the candidates themselves.

Who might challenge Harris? Someone floated a trial balloon on Twitter suggesting the Democrats nominate Mitt Romney, the thinking being that he voted to impeach Donald Trump and never endorsed him in any of his three runs. He could pick up, the thinking went, Republicans who voted for Haley and other independents. However, this will go nowhere. It wasn’t that long ago that the Democrats claimed that Romney wanted to put Black Americans back in chains and cause people to die of cancer. Romney won’t soon forget this, and your very progressive Democratic base would never stand for it.

Returning from Fairyland, the Democrats who come to mind are California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg. Other possible candidates might be Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, Hillary Clinton, and some speculate, Michele Obama.

Who would want this nomination, with only three months to put together a national campaign? While Harris would undoubtedly like to put some of her people at the organization’s top, she should seamlessly inherit the Biden campaign. And, since it is the Biden-Harris campaign, she could access the funds Biden raised (though there could be some problems with that).

Newsom is well-known but has a very progressive political record. Whitmer and Shapiro come from swing states that the Democrats must win. Shapiro is Jewish, meaning he might have some problems from the pro-Palestinian base that emerged in the Democratic Party this year. Harris would likely try to talk either governor into joining the ticket, but odds are neither one would want to be Harris’ number two – especially if she appears to be going down in flames in November. 

Clinton has already endorsed Harris, so she is out unless there is a multi-ballot convention. Michelle Obama has been the favorite of political conspiracists, but she claims to hate elective politics. 

The party is going to want to avoid a messy convention. While the winner of a free-for-all would have instant universal name identification, they would also have the scars of being attacked by the other candidates in an intense sprint to August 19. Harris has some assets against Trump. She can reverse the age issue for him, as Trump will be the oldest candidate ever nominated for President now that Biden has dropped out. Also, it is not hard to imagine Trump saying something about Harris that is interpreted as misogynistic by suburban women. Still, Trump, other than the second half of his acceptance speech, has been amazingly disciplined since the June 27 debate.

My daughter lives in Australia and follows the Presidential race by looking at the betting websites. Harris is soaring, with the gamblers giving her an 80% shot of winning the nomination. The question is whether the 4,672 delegates traveling to Chicago next month are willing to gamble with Kamala Harris as their nominee against Donald Trump.