How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work
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From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. So a number of months ago, I made the argument that Joe Biden should step aside and Democrats should pick their nominee at an open convention. That used to be how it was done. Now we use primaries and conventions have become largely public relations affairs. But if something happened to the nominee who won the primaries or if a party decided to go in a different direction, the convention is still there.

So Joe Biden's rough performance at the first presidential debate has brought back the question of whether Democrats should go another way and choose a candidate at their convention. There's no doubt this is risky. There's no doubt they don't really have muscle memory on this anymore. But there's also no doubt that going forward with Joe Biden at this point is an incredibly risky strategy too. So how does a convention actually work? What would happen if Democrats did try this?

Back in February, when I was making this argument the first time, I had Elaine K. Mark on the show to talk about exactly that. K. Mark is really the leading expert here. She's worked on four presidential campaigns, on 10 nominating conventions, both for Democrats and Republicans. She's been on the DNC Rules Committee for many years. She's the author of the book on this, Primary Politics, and she's a senior fellow at Brookings.

I found the conversation incredibly helpful then. And as people think about this now, or even if you're just a political junkie who wants to think a little bit about how this happened differently in American history, I think it's even more relevant today. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Elaine K. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I want to begin with something that you've said before, which is that selecting a nominee is a process, not an event. Tell me about that.

Well, there's two stages to picking a president, right? One is the primaries, and second is actually choosing the delegates. So the primaries allocate the delegates. The winner of the primary gets five delegates from this state. The actual people who are chosen as those five people are not picked until weeks or sometimes months after the primary.

Unlike any other election in the United States, it is a sequence of elections, not one single election. It starts in January or February, goes all the way to the beginning of June. And because it's sequential, it has a different dynamic.

The primary in one state has an impact on the voters in the next state, etc., etc., all the way until some candidate seems to have a majority of delegates going to the convention. And then if that doesn't happen, there is a convention, and the convention is the ultimate authority.

That isn't how he did it in, say, 1900. So before we get to how he did it in 1900, why did we move to this sequential primary process? What was the underlying theory of the problems that it solved? It had to do mostly with 1968 and the anti-war movement. In the old days, a lot of delegates went into the convention and they were uncommitted because

You didn't know who they were going to vote for at the convention. And by the way, the voters just thought this was natural. They understood this to be a party process, not a public process. And as you may remember from your history books, in 1968, Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the presidential race in March.

Even though he won the New Hampshire primary, the Gene McCarthy came pretty close to him in the New Hampshire primary, and he decided to get out of the race and focus on getting out of Vietnam. With American sons in the field far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.

or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

That meant that there were two sort of kinds of candidates running. There was Hubert Humphrey, who inherited a lot of Lyndon Johnson's political power and delegates. Humphrey, by the way, was the vice president back then. And then there was Gene McCarthy and then eventually Robert F. Kennedy, who ran on an anti-war platform, on a new generation platform, etc.,

And what happened was they couldn't win delegates. And so if you want to get a sense of this, you can go to YouTube history and you'll see that there was sort of a riot outside of the convention in Chicago. Thus, the night that Vice President Humphrey was to receive the Democratic Party's nomination for president was also the night of the bloodiest confrontation ever.

Hundreds of marchers and dozens of policemen were injured. Restraint was absent on both sides. This was later called a police riot. And there was sort of a riot inside the convention in Chicago. Mr. Chairman, thousands of young people are being beaten in the streets of Chicago.

Wisconsin is not recognized for that purpose. In other words, the 1968 Democratic Convention really blew up. And as a result, they established a commission to look at the way the party selected delegates. And that changed everything. But I want to get at something a little confusing in there, which is, as you mentioned, there were primaries before 1968. There were primaries in 1968. You just said Johnson won the primary against McCarthy. Right.

So what were those primaries doing if they weren't choosing the candidate? Well, first of all, there were very few of them. I think in 68, there were only about 16. And secondly, and most importantly, they were not binding. In other words, a candidate could win the primary and not win any delegates from that state.

The process of selecting delegates was not related to the outcome of the primary. Almost all the primaries prior to 1972 were what we used to call beauty contest primaries. In other words, sometimes they were useful in seeing which candidate did well with the voters, but basically they were not determinative of winning delegates.

So I want to get at something because I just find this period in our elections fascinating. So delegates make the choice of who the nominee is going to be at the convention. But you also have these primaries that are about giving the delegates functionally information. I think the very famous one is John F. Kennedy in West Virginia. Can you talk a bit about what that primary was and why it then mattered for the convention, even if he didn't win any delegates?

Sure. It's a fascinating example of what used to happen in the old days. Kennedy's big problem, as far as the rest of the party was concerned, was that he was a Roman Catholic. And back then, people were not sure that a Roman Catholic could be elected president. You know, there was all this stuff going around about, would he answer to the pope?

not the Constitution, that sort of thing. So Kennedy needed a place where he could prove to the party elders, like Governor Lawrence of Pennsylvania, who controlled the whole Pennsylvania delegation, Governor Brown of California, he needed to prove that he could win in a

And he won the Wisconsin primary, but when the powers that be looked at the results and looked at the internals, they said, wait a minute, you won this because of an outpouring of support in Catholic precincts. You didn't win Protestants. So that meant he had to look for another primary, and he went on to the West Virginia primary. And in West Virginia, there weren't very many Catholics, so it was an all-Protestant state, and he won West Virginia.

And by winning West Virginia, he seemed to have answered one of the big questions about his candidacy, which is could he win votes in Protestant states? And when that happened, a lot of the people who were watching him, party leaders, elected officials across the country said, maybe this guy can do it and maybe we will support him. And so all this then is getting to this question of the delegates, right?

And in this period in political life, who are the delegates and why do people think it is, one, legitimate for them to choose a party nominee, right? Who are they to make that decision? And two, why would they be good at choosing a party nominee? What gives them the expertise to make that decision? In this period of time, and frankly, it's not so different in our own period, we're

Delegates are people who have some relationship to their political party.

They can be labor union members in the Democratic Party. They can be county chairman. They can be precinct chairman. There are some people who are political actors. They can be the mayor of a small town. They can be a county commissioner. Maybe they worked for the party. Maybe they were a super fundraiser for the party, whatever. But they had strong links to the political party.

So then 1968 happens. It's a disaster. This commission is appointed. What do they report out? Well, there's two things that really changed fundamentally the way this whole system works. The first was that primaries had to be binding.

And so in the old days, a lot of people went to the convention uncommitted. What changed in 72 was the delegates still had to get themselves elected, but they had to be pledged to a presidential candidate. You had to establish a presidential preference, and the presidential preference had to have some relationship to the outcome of the primary. The second change that happened was the requirement that

In caucus states, the caucuses should be held at the same time throughout the state.

Because in the old days, like in Iowa, the caucuses would be held over a period of two or three weeks. Well, the problem was the press could not figure out who was winning. I mean, it was almost impossible to go through, you know, 99 counties in Iowa and thousands of precinct caucuses and figure out who was winning. As soon as you required them to all be at the same day on the same time,

Well, guess what? They could count and announce it to the press at 11 o'clock, and that was a big story. And what that meant is it essentially turned caucuses into the functional equivalent of a primary. And between those two things, really, we've never looked back. Interestingly enough, Ezra, at the time, no one really understood how big a change this was going to be.

Tell me more about why you say that. This is obviously a pretty big change to move from having a convention full of uncommitted delegates who make their decision on the floor of the convention to a convention driven by primaries and caucuses that happened well before. So when you say they didn't understand how big of a change it would be, what did they think they were doing and what did they not predict that then happened? I think they thought they would still control the system.

But in fact, once you move to binding primaries, control moved from the party leaders and the elected officials to voters in primaries. And I don't think anyone anticipated what a profound change that was going to be.

They did see it in 1972 when, to the consternation of lots of party officials and elected Democrats, the Democrats nominated George McGovern. This is a people's nomination, and next January, we will restore the government to the people of this country. And I believe that American politics will never be quite the same again.

And that's when the light bulb went off and people said, oh no, what have we done?

One of the ways I hear this justified now, and more than justified, one of the ways I hear things happening at party conventions delegitimized is the idea that primaries are democratic and party leaders or party members making these decisions are non-democratic, right? There was a lot of uproar in 2016 about the potential for superdelegates to act at the convention. That didn't end up being relevant, but people were worried about it. But

Primaries themselves are not particularly representative. I mean, they're democratic in the sense that if you qualify, if you're part of the party in the right state, you can vote. But relatively few people in those states vote in primaries. Primaries are something that the kind of intense, hardcore, faithful or the otherwise well-mobilized do.

So how do you think about that question of what is democratic here, the sort of representative function of the local party members acting, the participation function of anyone who wants to can come out to vote? Like, how do you think about the tradeoffs from a perspective of representation and democracy?

There are two different ways to think about representation in democracy. The primary voter, that's a form of sort of direct democracy, right? You're going to put a bunch of names in front of primary voters, and they're going to choose who they like the best.

Then there is representative democracy. That's what we have when we elect senators and representatives to Congress, right? We are electing them to make decisions on a wide variety of issues before us. The party leaders and elected officials themselves

are almost always elected by someone. In other words, that's one of the things that was missing from the superdelegate debates that we've had in recent years. Congressmen are all elected by many, many more people than sometimes vote in presidential primaries. The senators certainly are elected by a lot more people. The members of the Democratic National Committee are elected people. So it's

This is just a different form of democracy. It's more representative democracy than direct democracy. And that's where the battle is. Some people think that it's only direct democracy that matters. The other thing that gets lost in this debate is that political parties are covered under the First Amendment of the Constitution, under the right of free association.

And a lot of court cases over the years have said, in essence, look, a political party can do mostly what they want to do in terms of how they nominate candidates, presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, whatever. They can do that as long as they don't run up against another constitutional right, right?

So the clearest example is the Democratic Party of Texas decided that they were going to have an all-white primary. Black people were not going to be allowed to vote in the primary. Sounds amazing this day and age, but that's what they did. And back in the 1940s, this went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the court said, look,

The Democratic primary is tantamount to winning the election. And therefore, if you deprive people of their right to vote in a primary, you are depriving them of their 14th Amendment rights. And of course, that has stood for many, many years. Nobody ever tried that one again. But on other questions, like how you allocate delegates to candidates, the courts have basically said, no, that's in the purview of the political parties.

One of the other tricky distinctions here to me is that there is this question of who can participate, right? Can you vote in a primary? Then there is this question of what you can vote for in the primary. We have this distinction between primaries, which we see as roughly democratic, and conventions, brokered conventions, which we understand is roughly controlled by parties.

But that can break down a bit. So to make this clearer, look at this year. Go back to September. There's a poll by CNN. Two-thirds of Democratic-leaning voters do not want Joe Biden to run again. They don't know who they want to run. Nobody in the poll has a large amount of support beyond Joe Biden. But they don't want Biden. They want to find somebody else. But nobody else who is a significant player in the Democratic Party runs.

So in a sense, you have a primary happening right now. Joe Biden just completely dominated in South Carolina. But what you have is a brokered primary. There was a lot of party pressure to not have other Democrats jump in. They wanted a united front. They didn't want people weakening Joe Biden. So how do you think about a primary like this year? Because on the one hand, it is a primary. You can vote for it. But there's not really any other choices to vote for if you're a Democrat. So what role is a primary really playing?

Well, I think this is less to do with primaries and more to do with incumbency.

I mean, if you look back over the last 50 years when we've had primaries, very often the incumbent president doesn't have an opposition in the primary. Bill Clinton didn't have any opposition in 1996. Donald Trump didn't have any opposition in 2020. That's mostly because when you're a sitting president, you have a lot of control over your party.

You're doing things for your party. You're raising money for the party. You're making friends. Running against an incumbent president is really hard work. Once the primary is open, however, and there's no incumbent president, we've had no trouble having people get in the primary. There's been lots and lots and lots of people in the primary, as you can recall from some of the recent debate stages, which were so crowded.

so

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So I want to talk a bit about what would happen if this year, when the primaries are no longer a viable way for Democrats to pick a candidate, they no longer have an incumbent. Joe Biden steps down. He decides that this isn't right for him any longer. If Biden steps down in April, right, if he says, I've just decided that the right thing for me is to finish out my term and pass leadership on to the next generation of Democrats, then

What happens? What would begin from there? Well, beginning in April, you're going to see a lot of state conventions, county conventions, etc., going through April, May, and June. And in those conventions, the party participants—and anybody can come to the first of these things—they will pick delegates. They'll pick delegates to the state convention—

or to a congressional district convention, and they will actually choose the people who go to the national convention in Chicago.

So let's suppose that Joe Biden dropped out in April. The people who would want to replace him will engage in a very grassroots campaign to get their loyalists in the state elected to go to the national convention. It will be a little bit like the old-fashioned world. Just because there weren't primaries doesn't mean that people weren't running around the country trying to get support.

Teddy Kennedy was at the state convention in Wyoming speaking for his brother. And Robert Kennedy was all over the country going to state conventions and county conventions and trying to get support for Jack. This was going on way under the surface. And if, in fact, the president was not running,

the same thing would happen. People would be out there on behalf of a Gavin Newsom or a Governor Whitmer or, you know, whoever. People would be out there trying to get people elected to the convention that supported them. It's a very, very grassroots undertaking. We haven't seen it in more than half the century, but that's what would go on. Go a level deeper. When you say they would go to the convention and try to...

Make it such that delegates who liked them were named. So if you're Gavin Newsom, you want Gavin Newsom-oriented delegates because the best way to win a delegate is to have that delegate be for you before they ever walk in the door. What do you do? Who are you trying to convince? How do you know who those delegates are? What kind of politicking is actually happening there?

It is a politicking among the activists in the Democratic Party, because those are the people who seek to run as delegates. You would be finding your supporters in the state and encouraging them to go to the county convention or go to the state convention. You would be

Finding your friends. And again, you need a lot of friends to run for president and you need to have a lot of friends all over the country, which, by the way, is why incumbent presidents do so well and incumbent vice presidents actually do so well, is that they have a chance to make friends all over the place. And in this scenario, you would really need friends all

all over the country. In Pennsylvania, you'd need them. You'd need them in California. You'd need them all over the place in order to find enough people who would be willing to go engage in this election and get elected as your delegates to the convention. I want to get at the way that would lead to a different selection than primaries, particularly I think in the very modern social media-oriented attention era where

Which is to say that when one of the main questions is, do you have friends all over the country? Are you able to influence these delegate slates? It seems to me, looking back on history, to select more for candidates who are broadly acceptable to their party and select against candidates who are maybe insurgent-oriented, who are very controversial inside their party. So this is a kind of process, I think it is safe to say, that is

knocks Donald Trump out of contention. In a world of delegates and conventions, in 2016, Donald Trump does not win the Republican nomination. This is the kind of person who is knocked out by that. But Bernie Sanders probably also does not do nearly as well as he does. And on the other hand, it pushes oftentimes, maybe not always, Republicans

Towards candidates who are, you know, well-known, you know, your Hillary Clintons, your Joe Bidens, etc. Is that a fair way to think about it, that it selects for people who are broadly acceptable to the wide coalition, but against people who might be intensely generating of enthusiasm in smaller factions of the party that are trying to make a run for dominance? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a fair way to say it. I don't think it's absolute. I don't think it's as dramatic as some people would have you believe, because in fact, in the many decades since these reforms, both parties have managed to elect a lot of times very mainstream type candidates, right? Like a Mondale or a Mitt Romney or someone like that. But if the old system were to happen today, it also allows for an element of peer review.

Now, peer review, if you need brain surgery, right, you go to a brain surgeon who has had other brain surgeons say this person is, yes, capable of doing that. You don't pick your brain surgeon on the basis of his smile or his ability to do well on television. You're looking for sheer competence. That's all.

We have peer review in all sorts of areas of American life. Your manicurist has to have a license and has to know enough not to give you an infection in your nails. So there's peer review all over. The modern primary system is devoid of peer review. There is no place where people who know about government say, hey, this person is

can or cannot do the job of president of the United States. Had you had some peer review in 2016, Donald Trump probably wouldn't have made it. And take the following fun example. Jack Kennedy in 1960 had to go to Governor Lawrence of Pennsylvania. He was the boss, the big boss of Pennsylvania. He controlled the whole delegation, and it was a big one.

And he had to go to him and convince him that he would be a good candidate and a good president. So imagine the conversation. Obviously, it's in a smoke-filled room. There's probably some brown liquid, a scotch or a bourbon on the table. And the two men are talking. And, you know, obviously, Kennedy does a pretty good job convincing Governor Lawrence. And, you know, they talk about politics, but they also talk about government.

Now, imagine Donald Trump having to encounter a Governor Lawrence in order to win the delegates in Pennsylvania. And he goes in, of course, the room's no longer smoke-filled because we don't smoke anymore, but he goes in and he says, you know, I'm going to build a wall on the southern border between us and Mexico.

And the governor says, well, OK, I mean, I guess that's a feasible idea and probably pretty popular. And then he says, and I'm going to have Mexico pay for it. Now, that has to be one of the more ridiculous statements a presidential candidate has made. How on earth would you do that? Would you go to war with Mexico to make them pay for a wall? I don't think so. OK, and you can see another elected official, another person in government saying, huh?

How would you do that, right? In other words, these candidates in this system, there is a measure of competence that takes place. And therefore, a Marianne Williamson would never even get in the door.

We would still have ideological candidates, but we wouldn't have candidates who were really running to get a slot on CNN or to sell books. We would clear the field of those kinds of candidates. Let me ask if that's not a little bit sunnier of a view of this than sometimes it really was, because...

I mean, you know infinitely more about all this than I do, but my sense is that there were sharper boundaries, that it was partially about ideology. The party professionals, the center of the party, the people who held elected office, they

They were worried about more than competence. They were worried about their power. They were worried about what they would get from this candidate or that candidate. They had their views about what would play well in the electorate. They had their views about, you know, what they wanted to see happen in government, right? The governor Lawrence presumably had substantive commitments that he cared about and wanted the, you know, whoever the candidate was to actually be doing when they were president, right?

And they also have all kinds of biases about just what a president looks like, right? I mean, as you were saying, John F. Kennedy had to get through all these traps about whether or not a president could be a Roman Catholic, right?

You know, if you'd had a convention process, Barack Obama was obviously a very, very talented politician and quite well-liked within the Democratic Party. But if it had just been a convention, would those same party poobahs have thought that a Black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 could have won? I mean, maybe not. They might have said, you know what, you're great, Hillary Clinton's a safe choice.

So I just want to push on that a little bit, because from my read of it, competence was not the only thing these people cared about. There was a lot of trading, of horse trading, of assuming. And that's partially why I think a lot of people now feel it's not that it wasn't legitimate. I mean, the brokering, people don't say that word with a highly positive affect.

They were not in the business of taking chances. You're right. They were interested in winning and they were interested in governance and in preserving, of course, their own power. But remember, their own power was not dependent on the presidential candidate. Their own power came from being elected in their states. They knew something about how to win because of the place they were in. And

Their judgments tended to be pretty good judgments about what it would take to win at least their state. And let me ask you about a different timeline here. Let's say it is August 1st. The primaries are over. The delegates are selected, committed primarily now to Joe Biden.

And Joe Biden is a health event or just realizes that he can't do this. It's not for him right now. And he steps down. What happens then so close to the convention? Well, at that point, you have 4000 and some people who are already elected delegates on their way to Chicago. And I think that other people will throw their hat in the ring.

And they're going to have to convince those delegates in convention because there's not much time, right? So you will have what you had in the old days. Delegations will meet in their hotels and the candidates will go from hotel to hotel or their surrogates talking to the delegations and trying to get support.

You know, you would have the wives or the husbands being surrogates. You'd have other surrogates going to the smaller state delegations. And meantime, of course, you'd have a wild social media campaign going on. You'd have polling going on. You'd have all the other things going on. It'd be pretty wild. You might need another day for the convention because there'd be so much work to do.

And odds are you'd have to go beyond one ballot for somebody to get the nomination. Odds are you'd need a first ballot just to figure out where everybody was. And then you'd probably take a break before you had your second ballot. It would be pretty wild, okay? It would be pretty wild. I think for political reporters, Ezra, it would be the most fun of your whole life. And you'd love it. I think the voters would be absolutely...

tuned into their televisions. This would be great reality TV, if you will. It would be reality politics. But there are rules and processes for getting through this. And I think at the end of the day, you would have a Democratic nominee. Now, who knows how that would play in a general election, especially if only one party was going through this. Who knows what that would do to the general election? But it would be an old-fashioned convention.

Well, let me try to live in this world for a minute, right? Try to imagine how it would feel and what would happen. Let's think August, maybe July, right? There are a couple months here. Here's what I see happening.

There is a mad dash. I mean, Joe Biden gives a speech, gives a sort of heroic, honorable speech. You know, I've decided, you know, that it's the right thing for me is to be a bridge to the next generation, that we all need to know when our time is up, that I have important work that I still need to focus on in trying to defend Ukraine and Israel-Palestine and all these different things. And so there's a sort of applause to Joe Biden there.

And then all of a sudden, there is this mad dash. You have, of course, Vice President Harris, but it's very easy to name eight or ten other people who would be, you know, very plausible here. Buttigieg, Raimondo, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, Raphael Warnock. Anybody can have their list. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar.

CNN and MSNBC are going to start running candidate forums like on the daily. And, you know, as many of these can actually be done because one, they can actually shift the world. Right. I mean, you really like if the right 5000 people watch this, you might just win the convention and the nomination and become the next president. Right.

They're going to be giving speeches. They're going to be sitting for a million interviews and podcasts, very busy time on The Ezra Klein Show. So there's going to be a month or two month period here where they're doing the thing that you talked about with the beauty contest primaries earlier.

They are trying in every form they can think of to show that they have that it factor, right? That they are electric, that they will win, that they know how to hold the tensions of this moment and inspire, but also maybe convince voters who would be wavering from the Democrats. You would have a run-up period, depending on how long it is.

That would not really be primary oriented, but would be mass media oriented because you're trying to shift polling, shift narratives, be on social media in a way that the delegates who are coming walk into that convention thinking, you know, it's pretty clear to me that Gretchen Whitmer is the one who could win this election. Or it's pretty clear to me that Ro Khanna is the person setting people aflame.

And so in a kind of often dead period, you have what would be a genuinely riveting Democratic spectacle. I think the thing people worry about, and quite reasonably, is that the party fractures here, that the fighting immediately becomes...

riven with ill will that it becomes toxic that you know should this be given to vice president harris and if it's not given to vice president harris does that mean the party is passing over a black woman you know what does that mean about the party but that it could also just be a contest i mean how do you imagine that playing out oh azra i think that's hard to say right i mean that really is how do you mean it's feeling i don't mean how do you mean it ending but how do you imagine people acting within this period

My guess is it would not turn toxic. I'll tell you why. It's too short of a period of time. The first thing candidates do is they try to introduce themselves in a favorable light to the voters. In this case, the voters are basically 4,000 people who are packing their bags to go to Chicago.

And it would be sort of a bad idea to get really toxic at that point, because if your first introduction to these people is you're out there saying ugly things about Kamala Harris or you're out there saying ugly things about Gavin Newsom, it's probably not a smart thing to do. And I don't think the divisions within the Democratic Party are as ugly as the divisions within the Republican Party.

If Trump was your example here, I think this could get really ugly if the Republicans were confronting the same thing. But the Democratic divisions are simply not that deep. And you just don't have time. You just don't have time. And you'd always be worried about how is this impacting these 4,000 people. There would be a lot of attention to who these people are.

and a lot of seeking the biographies of these people of every single vote. And there would be an advantage to being from a big state, which is sort of not important anymore, but used to be. So Gavin Newsom would go in with by far the biggest block of delegates to the Democratic Convention. Texas, New York, Illinois, they would all have big blocks of delegates. And

And if you came from one of those states, you would have an advantage, no doubt about it, going into the convention. You mentioned a minute ago that you've got these 4,000-plus delegates coming. And that implies that there are 4,000-plus individual decision-makers. There are also superdelegates, you know, senators and members of Congress from the party. But is it that many individual people? When people talk about the brokered convention, when you talked about John F. Kennedy meeting with governors—

I think there's a sense, at least from the past, that maybe not everybody votes as a bloc, but there are decision makers who sway their groups and who have a lot of power. Who has power in this? Like, is this a world where, you know, Ben Wickler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and LeVora Barnes, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, do they become super powerful? Are they the brokers? If you are a candidate, who are you really trying to meet with and move here?

Well, it's going to differ from state to state because, first of all, if you have a governor in the state, so in Michigan, it would not be the party chair. It would be Gretchen Whitmer herself. So one of the things I can tell you that most people don't realize is I've been a delegate to 10 Democratic conventions and I've sat in the delegation. And you'd be amazed how little of the conversation has to do with the presidential candidate.

As Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. So for all the years I sat in the Massachusetts delegation, I don't think I ever had a conversation about the presidential candidates. It was all about who's going to be the next speaker of the House. How many seats do we think we can pick up in the legislature? Who's going to run for attorney general? It was all local politics. Now, given that it's so local politics,

People who are powerful in the state are going to be the ones that can most easily sway the delegates. So a sitting governor is going to be very important. If you don't have a sitting governor, but you've got, say, one United States senator, that person's going to be very important. The other thing you have at a Democratic convention and you have is you have a lot of members of labor unions.

So the labor union members will probably meet and caucus aside from whatever state they're in. So if you're a UAW member and you get to the convention as a delegate, you're going to pay a lot of attention to what the UAW president says and to what the president of the AFL-CIO says. You'll have different blocks according to where people's interests lie.

So it'll be a combination of interest groups and political power within each state.

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I think within this speculative scenario we're playing with here, you can imagine two different branches. One, Joe Biden steps aside but says, Vice President Harris has been my partner in every major decision. She is a person to lead the Democratic Party. You know, all of you delegates who have been named to vote for me, like, I really hope you'll vote for her.

And another is where he doesn't do that, says she's great, but says it's a grand party and, you know, that he trusts the delegates in the party or just doesn't really say anything about it at all. We typically think about something like this passing on to the vice president pretty easily. Harris, I think, occupies an unusual space in the party. She has some really significant backers and fans. And also there is concern she pulls a little bit behind Joe Biden.

How would this work when you have somebody who in many ways would be the obvious next candidate, but also there is concern and worry about them as the next nominee? I think it would depend on who else decides to get into the race.

You can imagine that if Joe Biden got out and said, I'd like to endorse Kamala Harris. She's been great. She can do the job of president. I'm vouching for that. You can imagine that that would have a stifling effect on other people. A lot of people would decide, no, I'm not going to run against her. I'm not going to get into the race. And so that would probably help clear the field.

The question is, after a Biden announcement, would somebody else jump into the race? And if not, then I think people would pretty much stand behind Harris and nominate her as president. But if you had a couple other powerful figures get into the race, then I think you might have an open battle for the nomination.

I don't think that Dean Phillips would be the logical choice. But somebody like if Gavin Newsom decided to get in, well, you're instantly splitting the California delegation. So it really depends on whether someone gets in or not. I think something that sits in people's heads here is, as you mentioned, the last example of this on the Democratic side is 1968.

which is one of the worst party conventions in history. I think it is fair to say. Right. It's fair to say. But there have been other conventions that are very fractious. In the convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson in 1912, it took, I think, 46 ballots for Wilson supporters to break the deadlock there. Sometimes a party just really cannot agree.

I've been reading this book about the convention that picked Lincoln, and over on the Democrat side, the first convention fails and they have to go and have a second meeting later on. What tends to divide the conventions that go well for parties from the conventions that go poorly? What tends to divide them is ideology.

or deep regional differences, which then have ideological implications. So it's ideology that really makes the big explosive conventions over civil rights, you know, for the Democrats fought over that for many of their conventions. There have been other issues. Lincoln's party, I'm sure you know more than I do at this point, but it's fascinating. That was a brand new party.

And of course, it had a pretty explosive issue and it was called slavery and whether or not there would be a civil war. So you can see why when the stakes are huge, the conventions can be quite contentious.

I don't see that on the Democratic side this time. The Democratic Party today has been quite unified for the entire speakership of Nancy Pelosi. The margins in the House were not very big, and they managed to pass an awful lot of legislation.

I could see it more likely on the Republican side if it were Trump who were dropping out or he had a health issue. And we have to keep reminding ourselves that he is 77 and he can have health issues, too.

I think if it were on the Republican side, you'd have a great big civil war, as we're seeing in the House of Representatives right now, between MAGA and more mainstream Republicans. But I don't see that, at least at this point in history, on the Democratic side.

I was trying to think about this myself. And the issue that I could see becoming extremely disruptive, even up to schism on the Democratic side, if it continues to get worse, and there is quite a bit of time between now and then, is Israel and Palestine. I mean, that is a place where I think you'd see huge protest movements, a gigantic divide between younger Democrats and older Democrats.

But I also think you're seeing the Democratic Party try to shift its position on this even right now. So possibly by the time you got to a convention that there would be a little bit more party unity on it. On the other side, there is this intense unifying pressure of Donald Trump. The fundamental issue of the Democratic Party is that Donald Trump should not be president again. And the fact that he would be being nominated, I think, would—

a strategic sharpening of the mind on the Democratic side, much as it did in 2020, which led to the nomination of Joe Biden.

So it's funny because I could see it going a bit both ways, but this seems to me to be a Democratic Party more so than in some other times that is very obsessed with winning because it really fears the consequences of losing. And so it reminds me a bit of something that I love from that Lincoln book, Edward Acorn's book, The Lincoln Miracle. And he quotes Charles Sumner, who is a senator at that point, sending a welcome message to the delegates saying,

whose duty it is to organize victory, which I just think is such a great quote about what parties are meant to do. They organize victory. But tell me a bit about what happens when you have a convention with multiple strong candidates. I mean, the 1960 convention is interesting from this perspective because JFK is a strong candidate. LBJ is a strong candidate. What happens there?

The 60 Convention is a really very interesting convention because there were really serious candidates in that race. They were highly respected, and they had a lot of support. Each one of them had support within the hall. But what the delegates at that convention saw, particularly the ones who were uncommitted, was they got to see up close and personal a very charismatic candidate.

And compared to Lyndon Johnson, compared to Senator Symington or any of the other people there, Kennedy was just really a new generation and so handsome and so charismatic that delegates said, yep, he's our guy, even with Kennedy's attributes. He almost lost the 60 convention. He almost lost it. But

That, I think, made him stand out from the pack. It was a generational turn, which everybody got behind. Suddenly, the World War II generation was coming into its own in terms of leadership of the country. So I think that's what happened in 1960. Again, you can see on YouTube history, you can see a meeting in Los Angeles at the 1960 convention where people

Jack Kennedy addresses them and Lyndon Johnson addresses them. And Lyndon Johnson stands up and he kind of drones on and on about all the major pieces of legislation he has passed as majority leader in the Senate. Six days and nights I had to deliver a quorum of 51 men on a moment's notice to keep the Senate in session to get anything at all. And I'm proud to tell you that on those 50 quorum calls, Lyndon Johnson said,

answered every one of them. That's his presentation. Kennedy gets up there and he smiles. He starts joking. He's holding the audience in the palm of his hand. So I come to you today full of admiration for Senator Johnson, full of affection for him, strongly in support of him for majority leader. And I'm confident that in that position, we're all going to be able to work together. Thank you. Thank you.

And you can see right there, right in that one little clip, why Kennedy managed to get the nomination away from Johnson. Even so, however, there was so much Johnson support in that convention that Kennedy had to put Johnson on the ticket.

as the vice presidential candidate. And they didn't really get along very well. Kennedy's brother, Bobby, hated LBJ and vice versa. Nonetheless, LBJ was on the ticket because he had delegate strength. One danger of possibly going to a convention for Democrats is that they just don't know how to do it anymore. The candidates

The candidates don't know how to politic among delegates. They've not had to do that in a very long time. They don't really think about delegate math. They have no muscle memory of this. The delegates don't know how to pick a candidate. They've not had to do that. They did not get named to this thinking that the weight of the entire country and its future would be on their shoulders.

That there's a possibility just for procedural chaos, for this to not go well because the relevant people no longer know how to do this kind of thing. Do you worry about that?

No, I don't. And the reason is that the people who become delegates in 2024 are not really dramatically different than the people who became delegates in 1960. They are people who are experienced in politics. There are obviously more women, more people of color. That's the difference. But those women are Pauls.

The people of color are Paul's. They have come up in a system. They've won a delegate slot, which means they have some support within their political party back home. You'll have a bunch of senators there. You'll have a bunch of congressmen there. They do this every day, right? Every day they've got votes. They have to see how many they have to count votes. They have to figure out who they can get to their side. They have to, you know, they have to. That's what they're doing there on the floor of the House of Representatives, which

you know, looks pretty confusing to us. And so I have pretty much faith that the delegates would figure this out and that the party leaders would figure it out. The presidential candidates, the problem there would be, I think, that they themselves would not have a broad enough understanding of 50-state politics.

to operate very effectively. So you can see there being some confusion there. But, you know, democracy is a mess. You know, as Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

One of the things you told me once that has stuck in my head is that all the machinery is still there. We actually still run a convention process. We just don't run it openly. We just don't use any of those systems or that many of those systems for their intended purpose. The thing that may not be there is a sense that parties and party actors are legitimate.

I think about this in the 2016 Republican convention, where even though a lot of the official Republican Party really loathed Donald Trump, it didn't feel like it had the strength to try to stop him. I think about this with the sort of backlash on the superdelegates on the Democratic side. And I think one of the fears or the ways this could go quite bad is that Democrats end up at a convention process where

And there is anger, like we the people did not get to vote. You just did this. The party just did this. And parties are not supposed to do this. The fact that they did it in the past doesn't mean it fits the mores and expectations of the present. How do you think about this question of legitimacy? Well, that's an interesting question. I think what would happen is if the primaries were over,

or we were in the middle of the primaries, people would understand that, okay, you can't rerun 50 state elections because, after all, November is Election Day and you've got to have a nominee by then. I think people would understand that the political parties would have to do it and that the people who are participating in the political parties, in fact, are duly elected.

This was one of the most misleading things about the superdelegate debate was that they kept calling them elites as if they were a bunch of billionaires. No, they were senators and congressmen and mayors and governors who had been elected by people. And therefore, you had a sort of representative form of government.

I think that in an extraordinary circumstance, the people would understand that it's now gone to the parties. And in fact, the compromise that was ultimately reached between the Bernie Sanders people and the Democratic Party was that the superdelegates would only vote on the second ballot.

The thinking behind the second ballot was that if superdelegates had a role on the first ballot, their count in the delegate count could distort what the people were saying in the primaries. In other words, you could have the superdelegates going for a person who was not winning the primaries.

On the other hand, if in fact no one won the primaries definitively, no one had a clean majority going into the convention, then in fact the people would not have spoken clearly. They would have spoken and they would have spoken in different directions. And at that point, it made sense to have the party leadership involved in the selection of a nominee.

So in that compromise, I think you see that people would probably understand, OK, look, we can't rerun 50 primaries. It's over. Our candidate is not able to serve or not willing to serve. OK, we've got to go to plan B. And plan B is you have the convention decide. What do you think it would feel like?

I know it's a sort of soft question. We've been talking a lot about rules and delegate selection processes, but if we end up in the scenario where over the summer,

The Democratic Party suddenly enters into an almost unknown situation in the modern era where its incumbent president is not running. It is looking towards making a decision at the convention. There's all of a sudden a huge amount of politicking of a kind people haven't really seen before. What do you think that feels like in this period, in this era of the media, in this moment in American politics? What has it felt like in the past? How would that be different now?

Well, I think what would be different now is the intense coverage of the politicking. In the past, this politicking went on largely unseen, and they certainly weren't covered in the way we think of covering a political event today. So in the past, this all went on behind the scenes, really. I think that if we

had to do this all over again, it would be covered extensively. There would be national television crews at the Wyoming State Convention or the Illinois State Convention. It would look to the voters as pretty chaotic initially, just as when the voters, if they ever tune into a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, right? It's all these people milling around and people taking turns arguing against each other, etc.,

But I also think it would be fascinating. And I think the voters would like it, frankly. I think it would be reality TV and people would get into it. And I think they'd like it. And they might learn something about the democratic process. There'd be something ironic about Donald Trump losing to a better reality television show than he was able to put on. But to that point, would a ticket coming out of a convention in late August have consequences?

time and capability to mount an effective general election campaign. It's Joe Biden who's been doing the fundraising, right? I mean, the DNC does some fundraising, but this ticket would not have been doing its own fundraising for, you know, months and months and frankly, you know, well over a year now. How could they actually run? Well, remember that when you come out of the convention, this becomes a party matter anyway.

So it would depend not on whether the candidate could raise money, but is the party in good shape financially? It's the national political parties and the state party's health in terms of finances that are really important when you come out of the convention and you go into the general election because they can then raise money for the whole ticket.

So in 2016, you know, Donald Trump had a mess of an organization nationally. Didn't matter because the Republican Party at that point was very strong. The state parties were very strong. They had talented leadership. They had a lot of money.

This year, by the way, the Republican parties are sort of in a mess. As you've probably read, they're replacing the Republican National Committee chairwoman. They're replacing her. There's four Republican parties in swing states that are basically out of money. Possibly replacing her with a Trump.

Yeah, right, with the Trump, yeah. And so this kind of party chaos in the election year doesn't bode well for the strength of the party in the general election. Democrats have more money than the Republicans do right now. They have more cash on hand. They have a stable leadership, et cetera. And you don't have the chaos in Democratic parties that you do in Republican parties. But it's still the candidates who are better fundraisers. I mean, the DNC is raising money, but Biden raised money

A lot more money. He's got more than $100 million on hand. Can they use that money? Can that money be transferred around? Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. Look, at the point when you come out of the convention, it really does become a party operation. It's no longer an individual candidate operation. Presumably Kamala Harris, if she was the nominee, or Gretchen Whitmer would, you know, presumably they would go do massive DNC fundraisers.

and raise as much as they could. Once you're out of the convention, it's all one big, happy family. Not always really happy, but boy, they pretend to the world that they are. And there's great unity when you come out of a convention. And there's also enormous legal flexibility for the money to state parties, to the national party, to the candidate campaigns, etc. But it's the party. It's the health of the party at that point.

I think that's a good place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Well, I'd start with All the King's Men. This is an old one by Robert Penn Warren, and there's lots in it about party conventions and all the dealmaking that goes on. I'd go to next The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White, which is about that election, and there's lots of background stuff on how John Kennedy won the Democratic nomination and how Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination.

And I'd end with Quiet Revolution by Byron Schaefer, which is the inside story of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. And we talked in the podcast about how people didn't really understand what was happening when they made all these rule changes. And this book tells that story really well. So I think if you're really interested in conventions and the nomination process, I

and a little history, those three would give you a very good background. Elaine K. Mark, thank you very much. Well, thank you.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristen Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samulowski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.

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