- In the unlikely event Joe Biden drops out, his party's nomination will be thrown into chaos.
- Biden and his allies have also implemented changes that stack things in his favor.
Some Democrats have grown antsy over President Joe Biden’s status. While even some members of Congress are voicing concerns about his age, there’s little that could be effectively done to stop the president.
And if he were to suddenly drop out à la LBJ in 1968, his party would face immediate chaos. It’s a near certainty that such a scenario would require an open convention, an event that hasn’t been seen in recent memory.
It is worth remembering that there are no constitutional provisions regarding presidential primaries and very few details about the election of the president itself. The current system is the result of self-interested leaders, shell-shocked parties, and the constant debate about who should really have the power to elect a presidential nominee.
Here's a breakdown of how we went from smoke-filled rooms and chaotic conventions to our modern system.
What were early presidential elections like?
Neither the primary process, if it existed at all, nor the general election are anything like their current counterparts. Revolutionary War hero George Washington was the easy choice for the white male property owners who decided the nation’s early elections. Washington’s decision to not seek a third term upended the system. The nation’s framers hadn’t anticipated political parties, but John Adam and Thomas Jefferson’s fierce rivarly quickly divided the top officials. Members of Congress, due to their proximity to political power, began informally and then increasingly publicly nominating their preferred candidates. Not everyone was happy with the system, which multiple state legislatures rallied against in part due to constitutional concerns about the separation of power. The chaos of the election of 1824, the only presidential election to be thrown to the House, hastened the end of this approach.
The Anti-Masonic Party, perhaps the U.S.’s first dominant third party, paved the way for a new method when it held the first national convention in 1831. (incredibly, they still chose a Mason as their nominee.) Soon after, as Jill Lepore recounted in The Atlantic, then-President Andrew Jackson’s desire to have his Democratic Party follow suit helped enshrine a new tradition into American politics.
What were early conventions like?
They were also nothing like modern conventions. Jackson supported the already ongoing expansion of voting rights to most white men, Daniel Feller, Editor/Director Emeritus of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, wrote in a summary of the former general's rise to power. Even that push didn’t change the real power that was selecting the nation’s presidential nominees. Detractors may have killed the congressional caucus, but the convention delegate system was another avenue for political elites to determine their respective party’s nominees. This era did give us one of the best cliches, the smoke-filled room.
Conventions didn't start to resemble what currently occurs every four years until much later. For example, it wasn't until FDR accepted the Democratic Party's nomination in 1932 that nominees began to show up for formal acceptance speeches, a major part of the modern convention.
What are primaries and how did we get them in presidential elections?
Progressive reformers were tired of political bosses. They sought to weaken elite officials' power through primary elections at all levels.
In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt won most of the GOP primaries, but few states actually held such elections. Unable to usurp William Howard Taft, his successor, Roosevelt started a third party of his own, The Bull Moose Party. Slowly, the primaries began to take hold, not as definitive nomination contests but as data points for party elites to assess the relative strength of candidates.
Dwight D. Eisenhower notched a major upset in the 1952 New Hampshire GOP primary that upended Robert A. Taft's perceived frontrunner status. Eisenhower went on to win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. On the Democratic side, Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s win in the West Virginia primary helped to soothe fears that some top party officials held about how a Catholic presidential candidate would be received.
Some defend this system and want to return to it, because it mixed a limited number of primaries with the power of party figures. As Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law, wrote in 2016, this approach allowed party loyalists to maintain some control over the primary process.
It was a year of sheer chaos that provided the final push to start modern presidential campaigning.
Why is 1972 the start of the modern era?
The 1968 Democratic National Convention was a disaster. President Lyndon B. Johnson shocked the country by announcing he would not seek reelection. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were gunned down just months apart. And an outcry over the Vietnam War loomed over everything. Democrats were already entering an uneasy situation for their national convention in Chicago. The party’s decision to nominate Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a pro-war candidate, who had run in any of the limited number of primaries, was vocally rejected by some delegates on the floor. News coverage of that drama was interrupted by a violent riot that unfolded outside. The legacy of Chicago held on for so long that questions were raised about whether Democrats should go back there for their convention this summer nearly 60 years later.
In the wake of the violence, Democrats launched a massive overhaul of their presidential primary process. Then-Sen. George McGovern helped co-lead the commission aimed at opening up the delegate selection process in more democratic ways, such as requiring more female delegates, establishing a quota for younger delegates, and pushing away from the old tradition of making delegate selection in secret. McGovern, who later said he was asked to help lead the panel due to his favorability among all wings of the party, later used the knowledge to help clinch the presidential nomination under the new rules.
According to some officials who worked on the commission, their changes had the unintended effect of popularizing state presidential primary elections. The Republican Party soon followed with its review. The upshot was party elites were now less powerful than they had been in decades. While Democrats have continued to study and tweak how they run presidential elections ever since.
How did the top officials respond?
Like they had in the past, party officials quickly tried to claw back power. Critically for Democrats, this led to the creation of so-called super delegates in the early 1980s.
While the initial goal was to limit their number, by 2016 superdelegates made up 15% of the available delegates, a sizable chunk in what became a more closely contested primary than initially anticipated. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters responded by calling for limits on superdelegates’ power.
In 2018, superdelegates were officially barred from voting on the first ballot if a candidate did not secure a majority of the delegates without the party officials’ support. In short, party officials’ hands are initially tied, even if they want to cast the deciding votes.
What has Joe Biden done?
Biden continued the tradition of tweaking the process. He went further than any recent proposal, angering Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats by pushing them further down in the party’s primary calendar. He also elevated South Carolina to first. Officially, the Democratic National Committee had to approve the plan, but it was largely rubber-stamped. If Biden were to drop out tomorrow, any hopeful would have to face this reality. Some states, such as Florida and North Carolina, have either canceled their primary election or made it a de facto Biden victory by only listing one candidate on the ballot.