Early 1968, Chairman Lyndon B. Johnson facing declining job approval ratings as the Vietnam War grew increasingly unpopular. By March, he had attracted two primary challengers, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Late that month, Johnson took the surprising step of announcing he would not seek re-election, after the primaries had already begun.
It’s not hard to see parallels with 2024. After President Joe Biden‘s bumpy debate performance has revived questions about his age and mental acuity, leaving Democrats with few options to replace him as their nominee. And the Democratic National Convention is just 46 days away.
During the party’s primaries, which ended in June, the president claimed more than 3,800 delegates from his party, all but seven of whom had pledged to other candidates. Democrats are currently planning to hold a virtual convention to nominate Biden in late July, ahead of the actual convention in Chicago set to begin Aug. 19, in order to sidestep Ohio’s filing deadline before the state relaxed its deadline in June.
If Biden withdraws:
The Democratic National Committee sets the rules for the nominating process and the convention. The party and elected officials continue to insist that Biden is the nominee, but if he were to follow Johnson’s lead and decline the nomination, his delegates would be effectively “released” from their pledge to support him and free to select any candidate they saw fit.
A candidate would need “not less than 300 nor more than 600 votes of the delegates” to be nominated, and if nominated, he or she would then attempt to secure the votes of the more than 4,000 delegates.
Biden could endorse an alternative candidate, such as Vice President Kamala Harris, and if that candidate gets a majority of the delegates, the process would end there. But if the candidate fails to get more than 50 percent of the delegates on the first ballot, it would trigger a brokered convention, something that hasn’t happened since 1952, when Democrats needed three rounds of voting to nominate Adlai Stevenson.
In a brokered convention, “delegates act as free agents, negotiating with party leadership to find a nominee,” according to a Reuters interview with Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a DNC member. This includes more than 700 superdelegates — party and elected officials who can vote for any candidate. Before the 2020 election, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee changed its rules to limit superdelegates from voting on the first ballot. In a brokered convention, superdelegates could cast a vote because no candidate would have won a majority on the first ballot.
“So you get what you had before. Delegations meet in their hotels, and the candidates go from hotel to hotel, or their deputies, talk to the delegations and try to get support. You would have the women or the men as deputies. You would have other deputies who go to the smaller state delegations,” Kamarck said in the podcast The Ezra Klein Show“It would be an old-fashioned convention.”
If Biden were to step down as the Democratic presidential nominee, anointing Harris would be the obvious choice. As the vice presidential nominee, she would gain control of all funds of the Biden for President campaign committee ($91.5 million in cash as of May 31, according to Federal Election Commission data), while another candidate would have to navigate a maze of campaign finance rules and procedures to access the funds. Biden could convert his campaign committee into a political action committee, but he would be allowed to contribute only $3,300 directly to a new candidate. While the Biden PAC could support another candidate through an independent expenditure campaign, it would not be able to work directly with that candidate. Harris, on the other hand, could bypass all that.
If Harris were not selected, the campaign could still legally donate the funds to the DNC, thereby indirectly funding the new nominee. The DNC would only be allowed to donate $5,000 directly to the new nominee’s campaign, and could spend up to $32.39 million in direct coordination with the campaign. The DNC would also be able to make unlimited independent expenditures, such as running web or television ads. But like a super PAC, these purchases could not be made in coordination with the campaign. As of May, the DNC had $65 million in cash on hand, significantly less than Biden’s campaign committee.
If Biden stays in the race:
If Biden does not drop out of the race, other candidates could still challenge him before Biden is officially named as the nominee by a roll call. The Democratic National Committee’s rules state that “all delegates to the National Convention who have committed to a presidential candidate must honestly reflect the sentiments of those who selected them.” That means delegates are not legally bound to a specific candidate, so Biden’s delegates could be choosing to vote for someone else instead, even though they have technically “committed” to Biden.
A successful challenge to the presumptive nominee is unlikely, however. “It’s been tried, and it usually fails,” Kamarck told The Associated Press. Biden could also thwart any attempt to replace him by swapping individual delegates who had no intention of voting for him with delegates who would.
a withdrawal after the convention:
Biden could also step down as the party’s nominee after the convention. In that scenario, the 435 members of the Democratic National Committee would select a new candidate, according to Kamarck’s Reuters interview.
This has happened only once in American history. In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, running on a ticket with George McGovern, withdrew from the race after the convention when it was revealed that he had been hospitalized with depression. Eagleton’s replacement, Sargent Shriver, had to be approved by the DNC before he could be on the ticket.
If Biden were to leave office after the convention, the biggest hurdle for Democrats would be the deadlines for access to the ballot box. Many states’ deadlines would have passed, and exceptions would have to be made on a state-by-state basis, opening the door to legal battles.
In a statement to NBC News on Wednesday, DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison made it clear that the party hoped the nominating process would follow the script written months earlier. “The primaries are over and in every state the will of Democratic voters was clear: Joe Biden will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. Delegates have been pledged to reflect the sentiment of the voters and over 99% of delegates have already committed to Joe Biden for our convention,” he said.
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