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It might surprise many Democrats to learn that President Joe Biden could be thrown off the ticket by delegates at the Democratic convention in August. In fact, he could even drop out after the convention, and the party could replace him.
These scenarios may seem remote for now. But the Democratic Party has procedures in place to address them. And perhaps nobody knows them better than Elaine Kamarck.
A longtime member of the DNC’s rules committee and a scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution, Kamarck served as Walter Mondale’s director of delegate selection, as a senior adviser to Al Gore’s 2000 campaign and as a member of Bill Clinton’s White House staff. She’s also a 10-time DNC delegate, and literally wrote the book on how primaries and conventions work.
In an interview with the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Kamarck laid out how Democrats would actually go about replacing Biden at the convention if they wanted to, and why she’s not particularly worried about how it would unfold.
“The reason people tear their hair out is that people don’t realize that the business of nominating a presidential candidate is ultimately party business,” Kamarck said. And the party decides.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor and senior producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here.
Tell us what a contested Democratic convention would look like. Would it just be folks in the backrooms around Chicago picking and choosing the nominee?
We’re way past the smoke-filled rooms. Mostly because there’s no party bosses anymore. But to have a contested convention, you need more than one candidate actually contesting the convention. So if, for instance, President Biden decided not to run and if two or more people decided that they would like to be the Democratic nominee, they would then engage in what Congressman Clyburn has called the “mini-primary.”
They would visit states and visit state delegations. They’d pay a lot of attention to the big state delegations like California, New York and Texas. They would probably engage in a debate.
If there’s only one person and Joe Biden got out and said, “I endorse my vice president, Kamala Harris” and no one challenged her — well, then we don’t have a contested convention.
If you are the Biden campaign and your goal is a smooth transition to someone else, would you tell him to drop out before the convention and give the party time to coalesce around a new nominee, or do you wait until everyone’s in Chicago and avoid that “mini-primary?”
I think if he was inclined to get out, he should do it as soon as possible before the convention so that the party can sort out who wants to run. And at this point, I don’t think there’s a lot of people who want to run.
I think that if he wants to get out, he should do it soon and let the party come together around Vice President Harris or perhaps somebody else, and do it in time for there to be a good convention.
Remember that the convention planning is going on. They’re writing a platform, they’re already choosing speakers. The divides within the Democratic Party over policy are not terribly deep, especially because the party is very united around defeating Trump. So it’s not like you’re going to have some huge ideological battle going on. It should be fairly easy for the party to come together if Biden decides he doesn’t want to run again.
To what extent do the delegates need to listen to his endorsement if he makes one? For example, if he were to drop out and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, do the delegates need to listen to him or can they just do whatever they want? Does he need to free them?
He doesn’t even have to free them. The minute he’s not a candidate, they are officially uncommitted. But the fact of the matter is, all of these delegates were chosen as delegates because they are enthusiastic and loyal Biden supporters. So of course they would listen to what Joe Biden says. They would take very seriously Joe Biden’s endorsement of his vice president or anyone else for that matter.
And it’s less messy for the party.
Much less.
Let’s say that Biden does not endorse Harris. How does the process vary if he doesn’t endorse anyone?
You’d have a run-up to Chicago, right? If people were very interested in running, they would start calling delegates. They’d be going to delegation meetings. It’s not any big mystery. It’s just that the target of their campaigning, instead of being the primary voters in this state or that state, the target would be these 4,000-plus delegates to the convention.
Do you have any concerns about that process being seen as undemocratic by voters?
Absolutely not. Some of these delegates were actually elected on the same ballot that the presidential candidates ran on. Some states actually placed the names of delegates on the ballot. In the states that don’t do that, delegates were elected in open, well-publicized meetings after the primary. In other words, anybody who’s a bona fide Democrat can sign up and register to run for delegate. And then you go to a congressional district caucus or a state convention or some gathering, and you bring with you as many friends as you possibly can. That’s why these delegates tend to be local leaders of some sort or another. This is true in the Republican Party as well.
President Biden, because of some ballot rules in Ohio, is set to receive his nomination virtually before the convention —
It’s not clear that they’re going to do that.
Is it clear that they need to do it though?
It’s not clear that they need to do it. Because they’re trying to evaluate whether or not they trust the Ohio Legislature, which has a lot of MAGA types in it, on this issue of putting the Democratic nominee on the ballot.
Let me say that this is pretty irrelevant. Because even if it happened and there was an early virtual vote, and then for some reason Biden decided to drop out of the race, the delegates would meet in Chicago, and on the first night of the convention, they would adopt the rules. And they would adopt a rule saying, “We’re going to have a roll-call vote on Wednesday night.”
This is not rocket science.
It’s common sense. If he dropped out or something happened to him, God forbid, they would simply adopt a rule and have a roll-call vote.
What if Biden dropped out after the convention? Is there a fail-safe for that?
There’s a process for that.
I love how you’re so calm when the Democrats I’m talking to in D.C. are pulling their hair out.
The reason people tear their hair out is that people don’t realize that the business of nominating a presidential candidate is ultimately party business. It’s not governed by the government. There’s no mention of parties in the Constitution. And in both political parties in America, there’s literally not just decades, but centuries of tradition and party rules about nominating presidents.
We’ve been doing this for a long, long time. It’s not a legal process, it’s a party rules process. So if Biden decided to drop out after the convention, the chairman of the Democratic Party would call the Democratic National Committee into session. The 400-plus members of the DNC would come to Washington or Chicago or somewhere, and they would vote for a new nominee. Would there be a lot of politicking about that? Probably. Or maybe they would just say, “It’s easier and safer to nominate the vice president.” The DNC, though, has the legal authority to do that.
Politically, that’s helpful for Kamala Harris, right, so as not to be seen as jumping over the first Black woman who’s been vice president.
Oh yeah. That would not be cool. And going back to our earlier conversation, that’s why I think there may not be a contested convention.
In other words, I think a lot of people who have their eye on future presidential runs probably don’t want to take on the first female, African American vice president. I think that will go into the calculations of Gretchen Whitmer or any of the other people — all of them good — who get mentioned.
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There’s been a lot of conversation over whether President Biden’s delegates have any room to maneuver or if they are truly pledged to him.
There’s a specific rule that I want to talk to you about. It says: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” What does that mean in practical terms?
In practical terms, it’s a loophole. And you can think of many examples.
For instance — and this is kind of amusing because it applies to the other party — if your presidential candidate, after the primaries were over, was prosecuted and convicted of a felony, some people might think in all good conscience they shouldn’t be the nominee of the party. But the example I usually used to think about is that when John Edwards ran for president, he was having an affair with his mistress, got her pregnant and set her up in a beach house in Malibu using campaign money. It was just a mess.
Now he never got very far. And the story didn’t break until much later in the year after the convention. But imagine if he had done well and he was sailing into the convention, sort of like Joe Biden with a couple thousand delegates, and the story broke?
You could imagine some people saying, in all good conscience, “I’m voting for somebody else.” This rule has been on the books literally since the 1984 convention. Since it’s never been used, we don’t really know what it means, but you can imagine it means something pretty serious.
It sounds like thinking the president has no chance of winning in November or that he’s too old could also represent your good conscience, right? It is so open ended that there could be a revolt of people who say, “I love him, but I can’t in good conscience say that he should remain the person on the ticket.” That seems like a possibility here, no?
It’s definitely a possibility. Now we are operating a little bit in the blind here because there hasn’t been enough time to poll delegates, right? We don’t know what the delegates are thinking. My guess is they’re doing exactly what a lot of Democrats are doing. They’re trying to figure out, “How bad is this and what should I do?” And we do have a month for people to figure that out.
Our colleague Jonathan Martin reported that the Biden campaign had been calling delegates basically to check their loyalty. If you’re the Biden campaign or if you’re advising the Biden campaign, why are you doing this?
Because they’re trying to see if delegates are sticking with the president. Same reason the Biden campaign is calling members of Congress. You want to take the temperature, see where they are. The most important group are these 4,000 delegates, which include, by the way, United States senators and U.S. congressmen and governors, etc.
How seriously should we take the reports of delegates saying that there’s a discussion happening about rules changes?
Well, I’m not sure what they would change. I don’t know what that means. They already have a rule which allows them to vote their conscience on this. The procedures for putting somebody’s name in nomination are pretty straightforward and actually fairly small. You need 300 to 600 signatures of delegates on a petition to put your name in a roll call. I’m not sure what rules changes anybody’s talking about.
They don’t have to amend the rules. They just can not vote for him on the roll-call vote.
If Vice President Harris or someone who’s not Joe Biden became the nominee, would she be free to pick the VP? Would the delegates pick that person?
She would be free to pick that person, subject to the fact that the delegates would have to vote on them.
So she’d need to talk to them and ask who they’d want?
She’d need to talk to them, yes. She’d need to find somebody who was broadly acceptable.
If the Republicans and Democrats went back to having open, contested conventions and letting party insiders choose the nominee, what would that legacy be?
There would be good and bad things about it. One of the good things would be that you would empower people who actually knew the candidates and knew what it took to govern and what their likelihood of being a successful president would be. You’d have peer review in the nomination process. And that would probably help prevent candidates like Donald Trump, who certainly when he was elected first, really had no idea what the job was. I mean, the guy didn’t know what the nuclear triad was, which most voters don’t know either. But a president of the United States better damn well know what it is.
Then the question would be who decides who gets in that room. Clearly in 1968, it was mostly white men. These days, however, just look at our party leadership: It’s heavily African American, it’s equally divided between men and women. So I think we’ve done a good job there. But it’s always a question of, “Who’s in the room? How do you get in the room? Are people cut out of the room?” So you’d have fights over that as well. It could look undemocratic. It could actually be undemocratic.
Your party has said for years that, “We are a big tent. We listen to the voters. We go with the will of the voters. We don’t subvert the will of the voters.”
But if 4,000 people in the party — the elites, people who have been elected, people who are connected — push Biden aside, wouldn’t that feel anti-democratic to a lot of voters? Wouldn’t that be subverting the will of the Democratic voters because he won the primary?
Let’s break this down a little bit.
We regularly elect members of Congress, governors, senators, and we let them make big decisions on our behalf. Representative government is a quite legitimate form of government for the most important decisions in our lives, and we elect people because we think they’re generally going to do what we agree with. So if you had a purely old-fashioned convention, you would be vesting in delegates the authority to make a decision on your behalf. And when we did have these old fashioned conventions, nobody complained. They didn’t see them as illegitimate.
My guess is that now that people are accustomed to voting in primaries, you could never go back. So the question would be, can you somehow create a system where, for instance, the elected officials — say in Congress — met with presidential candidates and gave them a vote of approval. “We think these three people are qualified to be president. We think this person who’s been a pizza executive or been a spiritual adviser, they have good points, but we really don’t think they’re qualified to be president.” And they could convey that to the voters and let the voters decide. It’s giving them information that voters aren’t really equipped to get.
But in a world where we have all of this access — probably too much access — to all the information, doesn’t it feel like voters could find those things out? That’s why we spend so much time and so much money doing campaigns.
Voters could find those things out. But come on. If you’re a neurosurgeon, are you going to spend your time pouring through these papers to figure this out? No, of course not. You don’t have the time. That’s why we use political parties. They’re shortcuts for us to understand government and what we want out of government. People just don’t spend that amount of time on politics.
You’ve talked about how 1968, the antiwar movement and the convention fiasco changed the primary process. It’s not lost on anyone that this convention now — the location, the sentiment about the war in Gaza, what’s happening right now with unease about President Biden atop the ticket — is making this DNC feel much more like Chicago in 1968. Maybe you would disagree?
I want to disagree. Look, it’s the same city. But 1968 exposed deep ideological schisms in the Democratic Party. We’ve gotten certainly a little bit better than we were back then, but they’re still around.
If this convention is an open convention, it will not be like 1968 because it’s not over an issue. It’s over a person. It’s literally over a tragedy. Can this person actually run for office and can this person actually govern anymore? That’s not the sort of thing that people man the barricades for, you know what I mean? It’s just not like the antiwar movement or the civil rights movement.
Do you believe that Biden should stay on top of the ticket?
I’m not going to say that right now.
I had to ask you, Elaine!
I’m not going to say.
What keeps you up at night?
What keeps me up at night is the threat from a Trump presidency, plus control of the House and the Senate. I think that would allow for the worst instincts of Donald Trump’s leadership style to become reality. A Trump presidency with the Democratic Congress, I’m still worried about it, but less worried. But the real worry is if Trump starts gaining and it looks like he’s going to have margins in the House and in the Senate that are big enough to allow him to do some of the really awful things he’s talked about doing. That keeps me up at night.
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