Biden out; nomination goes to Dems’ convention

Now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the nominee, it will ultimately be up to Democratic National Convention delegates to formally select a new nominee for their party. This will mark the first time in over 50 years that a major party nominee was selected outside of the democratic process of primaries and caucuses.

Many Democrats had already begun discussing how to replace Biden. They worried that having the convention delegates, the majority of whom were pledged at first to Biden, select the nominee would appear undemocratic and illegitimate.

The Republican Speaker of the House has claimed that having the convention replace Biden would be “wrong” and “unlawful.” Others have conjured up the image of the return of the “smoke-filled room.” This term was coined in 1920 when Republican party leaders gathered in secret in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel and agreed to nominate Warren G. Harding, a previously obscure and undistinguished US senator from Ohio, for the presidency. He won that year, becoming a terrible president.

The tradition of picking a nominee through primaries and caucuses – and not through what is called the “convention system” – is relatively recent. In 1968, after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for reelection, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was able to secure the Democratic nomination despite not entering any primaries or caucuses. Humphrey won because he had the backing of party leaders such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and those party leaders controlled the vast majority of the delegates.

Many Democrats saw this process as fundamentally undemocratic, so the party instituted a series of reforms that