Updated July 21, 2024 at 18:39 PM ET
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President Biden announced he is stepping aside and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket, putting an end to weeks of Democratic alarm following his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump last month.
Harris said in a statement that she plans to earn and win the Democratic party’s nomination, with just one month remaining before the party convention in Chicago.
All of this sets off a series of events not seen in more than 50 years. If another Democrat steps up to challenge Harris, the party could be headed for an open convention, which could go to multiple rounds of voting.
Much depends on whether Democrats – and more importantly, the 4,700 or so convention delegates – coalesce behind a single candidate before they convene on August 19.
What happens if there's a competitor for Harris
If there are serious competitors for Harris, the convention would be preceded by something resembling a highly accelerated primary campaign where the voters being wooed are the delegates. The delegate voting process is spelled out in Democratic party rules.
“Think of it as a redo of the primary system in a very, very, very compressed period of time,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Democratic National Committee member and a delegate herself. She spoke to a group of delegates about the potential process on Friday.
She suggested the candidates would name their intended running mates.
But Kamarck told delegates that she was skeptical there would be a contest, because of the tight timelines. “The problem is we are really up against the clock. This is a month,” she told delegates on a Zoom on Friday.
Under DNC rules, requests to nominate a candidate must be presented in writing and include written approval from the proposed nominee – as well as a petition with signatures from at least 300 convention delegates. Harris has already racked up enough endorsements that this will be easy for her to pull together. But for other candidates, lining up that support could be more of a challenge.
“You might not really know where it was going until we actually got to the convention and the delegates actually got there,” said Kamarck.
At the convention, each candidate would be allowed 20 minutes of supporting speeches from the people nominating and seconding them – and then there would be a roll call vote by states, in alphabetical order.
The delegates voting would include those previously pledged to Biden as well as about 700 so-called ‘superdelegates’, which include members of the DNC, Democratic governors, members of Congress and even former presidents. There could be many rounds of voting until a majority was reached.
‘Reality TV like you can't imagine’
Conventions have been relatively suspenseless affairs since the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Starting with the 1972 election, party rules were changed to shift the power to pick the nominee from party power brokers to voters whose preferences are logged months before the convention.
The rules were adjusted again after the contentious 2016 Democratic primary to further dilute the influence of party leaders in favor of the preference of voters.
An open convention would be “reality TV like you can't imagine,” said Kamarck. “But there is a procedure for doing it right. There's a procedure for running conventions that's well over 200 years old.”
Essentially, she says, this is a return to a process that started in 1831 with the first convention and lasted through 1968. That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped out early, in the face of anti-Vietnam war sentiment that was sinking his candidacy.
Then, while the primary was still underway, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, leaving Vice President Hubert Humphrey to battle it out with anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey came into the convention with the majority of delegates and left as the Democratic nominee, but the convention put an ugly intraparty battle on display with protests inside and outside the convention hall.
“Lots of voters tuned in to these conventions because it was only at the conventions that you saw the real drama,” said Kamarck.
Republican Richard Nixon won the election that November and Democrats instituted a series of reforms to the nominating process to give regular voters more say.
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