Until the late 1960s, the Democratic Party could have simply anointed a replacement for President Biden. Now it's not so easy.
After a poor debate performance unleashed weeks of pressure, President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was ending his campaign for reelection and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him. The process was agonizing and it’s not immediately clear if endorsements from Biden and scores of Democratic politicians, as well as numerous convention delegations, will be enough to clear the field for Harris.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The difficulty of orchestrating the situation reflects a process that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before that time, the Democratic Party structure was well-suited to the task of a late-in-the-game replacement and coalescing around a preferred nominee. Indeed, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago has emerged as an instructive moment in which a nominee and platform were ratified at time of tremendous contention for the nation and party. But, the changes to the Presidential nomination process that came after that storied convention reveal why the Democrats have had to work so hard to convince Biden to step aside, and why the party leadership can’t just select a replacement.
Before 1968, Lyndon Johnson firmly led the Democratic establishment. But as Johnson’s policies in Vietnam provoked rising opposition in the country, factions within the Democratic Party launched a ferocious and debasing assault against his reelection campaign in 1968. Nearly three weeks after Johnson beat an antiwar Democrat, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, in an uncomfortably close primary race in New Hampshire, the unpopular Johnson abruptly ended his campaign during a nationally televised address on March 31, 1968.
With no warning, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was thrust into the Presidential campaign. He first worked to secure the “political base” he had courted for more than a decade as a U.S. Senator and then as Vice President by meeting with party leaders around the country and aiding mayors and governors in need of the administration’s help. He expected, as had Presidential candidates for decades, to reap the reward of securing support from the national, state, and local party organizations. They continued to control the selection of delegates to national conventions; by 1968, only 38% of delegates were selected by primaries, with far fewer bound to specific candidates than are today. The result was that the party establishment chose nearly a third of the delegates before the 1968 primary elections even began, and by reaching out to party insiders in the months leading up to the convention in Chicago that summer, Humphrey jumped to a healthy lead in the delegate count.
Humphrey built up a bulwark of support, despite having to contend with a formidable antiwar challenge from well-financed, popular New York Senator Robert Kennedy—who had entered the race that March and performed well in Democratic contests that spring, before his tragic assassination in June on the heels of winning the primary in delegate-rich California.
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But the politics of 1968 soon upended the old system and Humphrey’s apparent glide path to the nomination. Popular unrest about the Vietnam War combined with the ambition of younger politicians to topple the Democratic Party’s nomination process. While political insiders accepted Humphrey’s steady march to the nomination as following long-established rules, supporters of Sen. McCarthy, who solely commanded the antiwar base after Kennedy’s assassination, were outraged that their candidate won a plurality of primary votes (2.9 million votes or 39%), yet he lost the nomination to Humphrey—who received about 150,000 votes but 67% of delegates. (McCarthy’s delegate count amounted to 23%.)
The discord inside the convention hall over Humphrey’s nomination was overshadowed in the national media coverage by the protests and riots on the streets of Chicago. In the lead-up to the convention, the national Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest antiwar group in the country with chapters on many college campuses by that point, castigated government policies as “unrepresentative of the interests of vast numbers of people” and ridiculed Humphrey’s nomination as “unrepresentative government.” Their bitter disdain was displayed in a mock convention staged outside the hall by Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who nominated a large pig named “Pigasus” as the Democratic candidate. The remedy, the young activists declared, was filling the streets with protesters and practicing democracy in action. They chanted, “The party belongs to the people,” and “The streets belong to the people.”
Chicago’s Mayor Daley tried to squash these displays with an overwhelming display of local, state, and national law enforcement, and the protests soon turned violent. The media trained its eyes on these events outside, while inside the hall, McCarthy refused to follow past precedent and endorse Humphrey’s nomination.
Presidential conventions are designed to unify the party and slingshot candidates into the fall campaign. Not so for Humphrey. The Vice President’s closest advisers surveyed the damage in Chicago and concluded it was a “mean Convention” that “humiliated” the Minnesotan and left him “a wreck.”
Following the Chicago convention and Humphrey’s close loss to Republican Richard Nixon in the general election that fall, Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, a rising young star in the Democratic Party, launched a surreptitious plan to revamp the nominating system that had caused such disarray. Harris’s scheme—carried forward by South Dakota Senator George McGovern and Minnesota Congressman Don Fraser—would transform participation in the Presidential nomination process and shunt aside the national and state party establishment and their allies.
The path forward, according to the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection’s report, Mandate for Reform, was to “democratize” the Party’s internal operations. The aim, it vowed, was to “strengthen our Party and American democracy” and “regenerat[e] the Democratic Party as a more responsive and dynamic servant of the American people.”
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The practical effect of these lofty aims was the adoption of Presidential primaries by Democratic state parties in 1972, with the Republican Party generally following along afterward. (The GOP was not driven by the elite divisions and ambition that propelled Democrats. Instead, state laws passed by mostly Democratic legislatures and the lure of media coverage, which favored Democratic candidates battling in the 1972 primary races, compelled the GOP to shift.)
The number of Presidential primaries rose rapidly from 15 in 1968 to 27 in 1976 and 37 in 1980, where it has hovered, moving a bit higher or lower depending on the competitiveness of Presidential nominations. Because of the adoption of primaries to replace party control, the proportion of delegates chosen by primary elections to both party conventions more than doubled—from about 40% in 1968 to 94% by 2020.
Though this may sound more democratic in principle than party members negotiating at a convention for the best ticket, the drawbacks of “more democracy” have been in display over the past few weeks: due to the limited power of party officials, the organized party leadership had no real way to manage the crisis over whether Biden had the capacity to win reelection. Delegates pledged to Biden from every state—who were selected in the largely uncontested Democratic Presidential primaries since January—will vote in the nomination process. But there is no avenue for the kind of high-stakes negotiation that would have easily induced Biden to step aside and coalesced around a replacement.
Biden’s 3,896 pledged delegates were essentially handed to him on a silver platter in a process once billed as advancing democracy. The development of that process rendered the practice of party officials running their party—a concept widely accepted in other representative systems that would prove useful today— undemocratic.
While Biden heeded the calls to step aside, the choice was his, and party leaders had limited options if he had chosen otherwise. Once the direct primary was adopted for Presidential nominations in the 1970s, the party structure that would typically make decisions about who leads the ticket was disempowered and has shriveled in the interest of more democracy.
And that may yet have ramifications in terms of whether Harris faces significant opposition in her quest to become the Democratic nominee. Party leaders can try to orchestrate her nomination, but they have no real lever to ensure that it happens.
Lawrence R. Jacobs is the Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota and the author of several books, including his latest, Democracy Under Fire.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
