President Joe Biden said something interesting at his rare news conference Thursday when he was asked if delegates pledged to support him at the Democratic National Convention have his blessing to support another candidate.
“They’re free to do whatever they want,” Biden said.
The president noted he overwhelmingly won Democratic primaries, which is why nearly all of the convention delegates are currently considered to be pledged to him. But then he added this:
“Tomorrow, if all of a sudden I show up at the convention and everyone says we want someone else, that’s the democratic process. It’s not going to happen,” he added confidently.
Biden is correct that the Democrats’ rules allow delegates to vote for the candidate of their choice. But it’s a little more complicated than he let on. During the roll call vote that officially selects the nominee, for instance, delegates who don’t vote for an acknowledged candidate would have their vote registered as “present.” Biden, at the moment, will probably be the only acknowledged candidate and in all likelihood will remain the nominee unless he steps aside.
Before Biden’s news conference, I talked to Elaine Kamarck about how Democrats pick nominees. Kamarck knows more than most. She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively as an academic about the primary process and is also deeply involved with the Democratic Party, where she serves on the Rules and Bylaws Committee. She told me how the process of replacing Biden would work considering nearly all of the 3,949 pledged convention delegates are currently pledged to support him.
What’s below are excerpts of a longer conversation conducted by phone.
Is it unprecedented for a president to face this kind of challenge?
KAMARCK: No, it’s not unprecedented. You had it with (Jimmy) Carter. An incumbent president who everybody thought was going to lose, and so there was a check to him (by Sen. Edward Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention in 1980). Certainly LBJ (in 1968) was forced to step down, or he thought he was forced to step down, by a bad showing in the New Hampshire primary and his inability to win over the trust of the anti-war movement. So, yes, presidents have been in trouble before. They’ve never been in trouble for this reason, and never so late in the process.
Is it too late to replace Biden?
KAMARCK: No, it is not too late to replace him. Sort of legally, according to party rules, he could be replaced anytime up to the roll call at the convention. Politically, it’s very hard to replace him, because with the exception of his vice president, none of the people mentioned have risen to national stature. And their ability to talk to the Alabama delegates, as well as the Maine delegates as well as the Utah delegates is very truncated. And they don’t have time to develop it. We’re just running out of time.
(NOTE: Governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland’s Wes Moore and California’s Gavin Newsom are popular in their states and seen as potential future presidential candidates.)
So you think the only viable replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris?
KAMARCK: That’s right. That’s not according to the rules or anything, but realistically… think about who these 4,000 people are.
First of all, they’re all very loyal Biden people. So this would require Biden dropping out. Secondly, because she’s been a vice president, she knows them, right? My guess is, of those 4,000 people, she’s actually met a lot of them. That’s not the case for anybody else who’s been mentioned.
The 2028 bench is a very strong bench, which is good for the party, but none of them have gotten out of their states yet.
Who are the delegates to the DNC who select the party’s nominee?
KAMARCK: In most states, they’re elected in congressional district conventions, which follow the primary. (They) file to run as delegates, and then they show up at a certain high school or someplace in their district, bringing as many of their friends and colleagues and supporters as they can. They’re nominated, and they run for the delegate slots. Everybody is elected. And this is very important, because there’s a lot of bullsh** running around about this being a group of elites. These people are the social studies teacher who’s an active union member. These people are a leader in the pro-choice movement, or they’re a county commissioner or a state delegate or something like that. These people tend to be local notables, and they tend to be very politically astute and politically active, because they’ve got to run and get elected.
(NOTE: There is also a much smaller group of superdelegates, or “automatic delegates,” who get delegate status due to their position in the party, but who do not vote for the presidential nominee on the first ballot at the convention unless there is a consensus nominee.)
How strong is the 3,949 delegates’ pledge or commitment to Joe Biden?
KAMARCK: The rule says – and the rule has been in effect since the 1984 convention, so it’s long-standing – that delegates shall, and the operative words are, “in all good conscience vote for the person they were selected to represent.”
It’s never been tested. There’s no legal history on what ‘in all good conscience’ means.
Does it mean you just suddenly don’t like the guy? I think probably not.
Does it mean you think he’s going to lose and the party will lose?
We don’t really know what it means because, since it was put in the rules and the ‘robot rule’ died, this has never happened. We’ve never had a convention where a lot of people voted against the person that they got elected with.
(NOTE: Kamarck writes more for Brookings Thursday about the ‘in good conscience clause’ and what preceded it, the so-called ‘robot rule,’ by which delegates were expected to act, essentially, like robots for the candidate who won their state’s primary.)
When were the most recent convention fights?
KAMARCK: You can go to 1980. The Carter-Kennedy fight was a big fight. It was a real fight on the convention floor. It was bitter. It was angry. Kennedy brought a lot of stuff to the table. In the end, Carter prevailed, but he fought it out. In 1976 with the Republicans, Reagan challenged President Ford. That was a great, big fight. They were very close in delegates, and Reagan lost narrowly and then conceded. Those are the two big ones. You don’t have to go way back in history to see conventions where there was a fight for the nomination.
Should Democrats be talking about all of this right now?
KAMARCK: I think we have to be talking about this. And I think we have to be looking at him carefully. … None of us get to see the president every single day, so it’s very, very hard, and that’s why I think Democrats are taking their time to think about this. I went to the Democratic congressional retreat in February, sat 20 feet away from the president and watched him answer questions from Democratic members of the House. He was fantastic. I didn’t see any signs of mental fatigue or fogginess or anything like that. I thought he was fantastic.
That very day that I was there, the Hur report came out. It was a very surreal experience to see this report come across the wires on my phone, and to be watching the man who was quite in command of everything. I think there’s a human element to this that everybody’s missing, which is that these things can develop quickly. It’s really hard to tell how serious it is when you’re not with him every day. And so people are being cautious.
What would the roll call look like?
It’s not clear what Democrats’ roll call will look like at the moment. The Democratic Party is considering a proposal to do a virtual roll call vote weeks before the Chicago convention is set to begin. That plan was originally hatched as a way to comply with an early ballot access deadline in Ohio. In the meantime, Ohio passed a law loosening that deadline. Party leaders may yet carry on with the plan as a way to squash questions about Biden. Read more about that from CNN’s Arit John and Ethan Cohen.
Democrats who sit on various committees will make those decisions at meetings in the coming weeks. The process for roll call votes is spelled out in a document, the Call for Convention, which spells out the technical rules that do not begin to seem important unless Biden drops out and the nomination is contested. Candidates for president must be nominated, for instance, by between 300-600 delegates, although not more than 50 per state. Superdelegates are restricted from voting in the first round of voting, but only if there is not a consensus nominee. A simple majority of delegates can select a nominee. Et cetera.
It should be noted, though, that any of these rules can be changed by a majority of the convention.
KAMARCK: The fact of the matter is that these people will descend on Chicago around August 19 and the convention will begin. And everything that goes on between now and then is just straight old politics.
Editor's note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter.
