This pre-election summer has been more eventful than usual, including a mid-July change to the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris – an unusual development that raised many questions about how political parties nominate their candidates for the presidency and why this switch was allowed to happen so late.
Like many features of American politics, the process we use nowadays to nominate the Democratic and Republican Parties’ presidential and vice-presidential candidates developed over time.
The Constitution doesn’t specify any process for parties to nominate candidates for the presidency or any other public office – in fact, it doesn’t mention parties at all. But political parties began to form in the 1790s anyway, and one of their key tasks was to rally supporters around a single candidate for the presidency. At the time, this meant that the members of Congress who belonged to one of the original political parties would decide amongst themselves who their standard bearer would be.
This process, along with the original party system, fizzled out during the 1820s. The election of 1824 – when Andrew Jackson won more votes (both popular and Electoral College) than any other candidate but didn’t earn a majority of the Electoral College and was denied the presidency by the House of Representatives in what his followers called a “corrupt bargain” – set in motion the first step towards the nomination system we practice today.
Jackson’s supporters swore they wouldn’t be bested again and began mobilizing voters for the 1828 election under the banner of the Democratic Party. Starting in 1832, the Democrats began holding national conventions every four years. These conventions were an opportunity for co-partisans across the growing nation to gather together to update their program and select their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. The Democrats’ first major opponent, the Whigs, did the same.
By the time the Republican Party was founded in the 1850s, the convention system was well in place and the Republicans followed suit.
Primary elections – that is, elections where everyday citizens could weigh in on who their party’s nominee should be – began to make an appearance in some states during the early twentieth century. But most states didn’t even hold primary elections for the presidency, and those that did didn’t rely heavily on them to control convention delegates’ votes.
In fact, until the 1970s, the national party conventions were insider affairs. On both sides of the aisle, local and state party organizations handpicked their national convention delegates. The delegates were selected for their loyalty to state party leaders, and these leaders horse-traded and haggled over whose preferred candidate would be nominated in so-called “smoke-filled rooms.”
The elections of the 1960s revealed dissatisfaction and problems with this system, and both the Democrats and the Republicans appointed internal commissions to propose reforms. The result for both parties (but with differences in their details) was to set guidelines for the state parties to select their delegates to the national convention based on public primary elections or caucus meetings. These delegates would then be “pledged” to vote for specific candidates based on the results of the primary or caucus in their state.
So now we have a two-step process: first, the voters weigh in by participating in primaries and caucuses held during the first six months of the election year, and then the parties hold their national conventions later in the summer to finalize the decision. Usually, the national convention is just a “rubber stamp” that makes the primary voters’ choice official. But there’s always the possibility that the primaries won’t be decisive. If there is no “presumptive nominee” (i.e., a nominee who has racked up a majority of pledged delegates to win the nomination vote at the convention), the result is a “brokered” or “contested” convention where the delegates are freed from their pledges after a first round of voting confirms that there is no majority for any candidate. As private entities, both parties control their own rules for how all of this works, including how to handle contingencies such as the withdrawal of a presumptive nominee (before the convention) or even an official nominee (after the convention).
This year, Donald Trump and Joe Biden both became their parties’ presumptive nominees based on primary and caucus results early in the primary season. The Republican National Convention met in Milwaukee in mid-July and the delegates voted to make Trump’s presumptive nomination official. The Democratic National Convention is being held this week from August 19-22 in Chicago. (By tradition, the party that currently holds the presidency has its convention last, and the timing of the Olympics has made it even later than usual this year.)
In the meantime, public and party pressure following a poor debate showing in June led President Biden to withdraw from consideration for the Democratic nomination. Soon after announcing this decision, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, for the nomination. There was some talk about possible contested convention, but other plausible candidates did not come forward. Over the next few days, state delegations to the national convention began organizing virtual conversations amongst themselves and announcing their commitments to support Harris on the first ballot. As a result, and in accordance with the Democratic Party’s rules, Harris became the new presumptive nominee and has since announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
These twists and turns have made for an exciting political summer, and while things seem to have settled down, they do raise questions for future election cycles. For example, will the parties take steps to revise their rules for how to handle presumptive nominee withdrawals? And will late-season nominee switches become more common now that the precedent has been set?
While these questions may affect how nominations play out in 2028 and beyond, the 2024 election is still in full swing, with early voting in Indiana set to begin on October 8 and Election Day on November 5. For more information about where and how to cast your vote, visit www.vote411.org.