How to Stop an Exploding President

...if you wanna, you have until Friday, July 19.

These are (some of) the men and women who will decide whether Joe Biden is running on the Democratic ticket this fall.

It’s still not clear to me that Joe Biden should drop out.

Wait. Let me modify that.

This Is Immoral

After my last post, at least one of my readers thought I was actually advocating for Biden to stay in. Allowing a man in Joe Biden’s condition to run at all was profoundly immoral. Asking him to remain in at this stage is elder abuse. Biden is a vile person,¹ but no one deserves this.

Almost ten years ago, an unusual set of circumstances led me into a very small room with Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura on Star Trek) for about six hours. I didn’t know many old people, had never seen dementia, and so I did not understand what I was seeing at the time. However, with hindsight, I recognize it as a similar sort of elder abuse. Ms. Nichols glowed with immense kindness, filled with a warmth unlike any I’ve ever seen, and she worked to the limits of her capacity to do what she’d been hired to do. I love her for it and will always be deeply grateful for the time we shared, which (for me) was a dream come true. But she was not all there, it gradually became very obvious she was not all there, and she should not have been there at all. She should have been home in retirement, but she was being trotted out like a show pony to earn some money for other people. It breaks my heart to think of it, and I feel a good deal of guilt and shame at the part I played in it, even coming up on ten years later. How can anyone not feel guilt and shame about exploiting an elderly man on the national stage, with eyes wide open about what they’re doing and plenty of time to stop it?

How, moreover, can anyone possibly think that reliving the last two years of the Woodrow Wilson presidency² is a good idea for the country?

However, I was not writing about what would be good morally or what would be good for the country. Democrats have long made clear that they do not care a whit what I think about morality. Instead, I was writing about what would maximize the Democrats’ chances of accomplishing their strategic priority: defeating Donald Trump. I assumed that the party operates without morals and without concern for how Biden would actually govern during the next four years; negative polarization means the Democrats value defeating Republicans over governing the nation well. Nothing in the past two weeks has challenged those assumptions.³

Keeping My Rosaries Off Your Primaries

Nor has much changed in my calculation about how Democrats can best defeat Donald Trump. I said Biden should drop out if his chances dropped to the 15-20% range. Pre-debate, Biden had a 35% chance to win the election in the Nate Silver model. Post-debate,⁴ he has a 30% chance. The 5% change happened very quickly, and it does represent a real, meaningful erosion in Biden’s position. However, things have not gotten appreciably worse for Biden since July 1.⁵ Nate keeps making excuses for why his model isn’t showing a worse collapse for Biden, some of them plausible, but (and I say this as a deeply devoted fan) it is pretty funny to see Nate clearly arguing with his own model, frustrated that it isn’t showing the numbers he thinks it should be showing. I think the simplest explanation for Biden’s durability is that—despite the best efforts of the press—voters were already pretty well aware of Biden’s decline before the debate, so it was already largely “priced in” to polls.

Silver is right that there’s still a lot of risk keeping Biden on the ticket, and most of it is downside risk,⁶ which probably does mean that his model (which doesn’t know about Biden’s cognitive decline) is overestimating Biden’s chances. Silver also seems to be working from the assumption that the Democrats should nominate someone who can actually serve as president for the next four years, which explicitly is not one of my assumptions.

Yet I continue to think that the risks of a swap are high, and (if all you care about is beating Trump) probably aren’t worth taking while Biden is still polling within a standard polling error of Trump. Biden’s odds of winning the election are about the same is Trump’s were in Silver’s own (excellent) election model on Election Day 2016. I understand the Democrats’ impulse to chuck him out, but I am still not sure that it is, tactically, the right move. It’s a very close call, but I still lean against.

UPDATE: It has taken me nearly a week to write this post, and, during that time, there was an attempt on Donald Trump’s life. For all Trump’s many disqualifying flaws (and crimes), he acquitted himself admirably under fire—to be honest, much more admirably than I ever expected. My gut instinct is that this will give Trump a temporary but substantial polling boost, which will gradually fade to a small but durable polling boost. Since Biden is already on the ropes, this will likely put Biden in replacement territory this week, even by my conservative standards.

With or without me, though, the momentum to chuck Biden off the ticket is only growing, so I think it’s time for a deep dive into the mechanics.

Not to get too Silvery, but we’ve slowly, steadily moved from 7 to 9 since he posted this, with hints of 11 in the works.

Presumptive Nominee vs. Legal Nominee

Joe Biden is not currently the Democratic nominee for President. He is the presumptive nominee, because he won the primaries. He must still be formally nominated by the Democratic Party according to the party’s internal rules and by-laws. This act of formal nomination is important, because it is the trigger for all fifty states to start printing ballots with the name “Joseph R. Biden” on them. Until the moment Biden is formally nominated, it remains technically legally possible for Biden to withdraw without penalty. The Heritage Foundation is circulating a scary-sounding memo that threatens (in part) to prevent Biden’s withdrawal before the nomination, but if you parse it closely you realize that it’s all bark and no bite.

After Biden formally becomes the legal nominee, however, replacing him becomes much more difficult. (This is where that Heritage Foundation memo starts to bite.)

First, withdrawal and replacement may create complications for ballot-printers. For example, in the 2002 Wellstone-Coleman Senate election, Wellstone died a few days before the election. Walter Mondale was legally subbed in by the state Democratic Party, but the ballots were already out, so everyone still had to mark “Paul Wellstone” on the ballot, knowing that this counted as a vote for Walter Mondale.

Moreover, there are plenty of state-level complications when a legal nominee withdraws for reasons other than death. For example, Wisconsin (a must-win state for Biden) has a pretty straight-forward law on this:

Any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot may not decline nomination. The name of that person shall appear upon the ballot except in case of death of the person. (Wis. Code 8.35(1))

Now, it so happens that Wisconsin has a 4-3 state supreme court controlled by Democrats, and those Democrats have so far evinced very little interest in the law of Wisconsin when it happens to conflict with their partisan political goals. Given the complexities of America’s presidential election system, it’s a good bet that the Supreme Court of Wisconsin would find or develop some loophole allowing President Biden to withdraw despite state law.

However, what if they didn’t? Biden might withdraw in September, with a court ruling in October that his replacement can’t appear on the Wisconsin ballot. Wisconsin legally binds its presidential electors to the nominee on the ballot,⁷ so, if the Democrats win the state, and Biden is not dead, the electors would be forced to vote for Biden, not for the Democrats’ replacement candidate. If Kamala Harris went on to win 269 electoral votes elsewhere, with Trump winning 261 and Biden getting Wisconsin’s 10, the election would be thrown to the U.S. House, where the unit rule almost guarantees Trump would win. Boom, one “sore winner” law in Wisconsin and the Democrats auto-lose the election.

Even if Democrats staved off this disaster in Wisconsin, there are several other states where withdrawing Biden after he becomes the legal nominee could create legal peril.⁸

If the Democrats are going to jettison Biden, then, it is nearly imperative that they do so before Biden becomes the legal nominee.

How It’s Supposed To Work

The alternative to a Biden nomination is an “open convention,” where the elected delegates from the Democratic Party would host an old-style national convention, with real coalition-building (and a few smoke-filled rooms). I have long maintained that our national politics would benefit immensely from returning to this nomination system. However, the current rules of the Democratic Party do not provide for this. The current system is a ghost of the old system, maintaining some of the forms without any of the actual power, much less the experience of wielding power—a bit like the Roman Senate around 275 AD.

The current, normal process for nominating a candidate for President is described in the Democratic Party 2024 Call to Convention, Section IX: Procedural Rules of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. This document, written by the Standing Committee on Rules and By-Laws of the Democratic National Committee, is only a slight evolution from the 2020 Call to Convention. It is not binding on anyone in any legal sense, but it is the current template for how Democrats expect their own nomination to work. I am not myself a Democrat and I do not know their precedents (Rule IX.H), so I can’t rule out the possibility that I have misunderstood something. I am just a big nerd who loves the caucus-convention system, and I have read these rules with interest.

Here is how the rules describe the process. Keep your eyes peeled, at each step, for where the real power lies:

1. From January to June, delegates to the national convention are elected by state parties through their presidential primaries.

2. Delegates meet in Chicago on 19 August.

3. Delegates vote to accept the proposed (“temporary”) rules as the rules of the convention (“permanent” rules). The temporary rules are written by the Standing Committee on Rules and By-Laws between Standing Convention Rules Committee before conventions. They are usually word-for-word the same as the procedural rules published in the Call to Convention.⁹

   1. In principle, delegates are supposed to consider the Rules Committee’s proposal as a suggestion, while retaining the power to write, amend, and vote on their own rules. This is because delegates are supposed to be the supreme authority of the party.

   2. In the modern Democratic Party, however, the only “choice” the delegates are given is whether to accept the temporary rules or reject them. They cannot amend the rules themselves (see Rule IX.L) and they cannot pick an alternative proposal unless it is first presented as a Rules Committee minority report (see Rule IX.C.2).

   3. If the delegates do reject the temporary rules, the Rules Committee must meet again and come up with a new proposal, but the delegates still can’t do anything except vote again (and again) to accept or reject that new proposal. They never gain the power to amend, or to dismiss the Rules Committee and start fresh. There is only a theoretical possibility that, if the Rules Committee went totally bonkers and, like, proposed rules banning delegates of a certain race from voting, the delegates could reject those rules over and over again until the Rules Committee relented.

   4. This is all academic: to the best of my knowledge, the Rules Committee’s recommendation has been accepted immediately at every convention since the birth of the modern primary system in the early 1970s.¹⁰ One way or another, then, what the Rules Committee proposes as the convention rules almost inevitably becomes the convention rules.

4. Once the convention rules are confirmed, nominations for the Democratic presidential nomination open. To be nominated, a candidate and 300 delegates must sign the nominating petition.

   1. As we will see below, this is purely ceremonial and has nothing to do with anything.

5. All 4,730 delegates vote for the candidate of their choice. This is known as “the roll call.”

   1. Since the McGovern “reforms” of the early 1970’s, the Democrats have never had an actual contest at this stage,¹¹ so little attention has been paid to the details. (I myself have made mistakes about this process because I assumed that the Democratic process was pretty close to the Republican process. Turns out, it’s not! Sorry, Cate!)

   2. Technically, the rules say that, in the first round of voting only, elected delegates will be allowed to vote, while ex officio delegates (popularly known as “superdelegates”) must sit out. However, Rule IX.C.7.b also provides that the superdelegates get to vote on the first round if any single candidate has a majority of the total delegates, which always happens.¹² In 2024, it has definitely happened. Joe Biden has pledges from 3,894 elected delegates, versus 43 elected delegates pledged to others/uncommitted, and there are 793 superdelegates, so Biden has 82% of the vote pledged to him already. Therefore, under “normal” rules, superdelegates will be allowed to vote in the first round.

   3. The pledged delegates do not have to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. The so-called “Robot Rule,” which required pledged delegates to support their pledged candidate on the first ballot (and discarded their votes if they did not),¹³ was replaced with the “in all good conscience rule” in the early 1980s. The “in all good conscience” rule (IX.F.3.d) demands that pledged delegates “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Obviously, this can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, and explicitly leaves the judgment to each delegate’s “conscience.” Most importantly, it has no enforcement mechanism. As the James J. Heaney Institute for Politics Ain’t Beanbag teaches, a rule without an enforcement mechanism is not a rule; it’s a suggestion. So the delegates can vote for whoever they like. However, as we are about to see, their votes may not count!

   4. Delegates can vote for any candidate, not just candidates who have been formally entered into nomination. The process described in Step #4 thus has no impact on the actual nominating vote in Step #5, and appears to exist solely so party grandees can give speeches.

6. The votes are collected for the various candidates. The Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee (Jaime Harrison) determines which candidates’ votes will count.¹⁴ (It is unclear when he makes this determination.) If he rejects votes for a candidate, the delegates’ votes are changed to “present.” The Chairman makes this decision based on six criteria (see Rule IX.C.7.d, Rule VI, and Delegate Selection Rule 13.K):

   1. The candidate must be registered to vote, and registered to vote in 2020.

   2. The candidate must be, in the Chairman’s judgment, a “bona fide Democrat,” with “the interests… of the Democratic Party… at heart.”

   3. The Chairman must judge that the candidate “will participate in the convention in good faith.”

   4. The candidate must, in the Chairman’s judgment, be seeking the nomination.

   5. The candidate must, in the Chairman’s judgment, have “established substantial support for their nomination.” This phrase, in particular, seems as though it can mean whatever the Chairman wants it to mean.

      1. The Chairman could tie this to the nominating petition from Step #4, but nothing compels him to do so.

   6. The candidate must affirm, in writing, that he or she is a Democrat who will accept the nomination, and who will run and serve as a Democrat.

7. As far as I can tell, the ruling of the Chairman is not appealable.¹⁵

   1. These rules place immense power in the hands of the DNC Chairman. This was likely contrived to make it easy to suppress votes for candidates the party didn’t want to platform (like Ron Paul as the 2012 RNC, or Gov. Bob Casey at the 1992 DNC).

8. Now that the acceptable candidates are known, the votes are tallied for real. If any single candidate has received a majority of all votes cast (2,366, assuming everyone votes), that candidate becomes the legal nominee. Otherwise, all the delegates vote again. This process repeats until a (recognized) candidate secures a majority and becomes the nominee.

This process is the platonic ideal of the Democratic nomination process as of 2024. I can’t yet describe what the actual process will be, because we don’t know yet! As we will see, though, it will probably be fairly close to this.

The Ohio Conundrum

Ohio has a ballot-preparation law that requires the legal nominee’s name to be formally submitted to the secretary of state by August 7 in order to be included on the ballot. The problem for Democrats is that the convention is on August 19. They won’t have a legal nominee on August 7.

Ohio’s law is pretty dumb. It already caused conflicts with Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2012 and 2020. Both times, the Ohio legislature had to pass special exceptions just to allow the affected party’s nominee to appear on the Ohio ballot in the fall. This year, negotiations broke down because Ohio Republicans (who control the legislature) wanted something in exchange for bailing the Democrats out of their (equally dumb) convention schedule. Eventually, Ohio was able to pass a bill making a special exception for 2024, so Biden will appear on the Ohio ballot. I stopped paying attention to the drama, so I have no idea whether the Republicans ended up getting something in exchange or not. If I were Ohio, I would have just amended the ballot-preparation law so this very dumb crisis stops happening every few years, but whatever, another band-aid works, too. Either way, crisis averted.

Or was it? While Ohio’s legislature was still dithering, the Democratic National Committee concluded that it needed a backup plan, just in case Ohio refused to play ball. The Democrats borrowed a concept from their 2020 covid convention—a virtual roll call—and coupled it to Ohio’s ridiculously early deadline. They proposed that all 4,730 delegates to the Democratic convention would vote by email for the Presidential nomination several weeks before the convention, probably on August 5 or August 6. This makes the actual convention totally pointless, as indeed it was in 2020.

In order to make this work, the DNC would have to grant the Rules Committee absolute power over the rules of the convention, stripping the delegates of even a theoretical right to challenge them. In convention jargon, the Rules Committee would be granted the power to “adopt the permanent rules of the Convention” and “select the permanent officers of the Convention.” As we saw, in Step #3 above, the delegates traditionally have a theoretical right to reject the Rules Committee report again and again until the Rules Committee gave the delegates what they demand. Under this plan, the delegates would lose that power. So, for example, if the Rules Committee unanimously adopted rules banning one race from voting at the convention, tough toenails for the delegates.

There would be one escape hatch: if 25% of the Rules Committee dissented by passing a “minority report” (an alternative set of rules), the delegates would get to vote on whether they wanted the majority report or the minority report.¹⁶ However, if the Rules Committee remained united, with no minority report, this plan would allow it to pass anything it wanted, with no recourse for the delegates.

Eventually, Ohio passed a bill fixing their dumb scheduling problem for 2024, rendering this backup plan unnecessary! However, in an interesting twist, the DNC is going ahead with the backup anyway. At their June 4th meeting, with the DNC’s blessing, the Rules Committee formally adopted the necessary amendments. The Rules Committee will next meet on July 19, where they will adopt the actual rules for the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

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UPDATE 17 July 2024:

I made a significant omission here. There are actually two Rules Committees.

The first is the DNC Standing Committee on Rules & By-Laws, which has some 30 members and is currently chaired by Jim Roosevelt and Minyon Moore. This committee remains in existence permanently, as an arm of the DNC.

The second is the Standing Convention Rules Committee, which has 186 members and is chaired this year by Gov. Tim Walz and Bishop Leah Daughtry. It comes into being shortly before the convention and dissolves at the end of the convention, although not all of its members are convention delegates.

The DNC Rules Committee met on June 4 and voted to give the Convention Rules Committee absolute power. The Convention Rules Committee is the body that will be meeting on July 19.

My analysis remains the same, but, if you’ve been putting together a call list of DNC Rules Committee members to pressure them to vote your way, you’d better scrap it, find a list of Convention Rules Committee members, and start phoning them instead. I regret the error, which was caused by my unfamiliarity with the DNC rules. I have lightly edited a couple spots in the article where I clearly referred to the wrong committee.

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The DNC’s excuse for assigning the Rules Committee absolute power is that Ohio’s new law does not actually go into effect until late August, and they fear that Ohio has one more “bad-faith partisan game” up its sleeve to ruin Joe Biden’s chances in Ohio. Personally, I think that’s poppycock. The fact that the amending resolution spends over a page and a half yelling about Ohio before getting to the two paragraphs of meat (which have impacts far beyond Ohio) strikes me as a classic “lady doth protest too much” moment. The truth is, there is no actual need for Joe Biden to appear on the Ohio ballot in the first place. Trump has a 97% chance of winning Ohio in the Nate Silver model, and, if Biden does somehow win in Ohio, it will be because he’s won a landslide victory and doesn’t need Ohio’s electoral votes. Silver’s model reports that Ohio has a 0% chance of being the tipping-point state that delivers Biden his 270th electoral vote, and a much smaller chance of being the decisive tipping-point state. Refusing to play the Ohio GOP’s game would probably end up far more embarrassing for Ohio than for the Democrats.

A cynic might say that the DNC is advancing its Ohio plan anyway as a back door to give the Rules Committee enough power to force Biden out (or force out any challengers). This seems unlikely. After all, the plan was set in motion on June 4th, well before Biden’s disastrous debate and Democratic elites finally admitting that they might need to remove him. To my eyes, this is probably just the DNC usurping more power from the delegates, a process that has been steadily going on for more than forty years (in both parties) and which advances (one way or another) in every cycle. If the delegates are the Roman Senate in 275 AD, the DNC is the Emperor Aurelian and his bureaucracy. The puppet show will probably come to an end at some point in the coming decades. (Diocletian formally ended the Senate’s political power in 300 AD.)

How To Wield Absolute Power

Regardless of the reason, the Rules Committee—if it can hold together—now has absolute power over the rules of the convention. Here’s another lesson from the James J. Heaney Institute of Politics Ain’t Beanbag: control of the rules is control of the outcome. The Rules Committee can now, if it wants, decide the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, regardless of the primary election results. What can be is unburdened by what has been.

Let me give you an example. If I were a Biden surrogate, I would want the Rules Committee to add one more criterion to Rule VI (described in Step #6, above):

To be a valid presidential candidate capable of receiving votes at the convention, the candidate must be the elected, incumbent President of the United States (if there is an elected president and that president is a Democrat).

If you add this rule, all votes for candidates not named Joe Biden are automatically converted to “present.”¹⁷ Biden might still not win on the first ballot, especially if the delegates are mad about it and cast protest votes, but, since Biden would be the only candidate eligible for election, he would win the nomination eventually.

Alternatively, if I were a surrogate for Gov. Gavin Newsom, I would want the rule to say something like “the candidate must be the elected, incumbent governor of the most populous state.”

Seriously, if the Rules Committee wants to do this, it can just do this. It can even make the process less messy by modifying Rule IX.C.7.e to simply invalidate all contrary votes (rather than converting them to “present”) so that the nomination is automatically finished on the first ballot. The Rules Committee would need strong convention officers to actually enforce these tyrannical rules, but, surprise, the Rules Committee gets to appoint all the convention officers itself this year!

Still, the Rules Committee probably does not want to do this. I’ve seen plenty of rules lawyers try to rig an outcome (even tried my hand at it once or twice), and it’s universally considered a party foul to make it too obvious. Moreover, the Rules Committee probably does not have enough unity to simply declare a nominee like this. There are surely some members of the R.C. who want to keep Biden and some who want him removed, just like the Democratic Party more broadly. Finally, the Rules Committee probably does not have the boldness to do this; the R.C. is normally a bunch of nameless apparatchiks, not people who seek the spotlight, and their power to determine the nomination this year has fallen into their laps sort of by accident. I have not even been able to locate a list of names of current Rules Committee members.¹⁸

However, the nomination will be largely decided, in my view, on July 19, on a YouTube livestream with fewer than 1,000 viewers:

Strategy Notes for the Anti-Biden Movement

Suppose I want to replace Biden as the nominee, but I don’t want to be so obvious about it that it would spook the pro-Biden members of the Rules Committee. My strategic goal is to secure the legal nomination for the candidate of my choice. Assuming I can’t do this by Rules Committee fiat as suggested above, I will need to secure the votes of a majority of delegates. My first and only objective at the Rules Committee meeting, then, is to open the convention.

Opening the convention has to be the first objective, because, at a typical closed convention, Biden wins. There are too many weird and unpredictable barriers under the current rules for an anti-Biden coalition to cohere and survive the first ballot, so you can’t stick with those. You can’t rig the convention in favor of your favored nominee, either, because that would be too obvious. You can’t even do much to rig the process against Biden himself. It’s possible you will accomplish the first objective (open the convention), and then Biden wins anyway. That’s life when your opponent controls 99% of the pledged delegates;¹⁹ it’s a multi-stage, uphill battle, and defeat at any stage means you lose. After you win the battle to open the convention, then you move to the next objective: persuading a majority of the delegates to defect.

These would be my tactics in support of the objective, from highest to lowest priority:

1. Clarify the criteria for nomination. In particular, strip the DNC Chairman of the authority to determine who counts as a “presidential candidate” under Rule VI (and Delegate Rule 13.K). Instead, guarantee that anyone who can get 300 names on a nominating petition can be put into nomination (and have their votes counted).

2. Appoint a convention chairperson who strongly supports replacing Biden. The convention chairperson will resolve rules disputes, which will be explosive in any attempt to open the convention. A third rule from the James J. Heaney Institute of Politics Ain’t Beanbag: control over rules disputes is control of the rules (and you already know that control of the rules is control of the outcome).

3. Assuming your side succeeds in controlling the convention chair, clarify and expand the convention chairperson’s powers under Rules IX.E and IX.I, explicitly allowing her to override the judgment of, say, the DNC Chairman.

4. Regardless (but especially if your side does not control the convention chair), clarify and expand the authority of the delegates as a body to overrule convention officers. Allow them to carry motions by simple majority (rather than by two-thirds majority). Provide clear mechanisms for bringing such motions and enforceable rules for recognition. (In other words, gut Rules IX.J and IX.K.)

5. Protect the “in all good conscience” rule (IX.F.3.d) as it is currently written, with no enforcement mechanism.

6. Fight against the virtual roll call and insist on an in-person convention, accepting Ohio’s new law as a “sure thing” and “not a good reason to disrupt the time-honored Democratic nomination process.” (I think Ohio’s law is a sure thing, but, even if it weren’t, the Democratic nominee doesn’t need Ohio! This is a dumb reason for a virtual roll call!) As someone who works remotely for my day job, but who has been on a few convention floors during contested nominations, take it from me: you can do a lot of things well remotely, but managing the currents and arguments (and chaos) of an open convention is not one of them. You really want to be in a room with the other delegates, pressing flesh and starting discussions. Otherwise, the presumptive nominee’s inertia tends to assert itself. (Also, you want to buy as much time as possible so you can court delegates, build out your convention-floor organization, and let Biden melt down further.)

7. Clarify other ambiguities in the rules. For example, who can make a motion to suspend the rules, and what compels the convention chairwoman to recognize it? Vague rules help the presumptive nominee, who has (again) immense inertia on his side. Clear rules help everybody else, by creating a fair game on a level playing field.

8. Anticipate and resolve (or empower convention officers on your side to resolve) logistical problems with an open nominating process in a body that has not held an open nominating process since 1968 and whose institutional memory of how to pull off an open nomination have completely atrophied. (Nearly everyone who was a delegate to the 1968 convention is dead, and even most of the people around for the minor rules tussles of the 1980s are dead, too.) For example, how can you make sure roll call votes are tabulated quickly and accurately, given that you might have 10 very tense roll calls instead of the typical 1 ceremonial roll call?

The more of these you accomplish, the cleaner your shot at Biden will be at the convention. You might win, you might not, but you will at least force his supporters to come out and give battle.

If you have to force these changes through over the objections of a minority report, or even if you lose at the Rules Committee and can only muster the votes to put this package into a minority report, so be it! Minority reports will be voted on by the delegates, and putting the nomination in the hands of the delegates is exactly what you want! You want to give battle!

Strategy Notes for the Biden Campaign

Suppose, instead, that I’m an agent of Biden for President, trying to influence the Rules Committee. The last thing I want is for my candidate to come out and give battle. If I have to give battle, I might lose. If I can avoid battle, I win automatically, and with much less damage. Worse, my candidate in particular is incapable of giving battle. I can’t send President Biden out on the convention floor to press the flesh and try to hold on to a bare majority of the delegates! If it comes to that, I might very well tell my candidate that it’s over and that he should step down to spare himself further grief.

I have one big advantage, though: I am the presumptive nominee. If nothing changes, I win. My strategic goal, then, is to render my opposition incapable of mobilizing against me before I become the legal nominee. I have two main objectives in support of that goal:

• First, create and protect obstacles to the opposition.

• Second (and perhaps even more important), shorten the time left before the legal nominee is determined.

If I can keep the opposition unorganized, uncertain of its rights, unclear on the DNC’s procedures, and ideally unled, it won’t even matter if two-thirds of the delegates would like to replace Biden; they won’t be able to do it. We saw something like this in March/April 2016: Cruz, supported by the anti-Trump grassroots, and Kasich, supported by the anti-Trump establishment, both wanted to stop Trump and almost certainly represented a majority of both the party membership and the delegates at the time. However, their goals were too disparate and their coordination too shortsighted to sustain an anti-Trump coalition. The realization that Trump was inevitable led GOP primary voters (and, later, a very sizable number of anti-Trump GOP convention delegates) to unite behind him.

However, the more time the opposition has, the more likely it is that they’ll be able to work out their conflicts, form a united front against Biden, and perhaps even coalesce around a single candidate (which would be an extreme threat to Biden). Thus the second objective: don’t just run out the clock, but actually make the clock shorter.

My tactic in support of the second objective (taking time off the clock) is simple:

1. Fight to the death for the “virtual roll call” and put it as early on the calendar as possible. July 21st if I can find the votes, but August 1st would do.²⁰ Scream and cry and kick your feet about Ohio and its terrible, terrible Republicans and their evil trickery and the possibility that the Democrats would simply be surrendering Ohio to the Republicans. But get that virtual roll call, and fast.

My tactics in support of the first objective (creating & maintaining obstacles):

1. Appoint a Biden loyalist as convention chairperson, such that the currently-ambiguous rules can be interpreted in a way that supports Biden without forewarning or reasonable possibility of appeal.

2. Likewise, secure DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison’s loyalty.

3. Undermine the “in all good conscience” rule by creating a soft enforcement mechanism: allow the convention chair to reject the votes of delegates that, in her judgment, have not been cast “in all good conscience.” Call this a clarification of an ambiguous rule, conducive to a good, clean convention. (The rule is not ambiguous.) If you have to give the other side an appeal mechanism to get this passed (like, the ruling of the chair can be appealed to the full body and overturned by simple majority), fine, give it to ‘em. You’re still making life harder for any pledged delegate who defects from Biden.

4. Clarify in the rules that the “substantial support” described in Rule VI means substantial support in a Democratic presidential primary. This would at least nominally exclude everyone except, arguably, Kamala Harris.

5. Fight other rule changes of all kinds, arguing that the rules have worked well at previous conventions and that innovation is dangerous. Overall, current rules work nicely to your candidate’s advantage, and anyone trying to change them should be presumed working for the opposition until proved innocent.

In one sense, Biden’s position is easier than that of the challengers: his top priorities are mostly to make sure things keep going the way they are already going. This requires little imagination and can bank heavily on status quo bias at the Rules Committee and among the delegates.

On the other hand, Biden kind of needs to win whatever fights he picks. If he loses battles, he loses the inertia and aura of inevitability that are his greatest assets right now. If the opposition manages to produce a minority report, he will have to make his case to actual delegates and fight at least one real battle in the open. Better to have that battle than surrender the rules to the opposition, and better to fight it at a virtual convention instead of a live one, but Biden must work much harder than his opposition to maintain the appearance of unity.

It could be quite a show.

What Will Actually Happen

Nothing.

I expect the DNC Rules & By-Laws Committee Convention Rules Committee will decide, on July 19th, that determining the nominee is the delegates’ problem, not theirs. I have seen no signs that any possible Biden rivals (Whitmer, Shapiro, Newsom, Buttigieg, Harris, even Dean Phillips) are exerting pressure on the Rules Committee or that they even have a strategy to deal with the convention rules if Biden refuses to drop out. (And Biden won’t drop out if he thinks he can win the nomination by default!) The only campaign doing anything visible to secure its objectives is the Biden campaign, which has indeed suggested a virtual roll call on July 21st (the earliest possible date) to secure its position. Everyone else is apparently just hoping an opportunity opens up, instead of seizing the opportunity in front of them. I suppose this is just what happens when a party becomes decadent and its leadership can’t lead. We’ve sure seen that in the GOP.

There’s still a few days left for me to be proved wrong, but, in the absence of organized opposition, the Rules Committee will most likely more or less reaffirm the current process (as planned) but move it to an August 7th virtual roll call (as planned), thereby giving Biden’s camp most of what they want without a fight. Having washed their hands of the decision, the Rules Committee will hand the delegates the problem… but not the tools to solve it! These rules are not fit-for-purpose if you want the delegates to actually decide anything. If the current rules pass, Biden’s inertia will almost certainly win out, and the Democrats will sleepwalk into November with a candidate who could not serve, even in the increasingly unlikely event that he wins.

I suppose I would find that frustrating, if I were a Democrat. I suppose I wrote this less as a guide to what will happen, and more as a guide to what might have been, in a world where U.S. politics were still a serious enterprise managed by serious people.

Related Links

Here are some links to relevant documents mentioned in this article (or related to it), mostly here for my own reference:

• The Charter & Bylaws of the Democratic National Committee (current)

• The 2024 Call to Convention (as published, not as recently amended)

• The June 4 Rules Committee resolution amending the Call (and assuming absolute power)

• A press release about the June 4 meeting

• The June 4 Rules Committee meeting livestream:

• An article, from before the debate, about the virtual roll call plans (including some helpful dates).

• An article, from after the debate, about using the July 19 meeting to protect Biden’s candidacy (archive link)

• EDIT early on 16 July: Here is the livestream for the July 19 meeting in a few days:

1. Regardless of what you personally believe about abortion, consider what Joe Biden believes about abortion. Biden insists that, as a Roman Catholic, he considers every abortion to be the murder of an innocent human being, and he is personally opposed to those murders. Nevertheless, his position changed in the 1980s from “I think we should outlaw murdering children” to “I think we should leave the question of murdering children to the states” to “I think we should let mothers decide whether to murder children.” (The common problem of coerced abortion, where women are pressured by boyfriends or families into aborting, has never entered into Biden’s calculus.)

Biden’s position remained there for several decades, as a kind of background tragedy Biden accepted, as much because the Supreme Court had commanded it as anything else. Then, when he ran for President in 2020, he shifted again: he now supported taxpayer funding for killing babies. Again, whether or not you believe abortion is the same as killing a baby, Joe Biden says that he thinks it is! Finally, when Dobbs came down, Biden came out furiously against states being allowed to restrict the killing of children in any way.

Either the man thinks baby-murder is awesome, or he is someone who is lying about thinking that baby-murder is awesome. Either way, he is a morally repellant worm of a human being!

Abortion is a particularly vivid illustration, but Biden has had similar moral failings throughout his long career, nearly always driven (at least to outward appearances) by his lust for power. We may pity President Biden the way Frodo and Bilbo wisely pitied Gollum, and we should of course pray for him both as a President and as a human being, but we must never forget who he is. The kindly uncle they sell ya on TV is a gimmick. He is and always has been a garbage person.

Biden can count his lucky stars he’s running against an even more ostentatiously awful human being.

2. Wilson suffered a crippling stroke in 1919 that left him barely functional. The First Lady, Edith Wilson, ran the country for nearly two years. The American people were not informed of the stroke until 1920, and the American people only found out how severe their president’s incapacity had become years later, long after both Wilson’s presidency and his life had ended.

It is unclear to me how much the press corps was involved in the cover-up, but Wilson was a Democrat and the press has always covered for Democrats, with full knowledge of what it was doing: FDR’s paralysis, JFK’s sexual abuses, and now Biden’s senility. From Teapot Dome to Russiagate, the press has a powerful nose for scandal during GOP administrations.

Megan McArdle has a counterpoint that I frankly do not believe (at least, I don’t think it admits to everything that needs to be admitted) but I include her take for completeness.

3. N.B.: I make the same assumption about the Republicans, the party I typically vote for and of which I used to be a member.

I think there is a place in intraparty politics for appealing to high moral principles, and sometimes that even makes a difference at a small scale. At the national level, however, it doesn’t seem to matter. In order to achieve power in a national political party, it seems you have to horcrux away enough of your soul that there just aren’t a lot of people up there who seem open to an appeal about anything as gauche suburban as “right and wrong.”

4. As I write this early on July 12, 2024.

5. I’ve been working on this article for several days, and Biden’s position today (July 15) is a touch worse than it was when I wrote this sentence (on July 12). On July 1, Biden had a 27.6% chance to win the election, then bounced back to just above or just below a 30% chance. On July 11, he had a 28.0% chance.

Here on July 15, he’s down to 27.2%, his lowest yet. Although still not appreciably worse than his July 1 numbers, it’s closer to a 25% chance than a 30% chance.

6. That is to say: there is also a ton of uncertainty swapping in Kamala, or running a “blitz primary,” but some of it is upside uncertainty—that is, there’s a decent possibility the unpopular Kamala could be torn to pieces by Mr. Trump’s sharp, vicious, schoolyard instincts, or exposed in a scandal that the GOP has been saving for a rainy day (downside risk), but also a realistic possibility that she could absolutely shine on the campaign trail and blow Trump away in a landslide (upside uncertainty).

It’s very easy to see the downside risk of keeping Biden in. Because he is in decline, he’s always one press conference away from proving conclusively that he can’t be president, which could cause the bottom to fall out on his polling. In contrast to Kamala, though, there’s no obvious upside to the uncertainty around Biden. He’s not going to wake up one day and be so amazing that his polls jump up 5 points.

7. As I have written many times before, this is VERY STUPID!

8. I completely missed this very important legal wrinkle in 2016, when I called on the Republican National Committee to remove Trump from the nomination after Trump’s formal nomination.

9. The rules in the Call are written by the Standing Committee on Rules & By-Laws, not the Standing Convention Rules Committee. However, the Standing Convention Rules Committee typically confirms them.

10. In the Republican Party, delegates theoretically have full power to adopt, propose, and amend rules. However, at the 2012 Tampa convention, the Rules Committee report was seriously challenged from the floor for the first time in living memory, thanks to Ron Paul’s rambunctious supporters. Convention chair John Boehner simply ignored what he was hearing, announced “the ayes have it,” refused to recognize anyone who called legitimately for division, and carried on with the business of the convention. In other words, he cheated, and so did that lickspittle Mitt Romney. The Democrats get points from me for at least being honest that they don’t trust their delegates with any real power.

11. Teddy Kennedy attempted to contest the 1980 convention but lost at the rules stage.

12. This rule exists to prevent superdelegates from deciding the nomination, and I believe it was instituted after the bruising, close-fought 2016 fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, the rule is expected to actually get triggered verrrrrrry rarely. I am too lazy to check, but, if memory serves, even Hillary ended up with a large enough elected delegate lead that the superdelegates were a non-factor at the convention.

UPDATE 17 July: In the comments, Daniel Pareja persuasively argues that, while I said “this always happens,” it does not, in fact, always happen—not even close. He also, in a parent comment, has a detailed history of What Happened In 2016 (and prior) that is much better than my “if memory serves” footnote.

Finally, he thinks I was not clear enough that the majority support for one candidate on the first ballot must come from pledged delegates only. I thought that was clear enough, especially from my subsequent math, but, to be clear, he’s correct. Superdelegates are not allowed to vote on the first ballot unless pledged delegates alone provide an absolute, all-delegates majority for a single candidate. In any event, that threshold has certainly been met this year for Biden, so superdelegates will vote on the first ballot unless the rule is changed.

13. The “Robot Rule” is currently in place on the Republican side, although I’ve never ever heard it called that on their side of the fence.

14. This rule was instituted at some point after 1992, presumably to prevent what happened in 1992. My mother was an uncommitted delegate to the 1992 DNC from Minnesota’s pro-life caucus (that was still a thing in 1992). She cast her vote for Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a lion who was twice the man his pathetic son has become. She received twenty-four black-and-blue marks and a vandalized dress for her trouble while the MN-DFL’s thugs manhandled her (they wanted a unanimous showing for Bill Clinton). Then she was escorted from the premises when an anonymous death threat was made against the Minnesota pro-lifers. She watched Bill Clinton’s speech (theme: the Democratic Party is a listening and diverse party that is open to everyone) from her hotel room and wept. This was the last night my mother was a Democrat, and the night Walter Mondale earned my family’s eternal enmity. The party has become much worse since then.

15. I apologize to the Democrats if I got this wrong. I see two possible pathways for appealing the ruling of the DNC Chairman about who qualifies as a presidential candidate, neither of them very promising:

Rule IX.I.1 allows the convention Chairwoman to decide all questions of order. This is confusing, but the chair of the convention, who only serves during the convention, is not the same as the chair of the DNC, who serves a four-year term. The 2024 convention Chairwoman will be Minyon Moore. In another year, she might theoretically be rejected, if the delegates staged and (miraculously) pulled off an unprecedented rebellion against this fairly anodyne Hillaryworld veteran. (This year, as we will soon see, the delegates lack that power. Only the [Convention] Rules Committee itself could remove her, and, since she is the [DNC] Rules Committee co-chair, that’s unlikely. [EDIT: However, if I were working for one of the campaigns, I would ascertain Moore’s candidate loyalty and move Heaven and earth to block her chairwomanship if she weren’t loyal to me. Perhaps we will see that happen on July 19.])

The trouble is, the DNC Chairman’s determination about who counts as a “presidential candidate” does not seem to be a “question of order.” The Chairwoman herself, I suppose, gets to rule on that, so, if she disagrees with Chairman Harrison’s determination of the candidates, she might be able overrule him and substitute her own list.

In a healthy parliamentary body, there is always a final appeal to the full body, so the entire group can decide (by majority or supermajority vote) what their own rules actually mean. The only outlet for that in these rules appears to be Rule IX.J, where a two-thirds majority of the delegates can vote to suspend the rules. Unlike in the Republican rules, however, there is no clear description of how to bring this motion forward. (In theory, I guess a single screaming delegate could make this motion. In practice, the Chairwoman is only going to recognize it if she wants to.)

There are explicitly no other options for the full body to debate the governance of the party, since Rule IX.K.1 (ludicrously) bars delegates from making any other productive parliamentary motions of any kind.

16. There could theoretically be more than one minority report, and the delegates could adopt as many or as few minority reports as they liked.

17. If Biden were turfed out of office by the 25th Amendment, Kamala Harris would become the incumbent President of the United States, but would not be the elected, incumbent President, since she was elected to the Vice-Presidency, not the Presidency. Team Biden would not want a rule that would give his own Vice-President strong incentives to stage a 25th Amendment coup against him!

18. UPDATE: July 17: When first published, this passage suggested collecting names from the June 4 meeting and matching them to actual real-life Democrats. I’ve deleted that suggestion, since the committee that met on June 4 is not the committee that will meet on July 19.

19. I can’t stop thinking about how the entire Democratic Party, from leadership to primary voters, collectively rejected Rep. Dean Phillips’ desperate attempt to save them from themselves. Then I start cackling like a witch.

20. UPDATE 17 July: The day after I published this, there was a brouhaha about the virtual roll call. This morning, the Convention Rules Committee co-chair promised to delay it from July 21 until… August 1. Exactly what I would do if I were the Biden campaign: appear to give ground, without really giving any ground, in a show of faux unity.

(Nate Silver is, of course, correct: DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison is lying about his true motivation for pushing the virtual roll call. Silver’s analysis of Ohio’s electoral significance matches my own.)