16 Comments

Your mother is a hero for doing that at the 1992 DNC, James, and I hope for the sake of the souls of the people who mugged her and threatened her that they repent of the evil they did that day and seek to make amends for that evil.

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If I was a delegate at the DNC and voting for President, I would cast my vote for John Bel Edwards of Louisiana and if I was at the RNC, I would cast my vote for Marco Rubio of Florida.

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The frustrating part of party rules today is that your vote for Edwards would be changed to “present” (DNC Call Art. VI) and I believe your vote for Rubio would be changed to the candidate to whom you are bound (probably Trump, Haley if you’re lucky).

That is how it was in 2012/16, anyway. I have not checked this year’s rules, since they are so inconsequential.

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Thanks! Gosh that sucks. Yet another reason I’m better off being and remaining politically non-binary.

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Also, the late Governor Robert P. Casey is one of my heroes! 🙂 I highly recommend his book Fighting for Life.

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Jul 16Liked by James J. Heaney

What happened with superdelegates, as best as I can recall:

In 2016, a constant complaint from Sanders' supporters was that the media was reporting superdelegate support as if they were actually committed, showing Clinton with a much larger lead than her actual pledged delegate count gave her. This, so said the Sanders camp, gave a lot of unearned momentum to Clinton, which proceeded to bias primary voters in her favour. (As Clinton supporters retorted, the media also did this in 2008, with Clinton being heavily favoured by superdelegates at the start of that election's process, and Obama ended up winning, though the eventual pledged delegate count between himself and Clinton was far, far closer than between Clinton and Sanders.)

Despite this, by the time all the nominating contests had wrapped up, Clinton had a majority of pledged delegates, but those pledged delegates did not represent a majority of all delegates. Sanders, likely thinking he had a better shot in the general election than Clinton, continued for a time to petition superdelegates to support him instead of Clinton, but eventually conceded and endorsed Clinton. (Hypocrisy knows no bounds, though I suppose a Sanders supporter would argue that at that point, he was just playing by the rules that were set, rather than the rules as he might have wished them to be.)

All praise to The Green Papers: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/D (showing Hillary Clinton with 2,205 pledged delegates of around 4,050, but there being 4,763 total delegates).

After the 2016 election, the DNC considered alterations to the superdelegate rules. Sanders' supporters wanted to be rid of them entirely, but the rule ultimately adopted was one that merely reduced their role, though not in the way you described above, to my knowledge. The current rule, I think, is that superdelegates can only vote on the first ballot if their support won't make a difference assuming all pledged delegates actually vote for the candidate to whom they're pledged. In particular, what superdelegates cannot do is override the choice of a candidate who'd received a majority of pledged delegates but not enough of those to have a majority of all delegates. If this rule had been in place for the 2016 convention, then, ceteris paribus, Hillary Clinton would have won the nomination.

All praise to The Green Papers again: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P20/D (showing that in 2020, Joe Biden had a majority of all delegates from his pledged delegates and so superdelegates voted on the first ballot, mostly for Biden).

Of course, what Sanders supporters thought might have happened in 2016 if superdelegates couldn't have been reported as first-ballot convention floor voters in advance of knowing primary results is that since that would have meant that there was a 0-0 "likely floor vote" tie going into the nominating process between Clinton and Sanders, rather than there being a few hundred in Clinton's column already from superdelegate support, there wouldn't have been people thinking Clinton was the inevitable nominee and thus voting for her (or not bothering to vote for someone else, namely Sanders). Thus all else would not have been equal and Clinton might not have come out of the primaries with a pledged delegate lead. (Whether this would have led to a Sanders majotity of pledged delegates or, perhaps because other candidates--Martin O'Malley, anyone?--stayed in, a contested convention, is something on which I will not speculate.)

In the event of a possible contested convention, the first ballot (on which superdelegates can't vote) is essentially just for show to establish that no candidate has received a majority among the pledged delegates. After that, the superdelegates can vote.

So under the current rules, all else being equal, Clinton in 2016 would still have happened. (Whether Obama in 2008 would have happened is another matter. All praise to The Green Papers once more: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/D.phtml Because of a few delegates won by John Edwards in early contests, Barack Obama did not have a majority among the pledged delegates, and his nomination that year ultimately happened when Clinton moved, and the convention voted, to suspend the rules and nominate Obama by acclamation "in the spirit of unity", though many, perhaps most, pledged Clinton delegates at that point were voting for Obama anyway. Kerry in 2004 had a healthy majority of pledged delegates, yet again all praise to The Green Papers: https://www.thegreenpapers.com/P04/D.phtml There would have been no question of his nomination.) Sanders supporters just thought that if the current rules had been in place at the start of 2016's process, Clinton might not have ended up with that majority because all else would not have been equal, and perhaps it would have been different enough for things to have broken Sanders' way.

Then come 2020, when it was very early (before Super Tuesday, maybe even before Iowa) it was a very real possibility that if nothing changed, Sanders could well have had a plurality, but not a majority, of pledged delegates, and Sanders supporters that year were adamant that if he ended up with a plurality, he had better darned well be the nominee, even if the field were so close that that plurality was only 30% or so and so the rules to which his camp had agreed specified a contested convention with all the superdelegates voting. (Once again, hypocrisy truly knows no bounds. There was a moment in one debate where the candidates were asked if the candidate receiving a plurality, but not a majority, should become the nominee automatically or if that should lead to a contested convention, and everyone but Sanders said "contested convention", even though back in 2016 he had tried to create a contested convention! What I suspect his camp really wanted, I know some suggested this, was to, essentially, supercharge the McGovern reforms and create a single, national day of primaries on which every contest takes place simultaneously, with whoever wins the aggregate popular vote becoming the nominee, and abolish antiquated things like nominating conventions.)

tl;dr Since 2020, Democratic convention superdelegates only vote on the first ballot if their votes cannot override the pledged delegate votes, and thus the superdelegates' votes are purely performative, and this happened in 2020 since Biden's pledged delegates represented a majority of all delegates, including superdelegates. Otherwise superdelegates cannot vote on the first ballot, leading either to the nomination of the candidate who received a majority of pledged delegates (if there is one), which would have happened in 2016, or to a contested convention after the indecisive first ballot, with superdelegates being eligible to vote on all subsequent ballots, which, going strictly by these rules, would have happened in 2008. (However Obama had a majority of superdelegates in his favour so he would presumably then have won on the second ballot.)

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I don't think your description of the rule disagrees with mine! But the dive into the history, context, and applications is much appreciated, since I either never knew or once knew but later forgot nearly all of this history.

This year is interesting, because Biden has a clear majority of all delegates BUT there is a real possibility delegates will break their pledges en masse.

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Jul 17·edited Jul 17Liked by James J. Heaney

Not quite: "the superdelegates get to vote on the first round if any single candidate has a majority of the total delegates, which always happens." You need to specify that that majority comes from their pledged delegates only, because the situation in 2016, contrary to your footnote (11), was that, as I noted, Clinton did not have a majority from her pledged delegates alone. If a few things had gone differently in 2020 it's not unthinkable that Biden (or Sanders!) could have ended up in the same situation, and the last two nominating contests without an incumbent (2008 and 2016) before the implementation of the new rules both did not have one candidate with such a supermajority. That it didn't happen in 2020 doesn't mean that it's expected to be invoked only rarely; a candidate would need to get about 60% of the pledged delegates, I think, to have a majority of all delegates pledged to them, and since delegates are these days allocated proportionally in all contests on the Democratic side, that makes it entirely possible that another situation like Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Sanders could arise again. (In fact, looking at past data, I think it's happened more often than not: Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Walter Mondale in 1984 but only just, as well as Obama in 2008 and Clinton in 2016, compared to the easy wins for Clinton, Gore and Kerry in 1992, 2000 and 2004 respectively. Superdelegates were apparently first put in place after the 1980 convention with its rules fight on the floor between Carter and Kennedy.) I think this rule excluding superdelegates is intended to be invoked more often than you might think, given that it would have been at four conventions out of seven without an incumbent.

The committee that wrote the new rules was primarily composed of people nominated by the Clinton and Sanders campaigns (10 for Clinton, including the chair, 8 for Sanders, including the vice-chair, and three selected by then-DNC Chair Tom Perez). My read is that from the Clinton camp's point of view, the new rules would prevent someone from doing what Sanders tried to do after the end of the nominating contests and swing superdelegates to his side even though the judgment of the voters was clear. From the Sanders camp's point of view, the new rules would make it highly dishonest to report superdelegate support as if it were already locked in as convention votes, since those delegates would not necessarily be able to vote on the first ballot. (There was one dissenter, a former DNC Chair, though I don't know which of the three camps he belonged to.)

tl;dr The superdelegate exclusion rule was almost certainly written with the expectation that it would be invoked, since it served the interests of both camps on the committee which drafted it and would have been invoked more often than not at conventions at the end of a nominating process without a clear nominee between the introduction of superdelegates and the later reform.

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Alright, fair point. I've updated Footnote 12 with a couple extra paragraphs agreeing with you and directing readers to these two comments. Thank you for the corrections!

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Jul 18Liked by James J. Heaney

And you are correct that I had a brain fart and said footnote 11 instead of 12 (unless you added a footnote since I wrote that comment).

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I DID add a footnote today (footnote 9, one of several light edits because of a stupid mistake I made about the two Rules Committees), so no brain fart! You are batting a thousand here!

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Jul 16Liked by James J. Heaney

Great Article! Very interesting read.

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Jul 16Liked by James J. Heaney

With respect to the Ohio issue, the GOP-dominated General Assenbly did pass a one-time extension of the time to submit a nominated candidate. The 90-day delay in that becoming effective is a state constitutional provision, which would allow petitions to be submitted to place that bill on the ballot for an up or down vote by the voters. (had both houses passed it by a supermajority -- not sure offhand how much, it would have gone into effect immediately). That won't happen in this case, of course, and the DNC's caution is unwarranted.

having said all that, yes, a permanent fix should have been in place. Ohio's GOP (other than Governor Mike DeWine, who is not Trumpy) is MAGA, obnoxious and incompetent. They botched a response to the Ohio abortion amendment which made it more likely for it to pass, which it did last November. And their gerrymandering has been so blatant as to provoke a vote on an independent districting commission. Had they been less greedy, they could have gotten away with districts that allowed them to retain control. (Can you tell I don't like the Ohio GOP?)

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Jul 17Liked by James J. Heaney

Awesome read James! Well researched and cited! This type of scholarship is sadly missing from today's mainstream dialogue. I discovered your Substack via your comment to Nate Silver's Substack post he wrote after the disastrous debate on June 27. I like your thesis in that post: you don't have to like Biden to show that the statistics favor him over a replacement in terms of odds of winning.

I did want to call into question your claim about Biden being "a vile person" because of his seeming controversial views about Catholicism and abortion. I didn't see his position on the matter as that extreme, but rather more so an attempt to reconcile religious belief and doctrine with political reality. Of course an argument can be made that his is a hypocritical position, but couldn't an argument also be made that his reconciliation demonstrates a flexibility in thinking and not a blind devotion to any single ideology, religious or secular?

Of course, I could be very wrong as I'm not a particularly smart person, so I'm thinking stupid thoughts, but such a dumb thought did cross my mind as I was reading your piece. Thank you again for your well-written efforts at explaining the Democrat Party's incredibly confusing nomination process.

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Thanks, Henry! And welcome. Obviously you are actually very smart, because you read De Civitate! (Also, Silver Bulletin. I've been a fan since 2008 and I've never been let down.) Your impeccable taste is a reliable marker of high intelligence. :)

However, I don't think that your perspective helps redeem President Biden. (Unfortunately, to support my position that Biden is vile, I am going to have to say quite a few more mean things about him, so this is going to be an awfully negative comment.)

I absolutely do agree that flexibility in thinking is good -- sometimes. I very much want flexible thinkers in office who are able to roll with a policy defeat over, say, union power, and who are able to find other ways to accomplish similar goals. I very much want flexible thinkers who can make compromises on, like, setting the corporate income tax rate at 20%, even when they'd really prefer 10% or 30%. Flexible thinking makes the world go round!

But there are also things where I want absolute rigid inflexibility from my leaders. I demand leaders who are absolutely inflexible about leaving office peacefully when they lose elections, for example. (If you're new here, you may not know just how fully I lost my mind over this, but hoo boy: https://decivitate.substack.com/p/roundup-mnscotus-disqualification ) I demand leaders who are absolutely inflexible when a military leader suggests that maybe we could win a war by committing a few war crimes -- a little mustard gas here, a deliberate murder of civilians there. No! No war crimes! Not one! Never!

And I demand absolute, total inflexibility from leaders when it comes to child murder. I think almost everyone does, really, when they face the question squarely. America's abortion debate, however, is a hall of mirrors and thought-terminating clichés that help protect people from the monstrous implications of very common positions, so nobody thinks about Biden's position long enough to realize, "Oh, right, he's actually saying that child murder is awesome."

I think most Democrats just assume he's lying about thinking that abortion is child murder. At this point, I tend to agree with them. His true beliefs are whatever they need to be, so he maintains this facade about abortion, but privately thinks it isn't child murder.

It still seems extraordinarily bad to me, though, that someone would lie in such a way that makes it look like he is pro-child murder! This is one place where simply admitting that he doesn't think the unborn child has humanity or human rights would make him look *less* bad! But he's wrapped his beliefs in a pretzel too many times over the years and is now trapped in the untenable position of claiming abortion is child murder but also claiming abortion is really great, actually. That's Joe Biden. That's who he is. He says whatever he needs to say to get elected. (Oh, look, breaking news today: he's embracing Supreme Court term limits -- an actually good idea! -- because his nomination is on the ropes.) He is contemptible. His path to Hell is very different from Donald Trump's, but it is nevertheless clear as the day is long. As I said, he of course deserves our pity and our kindness, but we mustn't be blind to him, either. We all try to see the best in the people on our own team, but, all too often, that leads to us not seeing them at all.

Speaking of Hell: I'm tempted to stop there. I deliberately avoided the intersection between Biden's abortion beliefs and his religion, but, since you bring it up, I really don't think I should just leave it sitting there.

I tend to think that Biden's Catholicism makes his abortion position look even worse. It implies that he only believes (or mouths a belief) that abortion is child murder because the Pope told Biden he had to (and not because he has a glancing familiarity with 9th-grade biology). He's not even consistent about this, since the very next thing that the Catholic Church teaches about abortion is: "Every government has a duty to protect the rights of the unborn," which Biden wholly rejects. This implies that he will adopt public beliefs on matters of great importance for *wholly irrational reasons*: residual childhood fondness for the Church, perhaps, or a keen awareness of the power of the Catholic voting bloc. It certainly does *not* reflect a thoroughgoing, rational belief that the Catholic Church's authority to teach right and wrong and humility in the face of that authority (something I can respect), since Biden rejects that authority in the very next breath.

Worse, Biden's position seems to betray a belief that Catholic thinking about abortion is somehow irrational or inaccessible to non-Catholics, when the truth is that Catholic thinking about abortion is simply, "Those are our children. Come on. It's 2024 and we know what an organism is and how fetal development occurs. It's bad to kill children on purpose." The Church has its share of esoteric religious positions that can only be derived from divine revelation (like transubstantiation), but this? C'mon, Joe. You're not just making yourself look bad with this; you're putting your whole Church into unjustified disrepute for the sake of your political career.

So, yeah, the more I look at Biden's position on abortion, the worse it looks to me. It is either monstrously cruel or monstrously dishonest, with a side order of religion-inflected irrationality and, frankly, disrespect. Even if pro-choicers are right after all and abortion has no more moral significance than clipping a toenail, Biden's position on it is vile.

Finally, as I said in the original footnote, this isn't an isolated incident, although it is perhaps an especially stark one. You can see Biden making this two-step all the time, throughout his career. As an article I enjoyed at Discourse Magazine earlier today put it, "[Biden's] formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: Find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities." That's just who he is. Any persona beyond that is, and always has been, marketing.

Many such cases. (One of these days perhaps I will unload a similar diatribe on J.D. Vance.)

Uh... on that... uh... cheery note, I just want to once again say welcome! I'm glad you found the piece useful! Come back Friday for my livetweeing of the Convention Rules Committee meeting!

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Jul 20Liked by James J. Heaney

Can’t wait for more out of America’s most trusted voice: “James J. Heaney Institute for Politics Ain’t Beanbag”

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