Gastonia, NC
One correction before the argument, because the roll call is running as I write this and it matters.
Votes are being cast. Not by the public, but by roughly four thousand delegates, and those delegates were themselves elected in primaries this spring. The party set a qualifying threshold — three hundred delegate signatures, no more than fifty from any one state — and nobody else filed. She is being nominated by a body, on a ballot, under published rules.
I read copy for a living, so I want the sentence precise. “She never faced a single voter” is not accurate. What is accurate is that no voter was ever asked whether she should be the presidential nominee. Those are different claims and only the second one holds.
The second one holds completely, though, and it is enough.
Every delegate voting this week was elected in a contest about a different question. The ballot in March said Joseph R. Biden Jr. Voters were asked whether they wanted him, they said yes, and the delegates they sent are now casting ballots for somebody else under a rule that asks them to reflect the sentiments of the people who elected them. Reflect is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.
So the calendar produced delegates and the delegates produced a nominee, and at no point did anyone put the actual question to the actual electorate. That is a formality in the precise sense — a rite that ran on schedule while the function it was supposed to perform happened somewhere else.
And the first half of the question is also right, which is the part people keep resisting. The Constitution says nothing about primaries. Parties choose their candidates. This one used its own rules and its own procedure and nothing improper occurred.
Both halves. Lawful succession, empty calendar. The mistake is treating those as alternatives when they are the same fact described from two directions.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota keeps hearing that the party should have printed a succession rule in advance. It did. That is the part everybody in this argument has missed and it changes the complaint.
The Democratic Party’s charter gives its national committee the authority to fill vacancies in the nomination. It has been there for decades. It was used in 1972 when Thomas Eagleton left the ticket and the committee installed Sargent Shriver in his place — no voter was consulted then either, and nobody called it a crisis.
So the rule exists, it is written down, and it has precedent. The complaint that the party made this up in July is wrong.
What is genuinely without precedent is the object. Eagleton was a vice-presidential nominee. No major party has ever replaced a presidential nominee after the primaries in the modern era. That is the first time, and the fact that the rule covers it does not mean anybody had thought about what it would feel like.
Here is where I land after sorting that out.
The civics answer is clean and boring. Parties are private associations. They nominate by their own rules. Those rules provided for this. Anybody arguing a constitutional injury has no case and should stop.
The legitimacy answer is different and it is about language rather than law. For a year this party ran a nominating calendar and described its output as the people’s choice — used that phrase against anyone who wanted a contest, called the desire for one sabotage. Then the only product of that calendar was withdrawn and replaced by a mechanism that consults nobody outside the committee and the delegates.
You may run a party-choice system. You may run a voter-choice system. What you may not do is run the first and describe it as the second for a year and then fall back on the first when the second becomes inconvenient.
If the rule is that the vice president succeeds, print it on the January ballot next to the incumbent’s name. Voters would understand it immediately — it is exactly what they already assume about a ticket. It costs nothing and it would have prevented the entire feeling of a gift.
Prescott Valley, AZ
There is a distinction here I would spend a whole class on, because it explains most of the confusion.
Delegates are voting this week. Thousands of them, in a roll call that opened on the first. Those delegates were chosen in primaries by ordinary people.
So the question is not whether votes were cast. It is whose question the votes answered.
The March ballots asked one thing: do you want Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. Fourteen million people answered. The delegates they elected are now answering an entirely different question — do you want Kamala Harris — and the party’s rules permit that, because a pledged delegate is asked in good conscience to reflect the sentiments of the people who sent him rather than to obey a specific instruction.
That is a real distinction and students need it, because it comes up everywhere. A body elected to decide one thing decides another. It happens with legislatures, boards, and juries in different forms, and it is generally lawful and generally uncomfortable.
What makes this instance uncomfortable is scale and language. The scale: this is the first time in the modern era that a major party has replaced its presidential nominee after the primaries, and it was done in a fortnight. The language: for a year the party described its calendar as the voice of the electorate, which set an expectation the mechanism was never built to meet.
I would not teach this as a scandal. I would teach it as the difference between a delegated body and a direct one, and I would ask the class which they think a presidential nomination should be. The honest answer is that the American system has been trying to have both since about 1972 and this summer is what happens when the two come apart.
Lawful succession, yes. A calendar that turned out to be an instruction nobody was required to follow, also yes.
Dayton, OH
A plant that transfers a job to the deputy when the lead walks off has a succession rule. That is not a customer vote for the deputy, and the interesting thing is what the rule actually required.
Look at the specification. To be placed in nomination this week, a candidate needed three hundred delegate signatures with no more than fifty from any single state. That is not a high bar. In a party with roughly four thousand delegates, three hundred signatures is a shade over seven percent, and the state cap exists to prevent a single delegation from qualifying somebody on its own.
Nobody else filed. Not one person.
That is the finding and it is more precise than “no one was allowed to run.” Somebody could have run. The threshold was published, it was reachable, and the window was open for days. What happened is that every plausible rival looked at a sitting president’s endorsement, a united congressional leadership, a nine-figure fundraising week, and about ninety days on the calendar, and concluded the attempt would end their career without changing the outcome.
In process terms that is not a blocked line. It is a line nobody attempted because everyone had already run the numbers.
Whether that is better or worse than a formal barrier is a real question. A formal barrier can be pointed at and attacked. A calculation cannot, and it produces the same result more reliably.
So my answer is both halves, filed accurately. The Constitution leaves this to parties and the party used a published rule with a real threshold and an open window. That settles the civics. And the primary calendar, which was sold all year as the mechanism by which the people select a nominee, turned out to be an input to a delegate body that then selected somebody the people had never been asked about. That is a formality in function even though every step was in spec.
Specs that permit this outcome are the thing to argue about. The people who followed them are not.
Wheeling, WV
I want to be careful with the phrase “never faced a voter,” because our side is about to use it a hundred times and it is not quite right.
Delegates are voting this week and delegates come from primaries. What is true is narrower: no voter was ever asked the question. The ballot in March said Biden. Nobody in this country has ever been handed a piece of paper with her name on it for president and been asked to mark it.
That is the accurate version and it is plenty.
Here is what I keep coming back to from thirty years of contract work. Every union I ever dealt with had a succession rule for officers, and every one of them was legitimate, and none of them was ever confused with an election. Members knew the difference. The executive board fills a vacancy, the membership elects. Two different things, both written down, nobody pretends otherwise.
The trouble here is not the rule. The rule is fine and it existed and it has been used before, in 1972, when the committee replaced a running mate without asking anyone. The trouble is that this party spent a year telling its own members that the calendar was the members speaking, and using that as a reason to treat anybody who wanted a contest as disloyal.
You cannot run the executive-board rule and call it the membership vote. Not for a year, not with a straight face, and not while calling people traitors for asking.
So: lawful, and a formality, and the second one is the part that will linger. Members remember being told the vote mattered. They will notice that when it stopped mattering, nobody asked them again.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would want to know what is actually new here, because everybody this week is saying unprecedented and most of what they are pointing at is not.
Party succession rules are not new. The Democratic charter has provided for filling a nomination vacancy for decades. It was used in 1972 when the committee replaced Eagleton with Shriver — a running mate swapped out by a committee, with no voter consulted, and the republic survived.
Delegate roll calls are not new. That is how nominations were made for most of American history.
What is new, and it is the only thing that is, is the object. No major party has replaced a presidential nominee after the primary season in the modern era. Not once. Every prior use of the succession rule involved a running mate or a pre-primary field.
So this is a first, and firsts get scored differently in my business than routine claims. A routine claim gets handled under the schedule. A first tells you the schedule was written by people who did not expect this and did not price it.
That is the honest finding. The rules covered it because the drafters wrote them broadly, not because anybody had thought this through. And nobody had thought it through because the scenario requires a party to nominate a man it privately doubts and then remove him after the ballots are printed, which is not a contingency you plan for. It is a contingency you create.
Lawful under the policy, then. Also a claim nobody underwrote, arising from a risk the same people manufactured in 2023 when they closed the field.
Formality is the right word for the calendar and I would use it without heat. A calendar that produces delegates who then choose somebody it never considered is doing something, but it is not selecting a nominee. It is selecting the body that selects the nominee, which is a different product than the one advertised on the box.
Long Island, NY
I draft organic documents, so let me put the operative provision on the table rather than argue around it.
The Democratic Party’s charter vests its national committee with authority to fill vacancies in the party’s nominations. The delegate selection rules provide that pledged delegates shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them — language chosen deliberately in the seventies to remove any legal binding while preserving a moral expectation.
Both provisions predate this year by decades. Both were followed. The suggestion in some quarters that the party should have written a succession rule in January is answered by the fact that it wrote one long ago and has used it before, in 1972, on a vice-presidential vacancy.
So the first half of the question resolves cleanly. The Constitution leaves nominations to parties, this party had a rule, and the rule was applied.
The second half is a finding about the gap between an instrument’s advertised function and its operative one, and that is a real category in my work. A required rite that no longer performs the function justifying it is a formality — not void, not improper, simply hollow.
Here the advertised function was selection of the nominee by voters. The operative function was selection of a delegate body by voters, followed by selection of the nominee by that body under a good-conscience standard that binds nobody. When those two coincide, the advertised function looks true. They coincided in every cycle since 1972 because the primary winner was always the nominee. This year they came apart for the first time, and the coming-apart revealed which one had been load-bearing.
That is the whole finding and it does not require anybody to have acted badly.
What I would recommend, and it costs nothing, is that the party say so on the ballot. A line under the presidential preference vote stating that delegates are pledged in conscience rather than in law, and that a vacancy is filled by the national committee. Voters would read it and shrug, because it is what they already assume about a ticket. The shrug is the point. Nobody feels cheated by a rule they were shown.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books and the entry here needs three lines, not one.
Line one: the delegates voted. Roughly four thousand of them, this week, elected in primaries. That is a real ballot under a real rule.
Line two: no voter was ever asked about her. The March ballot said Biden and that is the only question anybody was put.
Line three: the party’s charter has provided for filling a vacancy in the nomination for decades and used it in 1972. There was a rule. It was followed.
Three entries and none of them is a scandal. What is a scandal is the account they were posted to for a year.
For twelve months this party described its calendar as the people choosing. It used that description as a reason to call a contest disloyal. Then the calendar’s only product was withdrawn and the replacement came from a delegate body under a rule that requires nothing more than good conscience.
Both things cannot be the same account. Either the primary selects the nominee or it selects the people who select the nominee, and this year we found out which.
So I would post it as lawful succession under a printed rule, and as a calendar that turned out to be a ratification of one man rather than a selection of a nominee. The first is civics. The second is what actually happened, and the second is what members will remember when somebody next tells them their vote in March settles anything.
Sydney, Australia
I have been reading American commentary about this for a fortnight and the thing I keep noticing is that the grievance would be unintelligible almost anywhere else.
No Australian has ever voted for a prime minister. Not once, not ever, not in any election since federation. You vote for a member in your local division. The party with the numbers picks the leader, and the leader becomes prime minister, and if the party changes its mind the leader changes too. The same is true in Britain, in Canada, in New Zealand. Several hundred million people in the Westminster world live under governments whose heads they have never had the opportunity to select and would not expect to.
So the sentence “she became the nominee without facing a single voter” reads to me the way “she became prime minister without facing a single voter” would read to an Australian, which is to say it reads as a description of the ordinary arrangement.
That is not a defence of what happened. It is a way of locating what actually went wrong, which is not the mechanism.
The United States has two nominating systems stacked on top of each other. The older one — a delegate body that selects the nominee, with the national committee empowered to fill vacancies — has been in place since the parties began. The newer one, the mass primary, was bolted on after 1968 and has now run for half a century. In every cycle since 1972 the two produced the same answer, because the primary winner was always the nominee, and the country came to believe the newer system was the operative one.
This summer they came apart for the first time, and the older system turned out to be the one that was load-bearing. The delegates were always the nominating organ. The primary was an instruction to them, and the instruction was not binding — as your own party’s rules say plainly, in language chosen in the seventies precisely to avoid binding anybody.
What Americans discovered in July is not that their party cheated. It is that they have been living under a delegate system while describing a plebiscitary one, and the description was accurate for fifty years by coincidence rather than by design.
The comparative point I would offer is narrow. Countries that never claimed popular selection of leaders do not suffer this. The legitimacy claim is different — you elected a party, the party chooses — and because it is stated openly, a change of leader produces argument about wisdom rather than about betrayal.
The Americans have the harder version of the problem, and they created it by making a promise their machinery was never built to keep.
