Voters and Democratic elites are concerned about President Biden's age and ability to carry out his duties, as well as his lackluster polls against former President Trump. The movement to register dissatisfaction with Biden in the Michigan primary on Tuesday did not amplify concerns.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that the party choose a new standard-bearer at this late date, perhaps through an old-fashioned “brokered agreement” that ignores the results of the primaries. But replacing the presumptive nominee now would be bad for Democrats and democracy.
Biden will not officially become the nominee until he receives a majority of delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention in August. But even though only a handful of states have voted and less than 1% of delegates have been allocated, it is already too late for a new candidate to challenge Biden by entering the primary. The deadlines for submitting ballots have passed in most states, and states where not enough delegates were filed to win the nomination.
A question I've heard most often is whether delegates can “break the law” at the convention and choose another candidate. They could – but they won't.
Since Democratic delegates are committed to their candidates but not legally bound, they can vote for someone else. But the delegates will be loyal Biden supporters selected by his campaign and sent to the convention to vote for him. They will not suddenly decide to shift their loyalty elsewhere.
The only way Biden's delegates might abandon him is if the president decides not to run and encourages them to vote for someone else. An ambitious incumbent making that decision would likely require at least as much convincing from party figures as former President Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with a clearer sense that he is more likely to lose in November than any other Democrat. .
However, it is not clear who that other Democrat will be. The most obvious choice is Vice President Kamala Harris, but she is polling worse than Biden, making this scenario risky and unlikely. In the absence of another clear alternative that unites rather than divides the party, which includes a diverse coalition of voters and factions, Democrats are unlikely to be able to agree on a different candidate. Delegates could descend into chaos and all-out battles on the convention floor, which certainly will not improve the party's chances of winning in November.
Before going down this path, Democrats should pay attention to their history. Delegates routinely select candidates without guidance from voters in primaries and caucuses.
In 1968, Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey for president at their convention in Chicago. Humphrey was not the choice of Democratic voters. It couldn't have been, because he didn't participate in any primaries. With his nomination at the request of party elites and delegates, protests broke out in the streets of Chicago, and police forces and the National Guard clashed violently with the demonstrators.
Humphrey then lost to Richard Nixon, and Democrats recognized internal discord as a threat to the party and took quick and purposeful steps to reform it. The McGovern-Fraser Commission overhauled the party's presidential nomination process, wresting power from the “smoke-filled rooms” among party elites. The committee's recommendations strengthened the relationship between voters' preferences and the final candidate.
Since then, the Democratic Party has maintained its commitment to giving voters a voice. In 2016, when the party created the Unity Reform Commission in the wake of the nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Democrats sought to increase participation by encouraging caucus primaries and strengthening confidence in the integrity of the nominating process.
Delegates voting this year for anyone other than Biden would undermine those goals, returning the Democratic Party to a decidedly less democratic era when voters' preferences didn't make much of a difference.
It has been argued that parties retain more influence in the nomination process than is commonly acknowledged, including by setting the rules of contests. There is also an argument that parties should have a greater role, an argument that was particularly prominent in 2016, when Republicans sought to prevent Donald Trump from winning the nomination.
But if either party wants to shift the balance of power toward partisan elites again, it must do so in a deliberate and transparent way – as the Democratic Party has done repeatedly – and not after voting has begun.
Maybe Democrats would be better served with a different candidate in 2024. But it's too late for that now. Primary voters had no meaningful choice in the matter, not because no serious candidate could run against Biden, but because none did. Delegates and the party should not decide to go in a different direction after any number of potential contenders refuse to face voters.
As Democrats return to Chicago for another convention this summer, they should keep in mind that while their nominating process is not perfect, it is more democratic than ever. They have good reason to keep it that way.
Caitlin E. Jewett is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of Primary Rules: Parties, Voters, and Presidential Nominations.
