Don't look for either party to have a brokered convention next year.
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Monday, September 17, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Is it possible," I am often asked, "that we could have a brokered national convention this year?" There is a yearning in some quarters to see an old-time convention again, with platform or credentials fights, multiple ballots, favorite-son candidates and old political pros holding back delegates on the first or second ballot so that their candidate can be seen as gaining strength on the third or fourth.
You know what I mean: delegates wearing funny hats, waving home-made signs, roll calls with delegation leaders bellowing praises of their great state. Conventions where there's suspense about the outcome. Conventions that actually decide the presidential nominee. Is it possible that the Democrats or the Republicans could have that kind of convention next year?
A lot of people who don't follow politics closely think that it is. With multiple serious candidates competing for each party's nomination, it's possible that no candidate will emerge from the caucuses and primaries with a majority of delegates in each party.
The theoretical possibility is greater in the Democratic Party, because it tends to allocate delegates by proportional representation. If you make a straight-line extrapolation from current polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, assume that the candidates there get a bounce from their showings and calculate the number of delegates per candidate in succeeding contests, three or four candidates would emerge with votes in excess of the 15% threshold required in most contests for delegates, and none would end up with a majority.
That's not a scenario most political insiders expect to happen. More likely the race will boil down to two candidates, one of whom will end up with a majority of delegates. Still, it's theoretically possible.
Similarly, though Republicans tend to use winner-take-all rules to allocate delegates, one could imagine that four or five candidates will be closely enough matched to prevent any one candidate from winning a majority of delegates. Not likely, but possible.
But even if these unlikely scenarios occur, you're not going to see an old-time convention in Denver in August or in St. Paul in September. To understand why, you have to understand what conventions used to be, and how they operated.
The old-time convention was a medium through which men who seldom saw each other and often didn't know each other could communicate, negotiate and reach an agreement. And not always productively.
At the first national convention--held in Baltimore, Md. by the Anti-Masonic Party in September 1831--116 delegates from 13 states nominated Attorney General William Wirt, a former Mason who found nothing repugnant about Masonry.
Three months later a group of 168 delegates from 18 states opposed to President Andrew Jackson met and unanimously nominated Henry Clay. Jackson's backers, with Martin Van Buren pulling the strings behind the scenes, staged the first Democratic National Convention in May 1832. It concurred in nominations Jackson had received from state legislative caucuses and then nominated Van Buren for vice president.
Political parties were then and remained for years alliances of state parties, many of which had little in common. The Whigs, as Jackson's opponents came to be known, had no national convention in 1836 but nominated three regional candidates to oppose Van Buren in 1836; Michael Holt's definitive "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" is an account not of a national party, but of separate state parties.
From 1840 to 1852 the Whigs had four national conventions, in which votes were cast by unit rules in secret state caucuses; in three of the four there were multiple ballots (53 in 1852). Three of the four nominated generals, two of whom were elected president but died in office after one month and 16 months.
The Democrats, recognizing early the diversity of their state parties, required a two-thirds vote from their first convention in 1832 (it was abolished in favor of majority rule in 1936). They had their first multiballot convention in 1844, when on the ninth ballot they nominated a "dark horse," former Tennessee governor and congressman James K. Polk.
Even in the days of old-time conventions, multiballot contests were less common than legend would have it. The Democrats have gone on to multiple ballots in just 15 of 49 national conventions. The Republicans, who held their first convention in 1856, in just 10 of 44 national conventions. Since the 1920s the parties have had only four multiballot conventions, the Democrats in 1932 and 1952, the Republicans in 1940 and 1948 (you may note that only in the first of these did the nominee win in November).
The convention of legend was, of course, the 1924 Democratic National Convention at the old Madison Square Garden. The Democrats were sharply split between Southern and rural Drys and big city machine Wets. The minority report condemning the Ku Klux Klan, then in an expansionary period, was rejected by a margin of 543 3/20 to 542 7/20. The candidate of the South, William McAdoo, led the "happy warrior" big city leader Al Smith by 431 to 241 on the first ballot, but was still short of the majority and far from the necessary two-thirds. By the 50th ballot McAdoo had gained 30 votes and Smith 79; on the 100th ballot McAdoo fell behind John W. Davis, former solicitor general and ambassador to Britain (and, 30 years later, lead lawyer for the losing side in Brown v. Board of Education). On the 101st ballot McAdoo and Smith dropped out and Alabama's Oscar Underwood finished second behind Davis; on the 103rd Davis was finally nominated. All of this in a sweltering hall where delegates were covered in sweat, covered in epic style by the Baltimore Sun's H. L. Mencken.
The function of the convention as a communications medium became clear to me in reading the memoir of Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 campaign manager, Postmaster General James Farley. At one point Farley tells how he was able to predict, accurately, that Roosevelt would carry every state but Maine and Vermont in 1936. Farley transmitted the prediction to FDR in a book sent by special messenger containing copies of letters from Democratic leaders in every state, letters he assured Roosevelt were "not a week old." He added that he was "telephoning every state leader north of the Mason and Dixon line this afternoon for last minute reports, and if I get anything worthwhile I will pass it on to you this evening."
In other words, in 1936 it was considered extraordinary for even the campaign manager of the incumbent president of the U.S. to make long-distance calls to political leaders. Men of business in the 1930s, and up through the 1950s when direct-distance dialing was instituted, communicated largely through letters. Long-distance calls remained rare in the early 1960s, when they cost about $1 a minute at a time when factory workers earned $100 a week.
Politicians in the years of old-time conventions did not reveal their bottom-line negotiating positions or their goals in writing. They remembered that the 1884 Republican nominee James G. Blaine was assailed with the concluding words of a letter that had gotten into the wrong hands: "Burn this letter!" In 1932 Farley could not begin his serious politicking for the Democratic nomination until he got off the train at Chicago's Union Station and could speak with other politicians in person. Campaign managers did not really know how many delegate votes their candidates had until the first roll call. Preliminary roll calls on platform resolutions or credential fights provided useful and hitherto unavailable information about candidate strength.
Only when political operators had that information would they negotiate for real, as they did in the "smoke-filled room" in Chicago's Blackstone Hotel where Warren Harding clinched the nomination in 1920. And clever operators could transform the mood of the convention hall, as liberal Republicans did by packing the galleries with young men chanting "We Want Willkie!" in Philadelphia in 1940 and as the city's sewer commissioner did a few weeks later by piping into the loudspeakers people crying "We Want Roosevelt!" a few weeks later in Chicago.
Today the convention as a communications medium has been replaced by other media, such as long-distance telephones, frequent air travel, an abundance of public opinion polls and by the television networks' delegate counts (Martin Plissner conducted the first one for CBS in 1968; in 1976 the networks' counts held up in the very close contest between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan). Not to mention the Political Hotline (founded by Doug Bailey in the 1980s), the Internet, the blogosphere and Blackberries. The kind of communication that was possible only at the convention in the old days is now going on all around us.
The parties will continue to hold national conventions, because the experience of the last 25 years tells them that they can be (though aren't always) effective advertisements for their nominees, who have of course been chosen months before. The vice presidential nominees also have been chosen before the convention in most cases. But even if the caucuses and primaries of one or both parties in 2008 fail to give any candidate a majority of delegates, no one is going to wait for the convention to negotiate an outcome.
Mr. Barone is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. He is the principal co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics" (National Journal Group, 2005).
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