Gaddie: UnDemocratic Party Convention

Amidst all the arguing about the Democratic nomination – how many delegates does it take to win, how should delegates behave – I thought it’d be useful to have a history lesson about how Democrats have changed their nomination practices over the years.

A History Lesson

By Keith Gaddie

Special To

The McCarville Report

Until the end of the 1930s, to win the Democratic party nomination, a candidate had to have two-thirds of the delegate vote. Delegates were apportioned to states based on both size and loyalty to the Democratic party in elections. The consequence was that the South had votes out of proportion to it population or its votes. Southern Democrats could cast an effective veto over a nomination they didn’t like by sitting on their 30% or so of delegates, casting them for a trailing candidate or a favorite son until they could cut a deal that continued to protect segregation. One Democratic convention went 128 ballots seeking a nominee.

The two-thirds rule disappeared by 1940, and the veto shifted to northern urban machines and blocks of urban minority voters. The South could be part of a winning coalition, but given the southern dislike for black political empowerment and labor unions, such coalitions were tenuous at best, if not impossible. The South started to slip away in 1948 and it never really came back to the Democrats.

The Democrats, however, still had caucuses, strong state party organizations, and the "unit" rule. The unit rule allowed the majority of a state’s delegation to cast all of the votes from a state for a proposal or candidate. When Hubert Horatio Humphrey was nominated in 1968, it was the strong boss states and the unit rule that made his nomination possible.

The revolution in the Democratic Party overwhelmed the powers that be. Subsequently, the chairman of the DNC, Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, would appoint a commission to create a democratic delegate selection process so that the debacle of Chicago ’68 would not be repeated. The product of commission, the McGovern-Frasier reform (named after the commission leaders), was a primary/ caucus mechanism for selecting delegates that eliminated the unit rule, eliminated winner-take-all primaries, and required proportionality of delegate selection in a state, within electoral district (like congressional or state senate districts), and also required racial, ethnic, and gender quotas to make a convention that was not overwhelmingly composed of pink men in blue suits.

The problem with McGovern-Frasier was that it created a process that rendered the emergence of a majority nominee difficult at best. It also completely took party leadership and elected officials out of the nomination process. In 1982, the Hunt Commission proposed to bring party officials and elected leaders (PLEOs, in the jargon of the party) into the nomination process by allocating roughly 20% of the delegates to such leaders, who were unpledged. The idea was two-fold – to bring party leadership back into the convention, and to create a situation where party leadership could broker a nomination when no majority winner was determined through the primaries and caucuses.

At the same time, roughly, southern state Democratic leaders started to get antsy about presidential politics. From 1964-80, the majority of white voters in the South abandoned Democrats for president, and the concern of old school Democrats like Georgia house speaker Tom Murphy was that national Democratic nominees were too liberal, and needed to be moderated by a southern influence. Here begins the race to the bottom in primary scheduling with the creation of Super Tuesday, a mega-primary in late March that placed a huge bloc of southern and border state delegates into play on the same day. Presumably, by forcing the nomination fight to come South after Iowa and New Hampshire, the South could ordain a front-runner and moderate the national party.
The old white guys of the South were born of the courthouse gangs but headed into an era of rapid suburbanization and increased black political empowerment. They didn’t calculate two factors into their equation: (1) that the McGovern-Frasier proportionality rules till guaranteed a split in the southern delegations; and (2) that black and while voters might have different preferences in the South, and black votes were magnified in Democratic primaries. In the first major Super Tuesday, 1988, the South split three ways for Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, and Mike Dukakis. Meanwhile, on the GOP side, the Republicans came out of Super Tuesday with a front-runner who had a huge delegate lead -- George Herbert Walker Bush.

The race to the bottom continued, until by 2004, Super Tuesday moved from Saint Patrick’s Day to Ground Hog Day, and by 2008 Iowa nearly caucused in December 2007. The Democrats, who again tinkered with the system to prevent front-loading of their primaries and caucuses and stop the race to the bottom, declared they would strip state parties of delegates if they jumped ahead of the February 5 start date and were not part of the select few – Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina – who were seeded early. Florida and Michigan jumped the gun, and 368 delegates disappeared from the equation. The majority at the convention went 2,209 to 2,025.

This, of course, brings us to today. Come May 20, Barack Obama will likely have won a majority of delegates in primaries and caucuses excluding Florida and Michigan. But, it is also worth noting that, whether the threshold is 2,209 or 2,025 (where it will stay if the Democrats decide to do something radical, namely, follow their own rules), a candidate who wins a majority of the delegates in primary and caucus still falls well short of nomination. To win the nomination and not have superdelegates come into play requires a candidate win about 63% of the pledged delegates, or a simple majority of pledged delegates and PLEOs.

It requires extraordinary support in the rank and file to overcome, and it is a surprise to many Democrats, who often do not understand their own nomination rules. Before a Democrat goes off feeling bad for not knowing the rules, relax and take a bath in forgiveness. This ignorance applied to the people who would shape the presumptive, winning campaign -- Hillary Clinton’s own pollster and strategist, Mark Penn, did not understand that California was proportional, and assumed a winner-take-all scenario in his campaign plan.

Put another way, there’s a new veto, and it isn’t from the South, but from the political class who are the guts of the Democratic Party: the ambitious officeholders who are in congress and state government; and the activists and organizers who create the mechanisms that raise money and coordinate volunteer and expert effort to elect those ambitious politicians.

Dr. Keith Gaddie is a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, pollster, pundit and author.

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