Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president.
With Joe Biden’s shock withdrawal on Sunday afternoon, the stage is set for Harris to succeed him on the ticket. The drama, though, is not about the result. It’s about the process.
The question for Democrats is whether steps will be taken to quickly coronate Harris and hand her the presidential nomination or if there will at least be the opportunity for her to face token opposition — the sort Dean Phillips put up against Joe Biden.
Already, within hours of Biden’s announcement, elected Democrats from all wings of the party had rallied behind his vice-president to endorse her as Biden’s successor, as did the incumbent president himself. It’s hard to see any scenario in which Harris is denied the nomination
Democrats were already engaged in an elaborate process to adjust the rules of the convention to allow the nominee to be officially selected well in advance of it’s being gaveled into session on August 19. The push to hold a “virtual roll call” had been initially prompted by a quirk in Ohio state law that required a nominee to be selected before August 7. Although Ohio had changed its law, Democrats were still planning on moving ahead with that online process — publicly citing paranoia about potential GOP-backed litigation and privately expressing concern about open microphones on the convention floor leading to disruption in a party with growing ideological divides between activists and voters.
During an online meeting of the DNC’s Rules Committee on Friday, every effort was made to insist that a virtual roll call was an absolute logistical necessity given the late timing of the convention and concern of legal challenges from Republicans and the Heritage Foundation.
No final vote was held then — instead, the meeting served as both a comprehensive explainer of how a virtual roll call will work and pep rally to convince members of the committee to support it. Instead, the committee will formally decide the process in the next week.
As Daniel Scholzman, a political scientist who studies political parties at Johns Hopkins University, observed, the push for the virtual roll call had taken on “a life of its own” and, even though it was not developed for this sort of circumstance, had its own inexorable momentum.
Before Biden dropped out, there was already the challenge of whether his delegates would stick by him. Pledged delegates are not formally bound to a candidate — instead, DNC rules oblige them to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”
According to current DNC rules (which can still be changed by the Rules Committee), a candidate needs a signed petition with the names of at least 300 and no more than 600 delegates to have their name placed in nomination. No delegate can sign multiple petitions, and no more than 50 delegates from a single state can do so. There are 3,933 delegates in total.
The challenge now is whether anyone besides Harris will bother to scrape together the 300 delegates to have their name placed in nomination before a virtual roll call. Prior to Biden’s decision to drop out, the online ballot would list four options: Biden; Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who mounted a quixotic bid against the incumbent in New Hampshire; Jason Palmer, the unknown who won the American Samoa primary; and “uncommitted.”
Only an hour after Biden’s announcement, Barack Obama endorsed an open process to pick the next Democratic presidential candidate. “I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,” said the 44th president.
No one seriously doubts that Harris will eventually sew up the nomination. But there are incentives for someone else to try to contest it. From the party’s perspective, there is a desire to at least gesture toward an open process. From an individual politician’s prospective, there is the potential of lots of airtime on cable-news television if they throw their hat in the ring. Any challenger to Harris would be almost certain to lose, but it would be an opportunity to build up both a national profile and a donor list if handled adeptly.
This, of course, carries some risk for Harris. She could, at least theoretically, lose. But then again, every time they take the court, the Harlem Globetrotters could theoretically lose too.
At a time when Republicans are pushing Biden’s withdrawal as a “coup” against an incumbent president, having multiple credible candidates at least offers the veneer of democratic legitimacy to replacing Biden with Harris. The downside risk is, of course, that even a “mini-primary” could prove divisive. But then again, after weeks of Democrats publicly pressuring Biden to leave the race, it’s hard to imagine that anything could be more divisive than that.
