Much To Process
Delegates, the DNC, and the essential parties. And JD Vance.
Delegates to the DNC are growing more important by the day, given the swirling news on President’s Biden decision. So tune in to the Delegates Are Democracy zoom in less than an hour at 10am ET this morning, featuring presidential nomination expert Elaine Kamarck. And check out our post yesterday for more context.
You can register for the Zoom here - and please share with any delegates to the DNC you have in your network. More than 200 have registered in less than 24 hours since the registration link was posted.
But first, zooming back out to the big picture. Political parties are vital to democracy. And not just “partisanship”, but literally the parties themselves. Here’s Stanford political scientist Didi Kuo:
Strong parties with roots in society are considered essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth … The history of parties is the history of democracy itself—the history of how representation is built and how it becomes stable and permanent.
Parties have clear processes for selecting presidential nominees, a fact Americans may become more familiar with in the coming days as we live out the history of democracy in real time.
Purpose of Partying
We often write about the importance of strong parties from the centrist perspective, particularly the need for strong moderate factions. But underlying this is a firm commitment to the reality that the most effective centrism occurs within political parties, not despite them.
In The Bulwark, we argued To Defeat Authoritarianism, We Need Partisan Centrism. In the journal Democracy, we wrote about how The Vital Center must learn from the extremes within their own “hollow” parties.
While we disagreed with some of the Ezra Klein column that started all the contested convention chatter back in February, his emphasis on the purpose of parties rang true. Ezra wrote about the history of parties, centered around this succinct quote from the 1860 convention:
My favorite line in it comes from Senator Charles Sumner, who sends a welcome note to the delegates, “whose duty it will be to organize victory.”
Whose duty it will be to organize victory — I love that. That’s what a convention is supposed to do. It’s what a political party is supposed to do: organize victory. Because victory doesn’t just happen. It has to be organized.
The longer quote from Sumner, not included in Ezra’s column, may be even more apt today:
I rejoice in the omens of triumph which I see in all directions. One of these is the enthusiastic energy with which the Republicans of Chicago are prepared to welcome that great Convention, whose duty it will be to organize victory.
Enthusiasm! Energy! The subsequent letter, from the original Cassius Clay, captures another element of party conventions:
Nothing would give me more pleasure than to participate in the honors of the occasion and enjoy the social reunion of friends, and share the patriotic fervor …
Pivoting to a Pivotal Role
The Delegates Are Democracy initiative launched to bridge the information gap between the social and festive role that party conventions play, and the potentially crucial role for delegates in choosing a nominee who can beat Trump. A role that will have to be accepted by a majority of American voters (and our early polling shows they will view it as legitimate).
Here’s The New York Times on the effort and its founder:
Chris Dempsey … started a group called Delegates Are Democracy to educate delegates about the various nomination processes, including for a hypothetical open convention if Mr. Biden were to step aside. He said his team had spoken to scores of delegates, and many believed they were being taken for granted.
“Almost without exception, the delegates that we talk to feel that they do not have adequate information about what’s happening,” he said. “They want to be a part of something that is seen as legitimate, orderly, fair, transparent, and they don’t feel that way right now.”
Sylvia Gonzalez Andersh, a first-time delegate from Arizona, said it had been “quite unsettling going from something that was quite a complicated ministerial process” to an intrigue-laden event.
Rolling Stone had more on that feeling among delegates who may have to pivot into this pivotal role:
Chris Dempsey, a former staffer at the Democratic Party of Massachusetts who served in Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration, is involved with the effort. Delegates, he says, “are essential to our democracy, and they will be especially essential if the president were to withdraw from the race. They’ll go overnight from being a group of people that thought they were attending a party, to having the weight of democracy on their shoulders.”
Dempsey was named Bostonian of the Year by The Boston Globe in 2015 for leading the opposition to the Summer Olympics coming to Boston1. Another Globe column named him a “hero” for leading “a determined band of citizen-activists forced the powerful to confront” reality.
Citizen-activists confronting reality.
That may be an apt way to describe the delegates headed to Chicago next month, who are pivoting from being party-goers to Party-doers, and grappling with a weighty decision they may have ahead of them. The type of decision that has faced their predecessors in American political Parties going back centuries.
Dempsey beat the corrupt International Olympic Committee by building a volunteer army, informing them by engaging academic experts, and explaining a complex process in understandable terms to all of Massachusetts. He also knows a thing or two about delegates - as a statewide candidate last cycle, he earned the vote of 2,148 convention delegates, winning the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s endorsement.
There are no enemies within the convention, though. And the complexity of the public debate is inverse: the Olympics is more complicated than it first sounds, the role of delegates is more straightforward than it is currently made out to be.
Hosting the Olympics sounds simple because we are used to seeing it every four years (athletes and tourists from around the world visit for sports), but for host cities is in fact a complex array of obligations crossing legal, security, construction, and finances.
The opposite is true of parties nominating a president at a convention - something that used to capture public attention every four years, but has not for decades. Nominating a president at a party convention may today sound complex (How would debates work? Virtual or in-person? What about the party money? Is there time? Who votes on which ballot?). But overall it is very simple: duly elected and selected delegates vote until someone gets a majority. And then that person is the nominee.
We just haven't done it this way in a while.
There is misinformation out there, though. Including an unfortunate early morning Instagram Live post from AOC which mischaracterized the legal issues around the convention. That was likely unintentional. But waiting on the other side is a behemoth that will try to sow misinformation - including about the delegates and the process.
The road may get a little bumpy, but pay attention to the process and listen to the final words from Elaine Kamarck’s interview with Ezra Klein from back in February:
Once you’re out of the convention, it’s all one big happy family. Not always really happy, but, boy, they pretend to the world that they are. And there’s great unity when you come out of a convention … it’s the party. It’s the health of the party at that point.
If you are interested in joining this new volunteer army, send Chris a note at info@delegatesaredemocracy.com - and if you want to join the Delegates Are Democracy zoom with Elaine Kamarck at 10am ET this morning, register here.
Energy and enthusiasm abound. And, as Matt Yglesias recently wrote, “we have more agency than we like to admit” in shaping history.
The Vance Effect
Finally, allow us a word about JD Vance. We got to know him a bit last cycle, when we ran a “Why No JD” campaign in the US Senate race last cycle. That got us up close to the Vance Effect on swing voters: it repels them. The proof is in the election results: on the same ballot with a GOP governor who won by 25 points, Vance squeaked out a six point win. Here’s the data gurus at Split-Ticket:
Trump-endorsed Republican J.D. Vance underperformed by five points relative to expectations. Vance could not beat Trump’s 2020 margins, and Democrat Tim Ryan exceeded Biden’s performance even in former Democratic strongholds along the lakefront and in Appalachia.
Parties organize to win - or at least they used to. And they can again.
Coincidentally, you can hear Dempsey streaming live at 12:50pm today on Boston Public Radio, as today marks an important anniversary of the Olympic battle