Joe Biden’s unprecedented decision to drop out of the presidential election leaves the Democratic Party mere weeks to find and rally around a Democratic nominee for president.
Ultimately, 4,600 delegates slated to attend the August convention will decide the future of the Democratic Party. But what the party will do in the short period before the mid-August convention to establish its presidential ticket remains partially TBD.
All eyes are on an obscure 180-person body called the Convention Rules Committee, which will decide this week whether to proceed with a virtual vote from the delegates in advance of the August convention. The party originally organized the virtual roll call to comply with an Ohio ballot deadline but that issue has since been largely rendered moot because the Ohio Legislature changed the law.
Still, a quicker roll call avoids a long spell of uncertainty about who the nominee is and deprives other Democratic candidates of the chance to organize against Vice President Kamala Harris. It also resolves some tight ballot deadline issues in other states by settling the question of who the nominee will be early.
“It’s very possible — I would actually think it’s likely — that the DNC proceeds with this virtual roll call,” said one Democratic election attorney.
It’s just not yet clear whether the party will do it.
“They have still not told us! We are waiting,” a member of the party’s Rules and Bylaws committee texted NOTUS about the status of the virtual roll call.
That said, the party does have existing rules in place to establish a new nominee whether or not there’s a virtual convention.
“The work that we must do now, while unprecedented, is clear. In the coming days, the Party will undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement. Harrison’s statement did not mention the virtual roll call.
Any presidential candidate must submit their nomination in writing to the DNC and have a petition with signatures of at least 300 convention delegates, with no more than 50 coming from the same state delegation.
The question is how many candidates will put their names forward.
With Biden’s endorsement in place, there’s already a rallying force around Vice President Kamala Harris.
More than 40 former and current DNC members signed a letter calling Harris the “only person that can credibly claim the torch from the Biden-Harris Administration, which has led on a policy agenda that is widely popular among both base Democratic voters and the American people as a whole.”
Support for Harris isn’t set in stone, however. A DNC member told NOTUS Colorado state party leaders are giving delegates a day to decide whether to follow Biden’s endorsement and support Harris or be open to other options.
If Harris is the only nominee, delegates have the choice to either vote for her or to vote present. Once Harris has a majority of delegates, she would be officially nominated as the Democratic candidate for president.
But if another candidate does run for the nomination against Harris, and is able to meet the 300-delegate threshold, then delegates would vote between the candidates. Whoever wins a simple majority clinches the nomination.
In the first vote, only elected delegates are allowed to cast a ballot — a change made in 2018, cutting superdelegates out of the initial round in a contested convention. Superdelegates make up 15% of all total delegates and include top officials at the DNC, Democratic governors, Democratic members of Congress and other distinguished party leaders.
As for Biden’s pledged delegates, they are no longer officially beholden to the president or his wishes. In other words, Biden endorsing Harris doesn’t bind his delegates to her.
“Biden has taken his name off the ballot. They won’t have Biden on the ballot, and they don’t have any sort of pledge to Kamala, so it has to be because they want Kamala if they’re voting for her,” said Maggie Wunderly, a former Rules committee member in the 2016 and 2020 conventions.
But that doesn’t mean delegates don’t have their allegiances.
Many will feel a political pull to still align themselves with Biden, Wunderly said.
“Because they were Biden delegates, they might go with his choice, because a lot of them think they’re supposed to kind of just follow what the candidate asked them to do, even though that’s not in the rules,” Wunderly said. “They were already behind Biden, so most will be behind the Biden-Harris ticket.”
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Katherine Swartz, Tinashe Chingarande and Nuha Dolby are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Byron Tau is a reporter at NOTUS.