Make It Make Sense

Grace: 00:00:00

Hi, it's Grace, and this is Frogmore Stew.

Grace: 00:00:15

Joe Biden was not a young man when he was elected four years ago, but at that time, he was a vibrant candidate, albeit with a stutter and plenty of gaffes. The presidency ages a person though. And since that 2020 election, he has noticeably aged. Republicans may note of this at every stage of both his recent candidacy and his presidency.

Grace: 00:00:40

When the June 27th presidential debate happened, Democrats were shown that his decline was not just a Republican talking point. Democrats all around felt duped, duped by party leaders and surrogates. Who insisted that he worked longer and harder than the 20-year-old aides all around him. That was clearly not the case.

Grace: 00:01:04

It took 24 days after that debate for President Biden to make the final decision. And so, on Sunday, July 21st, Grandpa Joe handed over the car keys. There were many people pushing for a variety of ways to pick the next nominee. Okay. Through blitz primaries or an open convention, all sorts of different varieties came into play.

Grace: 00:01:29

But to many observers surprise, there were a landslide of endorsements for Kamala Harris almost immediately. And now she's reached enough pledged delegates to be the nominee. So what does all this mean? And why are Republicans calling foul? Remember way back in early February when you voted in the primary elections for president.

Grace: 00:01:52

You were technically voting for how the delegates would later vote for you at the convention, which the Republicans just finished and the Democrats will have in August. There are two types of delegates, pledged delegates and superdelegates. Out of those, 3, 949 are pledged delegates. And 749 are super delegates.

Grace: 00:02:18

So the pledge delegates, those are a select group of Democrats. The national democratic party allocates a number available to each state and then state party officials divvy them out. Different states have varying criteria to become a pledged delegate, and it's all super confusing. But in general, almost any registered voter that is deemed loyal to the party can be a pledged delegate.

Grace: 00:02:43

That includes people like poll workers or local elected officials, people that are fundraising, people that are big within the party movement. And those pledged delegates commit to supporting the candidate state voters choose. So when you vote, those pledged delegates Take how many people voted for which candidate, and the one that wins is mostly who those pledged delegates choose to vote for at the convention.

Grace: 00:03:10

There is a thing called a good conscience clause in the party's rules that gives them a little bit of wiggle room. But for the most part, they're committed to the winner of the primary of your state. Superdelegates are the party's highest profile leaders. They have the role because of the offices that they hold or have held.

Grace: 00:03:30

And that's typically former presidents and vice presidents, Democratic governors, members of Congress, and party officials. They are not pledged to any candidate, and they can basically overrule the pledged delegates at the convention if things get too crazy. One thing to note, when Biden dropped out, he was the presumptive nominee, because he had more than enough pledged delegates to win the convention's first ballot.

Grace: 00:03:59

But he wasn't the official nominee yet. Those delegates don't make their actual vote for the nominee until the actual convention, which again is in August. So here is where this gets a little bit more confusing. This year, there was a glitch in Ohio. Ohio has a ballot deadline, which falls before the Democratic convention was going to be held.

Grace: 00:04:25

So Ohio needed the official name of the Democrat candidate before the Dems. would have been able to officially elect their nominee at the convention. Ohio legislators did resolve this issue, but before that was resolved, Democrats decided to do an early vote or virtual roll call prior to the convention to avoid any legal challenges that might try to keep the Democrat candidate off of Ohio's ballot.

Grace: 00:04:55

Even though the issue was resolved in Ohio, the Dems felt best to continue with this early virtual vote just in case. The virtual vote is not a typical part of the process. So Biden had the backing of nearly all of the delegates prior to dropping out. And as of now, enough of them have pledged to vote for Kamala to make her the nominee.

Grace: 00:05:19

But remember, those are only pledges. The vote isn't tallied until the actual convention or If they do this virtual roll call prior to Biden dropping out, many people were calling for a variety of options at the convention, which could have led to an open convention, a scenario that the party hasn't experienced since 1968 and boy was 1968 a doozy. Here's a clip from our Frogmore Sioux episode just before the primary.

Grace: 00:05:53

It doesn't even really feel like the process works.

Katelyn: 00:05:54

I would agree with you there. When I was prepping for today, I actually was astonished that we didn't even have Primaries in most States until about 50 years ago, 1968, that just blew my mind.

Grace: 00:06:13

Totally. And actually we have a really awesome clip from that year to give a little bit of background in 1968, a candidate was picked that really pissed off a lot of people in the democratic party and the convention had violence over Vietnam war. There was lots of racial tension. The convention went a little bit haywire.

Reporter: 00:06:33

A lot of pushing. The man being pushed, watch it, they're going to knock that over. The man is a delegate, they're asking for silence. There's a priest in here, dozens of reporters, and the man who got involved in it all is very calmly smoking a cigarette.

Grace: 00:06:49

I love, he was very calmly smoking a cigarette.

Katelyn: 00:06:53

It's very on brand for 1968. I love it.

Grace: 00:06:56

I love it. I love it. Let's just, for our listeners, I feel like a lot of times on political podcasts they talk about things and people are like, what does that mean? The convention is the event that's held every four years that nominates candidates for the president and the vice president.

Grace: 00:07:12

You have either a primary or you have a caucus, then your state sends delegates to the convention. And then that's when the candidates are officially nominated. After that crazy convention in 1968, the Democrats decided that they needed to change their process to make it more inclusive. And so their whole process was reformed.

Grace: 00:07:35

And then four years later, the Republicans reformed their process. But when they did that, they basically gave state party leaders a lot of leeway in how their caucus or primaries were set up. And so then that created a super confusing and complicated system that, by the way, is unique to each state.

Katelyn: 00:07:56

Gotta love a republic. Um, so. One of the things that fascinates me about this, which I would like to discuss today is we're not talking that long ago that voters were quite divorced from this process of picking the actual candidate. And so when you think about behavior change and instilling traditions in a system, it's no wonder that we're in this place where We have such low turnout during the primaries.

Katelyn: 00:08:25

We don't think about the primaries with the same importance we think about the general election. So the history of this all to me feels deeply important.

Grace: 00:08:36

For sure. And also the fact that they don't have to do any of the primaries, they really could just go to the convention and say, this is who our candidate is. The parties are essentially private organizations. They don't have to do any of that. So I think one of the reasons that they did do that was to make sure that the people on the ground felt way more involved than just this top party leadership.

Grace: 00:09:06

At this point, given the many, many endorsements Kamala has from the party's top leaders, it would be political suicide if anyone else jumps in. Those who might have challenged her nomination have stepped up to support her. People like California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Grace: 00:09:29

They've all backed Harris, and they are perhaps lobbying her for the role of her VP. But this process is exactly why many people are so frustrated with party politics, right? Because this didn't feel very democratic, or even in the spirit of why they changed the process after 1968. It's being called by some as the coronation.

Grace: 00:09:51

We have to get past that. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative political analyst and author, said recently, The idealistic defense of the primaries is basically that we are a democracy, so the parties must be democratic. Taken seriously, this would mean we weren't a democracy until the 1970s. It would also mean that nearly all the countries we call democracies aren't.

Grace: 00:10:17

Because the vast majority don't rely on primaries the way we do to select party nominees. He goes on to say that beyond the minimum legal, constitutional, patriotic, and moral constraints all parties are supposed to respect, they really only have one job, winning general elections. So one could argue that hosting debates among Democrats where they knock each other down leading into our convention would be crazy. And that having an open primary at the convention was not in the best interest of winning the election. I don't think anyone thought what is happening would happen. Kamala is on fire and has pulled the attention away from the Republicans. She has true energy and excitement behind her campaign.

Grace: 00:11:06

Additionally, this really was the safe bet because of the money. There are Democratic Party rules in place to govern the process of selecting the nominee, which we just covered. But there are rules established by the Federal Election Commission that apply to the funds held by the Biden Harris campaign.

Grace: 00:11:25

Because Biden and Harris shared a campaign committee, Kamala and her new running mate can continue using the campaign's existing funds for the general election if she is on the Democratic ticket as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee. If the new ticket didn't include Kamala Harris, the rules are different.

Grace: 00:11:46

Campaign committees are subject to federal contribution limits, which means they can only give the candidate-to-candidate max of 2, 000 per election. Or the Biden campaign could have offered a refund to the donors. Imagine what that would look like. Or the campaign could transfer its funds to the DNC or state parties.

Grace: 00:12:05

These rules are already going to be tested in the courts as they are now suits filed against this campaign. It is impossible to predict how courts might rule on these challenges, but there seems to be a consensus by legal experts. That these suits are throwing spaghetti at the wall when she picks her vice president.

Grace: 00:12:23

The same delegation voting systems holds for the vice-presidential nomination as it does for the presidential nomination. And on a side note, running mates can't hail from the same state, so no Gavin Newsom for her, which really doesn't make sense anyway, given California as a blue state. She needs Midwest or Arizona or North Carolina over the last year.

Grace: 00:12:45

How many times have you heard from your circle, anyone, but either of these two old men? Well, here you go. That's all this too, for today. Talk to you next week.

Credits: 00:12:57

The Frogmore stew podcast is written and hosted by Grace Cowan, editing and audio. IT support by Eric Johnson, produced by TJ Phillips with the podcast solutions network.