Biden withdrawal throws spotlight on to role of Democratic delegates

It’s been more than 50 years since delegates to a Democratic national convention haven’t known their nominee as they walked through the door. Now, in the wake of Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday not to seek re-election, there’s a mad dash.

Delegates are due to convene in Chicago on 19 August, and while the Democratic party seems to be coalescing around Kamala Harris, there’s no guarantee that she will be the nominee, and others could still throw their name into contention.

But just a few hours after Biden’s announcement, Google documents were circulating asking delegates to pledge their support for Harris.

Jonathan Padilla, a delegate from California, said he could stand for things to be a hair less mad.

“I don’t want to be rushed into something,” Padilla said. “I do want to have deliberation. There’s a lot of frustration in the party, and I think having a process to talk to people from the campaign and to the candidate or people around her is necessary … to help us be unified in November.”

Delegates are, by and large, local volunteers expected to spend thousands of dollars to fly to Chicago and attend the convention. It’s often viewed as a reward for activism and dedication, but it’s typically a far less consequential role than it might be next month.

Related: Who will replace Biden as Democratic nominee? Here are some of the top candidates

One delegate who isn’t yet old enough to drink expressed his mounting anxiety about how things are unfolding and how little has been predictable.

“I’m a young, young person,” said the delegate, who requested anonymity because he feared being replaced by his state chair. “This is my first convention … And this is scary. It’s super anxiety-inducing, and crazy, and so much.”

He said he was disappointed with the party for communicating poorly. “But at the same time, I don’t really feel like I have time to be disappointed. I feel like I just need to go knock on some doors.”

In a “normal” election year, each state sends a number of delegates to the convention who have been pledged to a candidate. Those delegates are expected to vote for that candidate , on pain of being replaced by a state chair if their vote is wayward. With a majority going to one candidate, as has happened every election year since the 60s, that’s the end of it. A candidate is chosen.

That bureaucratic, uncontroversial process has become an open question this year.

In a call on Friday, before Biden dropped out, Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the party’s rules committee, likened the process of selecting a new presidential nominee to a mini-primary, with delegates as the voting audience. If Biden were to drop out, the process would be “scrunched into three weeks or something. It’d be incredibly tight.” The question at the convention would then become whether a consensus had formed on a new nominee.

But that’s not exactly what’s happening right now. Instead, members of the California Democratic party have begun circulating a Google document asking delegates to pledge their support for Harris publicly and immediately. According to the list, shared with the Guardian by a delegate, 83 people had already signed on as of 9pm on Sunday. A second Google document is circulating to delegates with a form for pledging their support for Harris on a petition. Before the start of the convention, the Democratic National Committee is also planning to hold a virtual roll call , where a nominee would be chosen for legal purposes.

Ohio presents a problem. State law ostensibly requires parties to select their nominees by 9 August to appear on the ballot. Ohio lawmakers changed the law this year, but Democrats worry that the change won’t take effect in time.

Padilla said he expected Harris to be the nominee, but some delegates are unhappy with the pressure for an early decision.

“Vice-President Harris has the next 72 to 96 hours to mitigate any serious challenge,” he said. “And pending that, I think the party moves forward with the existing plan of the virtual roll call, which would mitigate risk at the convention, but it does probably leave a lot of delegates who would want a more transparent, deliberative process probably not happy.”

Susan Herder, a Biden delegate from Minneapolis, said she thought Biden might be the best president of her lifetime, crediting him with turning the country around from Covid-19 and an economy in which the wealth gap had widened.

After the debate and Biden’s exit, she’s ready to start campaigning for Harris. She said she intended to respect all voters and would listen to them to understand their points of view.

“I am looking forward to the future,” she said in an email. “I hope everyone who is inclined will help us elect Kamala Harris. It’s a great way to defeat anxiety, fear and feelings of hopelessness. LET’S GET HER ELECTED!”

While some delegates have only just come around to supporting someone other than Biden, others had been pushing for a change during the primaries, long before Biden’s disastrous debate.

“I think we were feeling like our message has become even stronger in the past few hours,” said Asma Mohammed, leader of Minnesota’s “uncommitted” movement and a Democratic convention delegate. “In the past few hours, there are people who have reached out and said, ‘You know, you’re right. We needed a better candidate.’”

Mohammed has been calling for pushback against the Biden administration’s support for the war in Gaza, demanding a plank in the party platform that calls for a ceasefire, an arms embargo and a president ready to support that position. She believes Harris is more sympathetic to her position than Biden was, despite having taking $5m in campaign donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), but wants time to put the question to her.

“We are delegates from our communities, and we are being asked to represent,” Mohammed said. “We can’t do that if we’re only being given one option.”

A degree of dissent against the virtual roll call had percolated up from delegates days ago. Delegates Are Democracy and Welcome Party, two organizations formed in recent days to help inform confused delegates about their options, have been hosting webinars, airing concerns from delegates about a convoluted process.

Chris Dempsey, head of Delegates Are Democracy, said he had been speaking with dozens of delegates who say the process is opaque and that party leaders have been gatekeeping information. He stressed that Delegates for Democracy had not been advocating for Biden to withdraw, but was instead trying to guide delegates, who are often volunteers without deep legal training, about the rules.

“We think that conventions are essential at putting forward strong nominees,” Dempsey said. “We can beat Donald Trump in November. But we know that we need credible sources of information to share with delegates. We want to be a place that delegates, the public, the media can come and get good information about how the process works.”

Kamarck noted in a call on Friday that delegates were already free to vote for whoever they wanted, more or less. The convention rules contain a loophole, she said.

“The loophole is ‘in all good conscience’. That was added after the very, very difficult and bitter 1980 convention.”

At that convention, Senator Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter in primaries and then a floor fight. At the time, delegates could be removed by state leaders if they changed their vote. The conscience clause emerged after that, to prevent delegates from acting like robots, Kamarck said.

“On the Democratic side, there is no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates,” Kamarck said. “And Joe Biden gets this. I don’t know why the rest of the press doesn’t get it. Joe Biden said in his Nato press conference: ‘The delegates can do whatever the hell they want to do.’ And that is basically true.” The delegate rules require their votes to “reflect the sentiments” of those who elected them.

That phrase had never really been tested, Kamarck said. Until now.

Biden’s withdrawal has set off a hunt for delegates, Kamarck said. Again, in a “normal” process, that hunt would start on the floor of the convention, with potential candidates soliciting signatures on a petition to get on a nomination ballot, with no more than 50 from any one state and 300 delegates to make the ballot.

“I suspect that somebody from the [Democratic National Committee (DNC)] or the state parties would organize delegate meetings that would be open to the public – because all DNC meetings are open to the public – for the candidates to come and talk to the delegates, because they’d have to win over the delegates,” she said.

The nomination for vice-president would be based on a separate vote, she said on Friday. “I imagine what would happen is that whoever emerged as the frontrunner – and maybe there’d be two or three of them – would all name their vice-presidential candidates. But then we’d have an open vote for vice-president. It could get quite confusing. But this assumes, all of this assumes, that there’s a contest. And I for one am very skeptical that there’ll be much of a contest.”