Sarah Palin recently suggested that a brokered convention could be a good thing for the Republican party. This view seconds the attitude of several commentators, who suspect that the GOP’s position could be enhanced by a battle in Tampa over who will be the next nominee.
I could not disagree more. While I prefer the convention-style system of days long gone, I also think that such a shift must come about because of a conscientious reform effort. In the post-reform era (1972-present), a brokered convention could be an extremely dangerous occurrence for either political party. I’ll offer four reasons why.
1. What about the campaign? 100 years ago, state and local parties largely managed the campaign. Presidential nominees did not have large staffs, and most of them stayed at home during the fall. But all that has changed. Now, the candidate and his personal organization are the locus of campaign activity, while the state and local parties barely exist anymore.
This means, in turn, that candidates must put together multi-tiered campaign operations that integrate media messaging, fundraising, get-out-the-vote efforts, polling, campaign appearances, basically everything. That takes a good deal of expertise, time and money to build, and in this day and age the party organizations simply cannot fill in the gaps, having atrophied to virtually nothing since the 1960s.
So what happens if the GOP convention selects a dark horse in August? How is that person supposed to put together a campaign operation in the course of three months? How is he supposed to be ready with an informed, intelligent answer on every relevant issue, from what to do about gas prices to what would a Portugese default mean for the US?
The most likely answer to all these questions, in my opinion, is he won’t do these things well. Instead, he’ll flounder. The experiences of the Fred Thompson 2008 campaign and the Rick Perry 2012 campaign suggest very strongly that you cannot simply hop into a race late in the game and expect everything to work out all right. It’s the early bird who gets the worm in this day and age.
2. Appearances. We all know what Barack Obama plans to run on this year. He’s going to hock class warfare hither and yon, then pitch himself as the great centrist defender against those dangerous Tea Party extremists. A brokered convention will play right into his hands.
Brokered conventions can be extremely chaotic and sometimes even ugly. Lots of shouting, lots of calls for adjournment and other dilatory tactics, lots and lots of speechifying, an unwieldy array of candidates, long nights with no obvious concluding moment.
What would this look like on television? It certainly would not look pretty.
And remember, the public memory of conventions really doesn’t stretch beyond the carefully manicured, over-produced spectacles of the contemporary era. Most people would not understand that this is pretty normal for a party that hasn’t settled on a nominee during the primaries, and has to battle it out at the convention. And lord knows the mainstream media would not help clarify matters for them.
Juxtapose the chaos of a brokered GOP convention with a serene President Obama making empty-but-reassuring statements from the Rose Garden, promoting all of his ticky-tack proposals that he will speciously claim can get the economy moving again. He will seem like the adult and the GOP the radical rump that cannot be trusted with power.
3. Whither Republican Populism? Either one of two things will happen at a brokered convention. One, the party will ultimately settle on the candidate who has won more popular votes (and probably delegates), thus needlessly damaging him in advance of the fall campaign. Or two, it will swing to somebody who finished behind the frontrunner, or did not compete at all.
Ponder the implications of the latter scenario, especially how Team Obama will play it up. It will look like Republican elites tossed aside the will of the people to settle on a nominee of their choosing – or, after David Plouffe finishes slicing-and-dicing the facts, radical elites tossed out the moderate and sensible Mitt Romney to go for a conservative atavist.
The Republican party cannot set up the primaries and caucuses as the normatively superior mode of choosing a nominee, stick to that standard for half a century, then suddenly overturn it because the guy who finished first is too moderate. Well, technically the party can do that, but it should expect serious blowback for defying “the will of the people.” Don’t get me wrong: I think the primary/caucus system is terrible and doesn’t reflect the will of the people in any meaningful way; I am just pointing out how it will appear to everybody else.
4. Downside Risk. Implicitly, people hoping for a brokered convention believe they can trade up; they will somehow find a nominee who is better than any of the four remaining contenders. Perhaps, but we also have to factor in the possibility of a trade down, i.e. the party nominates somebody who is unelectable or will be a bad president once in office.
Suppose that nobody wins an outright majority on the first ballot, and then after several more rounds of balloting at the convention you start seeing names submitted for nomination. That is when the convention could start to atomize, with different factions backing different candidates for different reasons. If that happens for a long enough time, you never know what will happen when they are exhausted and just want to go home.
Sometimes you can get good results – e.g. the GOP backing James Garfield over Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine in 1880 on the 36th ballot – but sometimes you can get terrible results, too. Some historical examples illustrate just how bad things can be.
a. Democrats in 1852. Northern and Southern Democrats were split, and on the 49th ballot, the party turned to Franklin Pierce, a one-term former senator from New Hampshire whose principal qualification was that he hadn’t been in office when the Senate approved the Compromise of 1850. Totally unfit for the office bestowed upon him, Pierce was in my opinion the worst American president, signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and all but guaranteeing the Civil War.
b. Republicans in 1912. Not really a brokered convention in the typical sense of the phrase, but only because incumbent President William Howard Taft controlled the Southern delegations and the RNC, sufficient to blunt TR’s string of primary victories. Yet 1912 is a great example of the potential blowback to come from denying the popular vote winner the nomination. TR bolted the GOP, split the party in two, and handed Woodrow Wilson the presidency in 1912.
c. Republicans in 1920. Perhaps the closest parallel to this year’s GOP battle, the Republicans in 1920 had several declared candidates, but no clear frontrunner. At the Chicago convention, 11 names were placed into nomination, and on the 10th ballot the party settled on Ohio senator Warren G. Harding, the “best of the second-raters,” as Connecticut senator Frank Brandegee called him. But that turned out not to be true. Though Harding won a huge victory in the fall, his crooked administration nearly brought down the Grand Old Party. The Harding scandals contributed to the GOP’s huge losses in the 1922 midterms, and he has since been remembered as one of the worst presidents of all time.
d. Democrats in 1924. Urban and rural Democrats were bitterly divided that year over Prohibition and Ku Klux Klan planks in the platform, and could not settle on a nominee until the 103rd ballot, finally selecting John Davis of West Virginia. Davis had been solicitor general then ambassador to the UK during the Wilson Administration – hardly a presidential resume – and he went on to win the smallest share of the vote in party history.
e. Democrats in 1968. This nomination is similar to the GOP’s 1912 debacle, in that Vice-President Hubert Humphrey won an easy nomination because LBJ controlled the party machinery. However, the violence on the streets and the turmoil within the convention signaled the end of Democratic dominance of the national political scene. And while Eugene McCarthy – Humphrey’s main opponent for the nomination – did not run on a third party ticket, he waited until very late in the season to endorse the vice-president and then only lukewarmly.
People who believe that a brokered convention in 2012 will produce a better nominee need to wrap their minds around the fact that, often times, such battles have produced worse nominees – for the party, for the country, or both.
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My bottom line: I see only two scenarios where a brokered convention would not be a disaster for the GOP.
First, some candidate announces his candidacy in the next few weeks, and gets his name on the ballot in the final primaries. He wins big states like California and New Jersey, leads in the national opinion polls through the summer, and argues that he is the true choice of the Republican electorate. He couldn’t take the nomination on the first ballot, but maybe after three or four rounds. And because he had been setting up a campaign operation through the spring and summer, he would be ready for the fall campaign.
Second, the party nominates some unifying national figure who does not compete in the primaries but is such an obvious slam-dunk that the typical rules of campaigns are suspended. Historically speaking, such characters have only ever come via the military, and in 2012 only David Petraeus fits that bill. He could accept the party’s nomination without actively campaigning for it, then run a national unity campaign based on his proven leadership skills, promising to solve the nation’s fiscal and economic crises.
Other than that, a brokered convention would likely be a net negative for the Republicans, and potentially a very substantial one at that.
