DETROIT – There’s no doubt that many Democrats enjoyed the spectacle of the seemingly dysfunctional Republican caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives failing for days to be able to unite and pick a Speaker. Even some Republicans acknowledged what happened was an embarrassment. But Democrats shouldn’t gloat too much.
Something even worse once happened to them — and a version of that fiasco could happen again, possibly even next year.
Flash back to exactly a century ago, which was, as you may now know, was the last time there was a multi-ballot battle for Speaker of the House. That time, one Frederick Gillett won after nine ballots. Earlier this month, it took Kevin McCarthy 15 ballots to become speaker, the longest such battle in nearly two centuries.
Both men were Republicans who were facing revolts in their own parties, and yes, both cases were embarrassing. Yet until this year, even most political historians had forgotten about what happened in 1923. They do, however, remember 1924.
That was the year the Democratic National Convention, attempting to nominate a candidate for President, went completely and stupendously off the rails. Here’s a little background: When we voted in Presidential primaries, we were actually voting for delegates who would come together and nominate a candidate that summer.
That number changes every time; in 2020, it was 4,749. To win the party’s presidential nomination, someone has to have one more than half of all the delegates — in that case, 2,375.
We tend to forget that these days, because what tends to happen is this: Someone starts winning primaries, as Joe Biden did last time, starting in South Carolina. Campaigns are terribly expensive; nobody wants to waste money on a loser, and soon those who aren’t winning see their contributions wither. They suspend their campaigns; the front-runner cleans up, and it’s over.
Nobody even bothered to report that Biden ended up with 3,558 delegates that August, because he’d cinched a majority long before. That’s how it’s been for decades. But once it was very different. Unless a party had an incumbent president running, there were usually multiple candidates, none of whom arrived at the convention with a majority. When that happened, the delegates would vote multiple times, backroom deals would be made, and after a few ballots, someone got a majority. It took Abraham Lincoln six ballots to get nominated in 1860; it took Franklin D. Roosevelt four ballots in 1932.
But in 1924, there were major splits in the Democratic Party. The urban faction wanted Al Smith, the governor of New York, who wanted Prohibition repealed, hated the Ku Klux Klan, and would have been the nation’s first Roman Catholic nominee, let alone President.
The almost equally large rural wing of the party was tolerant of the Klan, which was then a major force in American life, still largely supported the four-year-old nationwide ban on alcohol, and was deeply suspicious of the Catholic Church. They wanted a candidate named William Gibbs McAdoo, a former secretary of the treasury.
Each of them had enough supporters to keep the other from being nominated. But neither of them had, or could get, enough delegates to be nominated themselves.
The problem was compounded by the fact that Democrats then required someone to get two-thirds of the vote to win the nomination; there were also a host of lesser candidates and favorite sons. On the first ballot, McAdoo had 431.5; Smith 241, nowhere near the 733 votes needed. So they voted again. And again and again …
For day after day, after day. Twenty ballots, thirty, fifty. After a week there was little change. Still they kept on voting, in the New York summer heat. Some delegates threw away their credentials and went home. At least one died. They went on for 17 days.
The proceedings were broadcast by radio, and the Democrats became a national joke. Finally, the main contenders gave up, and an obscure West Virginia lawyer named John W. Davis was nominated for President on the 103rd ballot.
He told friends that the nomination was worthless, as it indeed was. Even though the Republican Party was split, and the incumbent President, Calvin Coolidge, was a colorless man who had been in the office barely a year (President Warren Harding died in August 1923) the Democrats went down to a humiliating defeat.
How bad was it? John W. Davis got less than a third of the vote, carrying only a handful of ‘Solid South’ states that still had a grudge against Republicans from the Civil War. He got less than 24 percent in Ohio and a stunningly horrible 13 percent in Michigan.
Nothing like that has ever happened again. Not since 1952 has any convention needed more than a single ballot to select a nominee.
But … what if President Biden doesn’t run for reelection?
If that happens, there are certain to be a ton of candidates who want the nomination: Senator Amy Klobuchar, for one. Vice President Kamala Harris would likely run. Pete Buttigieg may.
You can’t rule out Sens. Elizabeth Warren or — never say never — Sherrod Brown or even Bernie Sanders. And don’t look now, but AOC – U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – will finally be old enough, since she will turn 35 just before the November election.
Nobody expects they will ever see a deadlocked convention again. Then again, nobody expected Donald Trump or Barack Obama would ever be nominated either. And it is quite possible that no candidate will have a majority of delegates when they get to their convention next summer. In that case, who knows?
Confucius didn’t really say that living in interesting times could be a curse. But it is still true, all the same.
-30-
