Democratic National Convention

Democratic National Convention (DNC), quadrennial meeting of the U.S. Democratic Party, at which delegates select the party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.

History

The Democratic Party held its first national convention in May 1832 in Baltimore, Maryland. The party, which had been known since 1798 as the Democratic-Republican Party, nominated Pres. Andrew Jackson for a second term. (The party formally adopted its current name in 1844.) Delegates (representatives of state constituencies) attending the convention declined to nominate John C. Calhoun for a second term as vice president under Jackson (Calhoun had earlier served as vice president under John Quincy Adams [1825–29])—partly because of Calhoun’s support for the doctrine of nullification, which Jackson opposed—and selected Martin Van Buren instead. The convention adopted a rule requiring the party’s nominees to receive the votes of at least two-thirds of all delegates. It also established the “unit rule,” which allowed a majority of a state’s delegates to require that all of the delegation’s votes be cast for a single nominee.

The convention of 1844 brought the first heavily contested Democratic presidential nomination. Van Buren’s opposition to the annexation of Texas cost him votes among Southern Democrats, but his main rival, Lewis Cass, was also unable to gain support from two-thirds of the delegates. James K. Polk won the nomination on the ninth ballot, becoming the party’s first “dark horse” nominee. Polk won the presidential election of 1844, becoming the country’s 11th president.

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United States presidential election of 1980: The Democratic nomination

During the 1840s and ’50s the Democratic Party suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery into the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The deep divisions within the party resulted in protracted battles between delegates at the party’s convention in 1856, which required 49 ballots to select a nominee, and at its convention in 1860, which required 57.

From 1872 to 1908 only one Democratic National Convention failed to nominate a presidential candidate on the first or second ballot. In 1912, however, it took Woodrow Wilson 46 ballots to secure the party’s nomination.

The two-thirds rule nearly ruined the party in the 1920s. A record 103 ballots were needed to select a nominee in 1924. In 1932 it took only four ballots for Franklin D. Roosevelt to win the party’s nomination. Four years later, at Roosevelt’s urging, the convention dropped the two-thirds rule. As a result, in only one subsequent convention—that of 1952—has more than one ballot been necessary.

In 1948 and 1964 the Democratic National Convention was dominated by the issue of civil rights. In 1948 Southern Democrats, then known as “Dixiecrats,” abandoned the convention and supported their own candidate, segregationist Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. In the convention of 1964 conflict arose over the seating of delegates from Mississippi. A compromise that granted two at-large delegates to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which had sent an integrated delegation to the convention to protest voter suppression in the state, resulted in the departure of many white delegates from Alabama and Mississippi, who refused to sign a pledge to support the party’s presidential nominee.

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During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, police and members of the U.S. National Guard violently battled antiwar and other protesters from across the country as delegates to the convention engaged in their own fierce confrontations. Vice Pres. Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered the party’s primary elections, was selected as the party’s presidential nominee. Convention reformers won a major concession with the abolition of the unit rule, both for the convention itself and for the future selection of convention delegates beginning in 1972. In essence, new Democratic rules required that delegates be apportioned proportionally, which potentially made it difficult to win a majority of delegates in a contest involving many candidates.

In 1984 the party supplemented the delegates selected through primaries and caucuses with numerous uncommitted national delegates. Advocates hoped that these “superdelegates,” as they were called, would help to prevent disunity and increase the appeal of centrist candidates. In 2016 superdelegates overwhelmingly favoured former first lady Hillary Clinton over independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, while Sanders’s supporters called for abolishing superdelegates. The convention eventually reached a compromise whereby two-thirds of superdelegates would be committed to the outcome of the primaries in their states while one-third—including members of Congress, governors, and major party leaders—would remain unpledged.

Role of modern conventions

Early national conventions were often chaotic and their outcomes unpredictable. Likely nominees are now known months in advance, and the conventions themselves consist largely of scripted multiday campaign rallies designed to promote party unity and highlight major campaign themes. Once covered gavel-to-gavel by the news media, conventions are now given only about an hour of prime-time coverage per day by major broadcast networks.

National conventions span several days, with major events scheduled for evenings in order to reach a wide broadcast audience. Each evening is devoted to a theme that highlights a major campaign issue for the general election. On the first night, the convention hears from a keynote speaker, often an up-and-coming star in the party. For example, in 2004 then-U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama delivered the convention’s keynote address, helping to raise his national profile.

On the convention’s penultimate night, the presidential nominee is formally selected, usually through a roll call of each state but occasionally by acclamation. On the convention’s last night the vice presidential nominee is selected and the presidential nominee formally accepts the party’s nomination in a live-broadcasted speech usually seen by tens of millions of Americans.

Delegates to the Democratic National Convention have become more diverse over time. Delegates had primarily been white men until the late 20th century. By the early 21st century, nearly half of all delegates were nonwhite, and the party had adopted rules requiring state delegations to be divided equally between men and women.