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Since 1968, no one in either party has successfully defeated at the Convention the candidate who won a plurality of the primaries and the caucuses. In 1972, George McGovern, who’d chaired the Democratic commission that rewrote the Party’s delegate-selection rules, won its nomination despite an “Anybody but McGovern” challenge at the Convention, in Miami. McGovern lost to Nixon in a landslide: he carried just one state. In 1976, at the G.O.P. Convention, in Kansas City, Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford and, very narrowly, lost. Jimmy Carter, who’d won a lot of primaries, won the Democratic nomination and even the election, but after his failed Presidency many Democrats regretted binding their delegates to the primaries. In 1980, at the Democratic National Convention, in New York City, Ted Kennedy tried to challenge Carter but was defeated by the rules. That’s why, in 1984, the D.N.C. invented superdelegates, high-status Party officials who are pledged to no one candidate. This year, a lot of Republicans are regretting binding their delegates to the primaries. The rules committee meets the week before the Convention. Hundreds of anti-Trump Republicans have formed an organization called Free the Delegates and begun plotting a strategy to block his nomination by adding a “conscience clause” to the rules, unbinding the delegates. Paul Ryan said that he wouldn’t object: “It’s not my job to tell delegates what to do.” This tactic has been tried before. A savvy souvenir collector could even hawk on the streets of Cleveland the buttons that Kennedy supporters wore in 1980, which read “free the delegates.”
For more: EXTREME CONVENTIONS: SAN FRANCISCO, 1964, AND CLEVELAND, 2016.
