As I write this blog, the Republicans had
just wrapped up their national convention in Tampa, Florida, and Tuesday,
September 4 began the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North
Carolina. Both these major party
conventions will be elaborate exercises attracting a very high level of media
interest throughout the United States.
We all know that the 2012 presidential candidates of the Democratic and
Republican parties are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. So it might be reasonable to ask, what is the
point of a party convention?
In the abstract, the primary purpose of the
convention remains the official selection of the party’s candidate for the
presidency. In the early decades of the
history of the United States, congressional delegations met and determined who
their parties’ candidates would be.
Dissension led to an expansion of the system to a broader group of party
leaders in the 1830s, who met in what was called a convention to make the
choice. It was still a matter of party
insiders deciding who to put forward, however, and the process only became more
democratic after the controversial 1968 Democratic convention, when anti-war
activists demonstrated to protest their lack of voice in the process. As a result, both the Republican and
Democratic parties today hold primary elections in individual states, and those
elections determine who the delegates will be who will participate in the
conventions. Since none of this has any
official constitutional basis, each party and each state sets its own rules for
how the primary will be held, who can participate, and whether the states’
delegates will each support the candidates they stood for in the primaries or
whether they will vote as a bloc in favor of the candidate with the most
support. In recent years, the results of
primaries have led less successful candidates to withdraw, so the nominee has
been known long before the convention, which simply officially endorses the
nomination.
The convention also votes on the vice presidential
candidate and on the policy platform on which its candidate must run. Today both of these are also determined in
advance and simply endorsed at the convention.
So what was once a significant substantive role for conventions is now
largely symbolic.
The convention continues to be important as
the launching of the candidate’s official campaign. It provides an exceptional opportunity for
public outreach, and each party carefully selects its roster of speakers and
apportions them time slots designed to rally the faithful and attract undecided
and independent voters to the campaign.
While both major party candidates have been campaigning against each
other in public appearances and through media advertisements for months, it is only
after the convention that they hold formal debates.
Of course the Republican and Democratic
parties are not the only ones holding conventions, and numerous other parties
will endorse their own candidates. The
challenge for third party candidates is to assemble a campaign organization
that can meet the requirements to get the candidate’s name on the presidential
ballot in all 50 states, since each state has its own rules and requirements
for filing fees and signatures. In 2000,
the Green Party and its allies managed to get the name of its candidate, Ralph
Nader, on 42 state ballots.
So while it may seem from here that the U.S.
presidential campaign has been underway for a long time, the real campaign is
beginning now, and will continue until election day, which is always the first
Tuesday in November: this year, November 6.
