Two-thirds of Ohio's DNC delegates are first-timers. Their job just got more interesting

Gavi Begtrup left his cell phone at home Sunday afternoon when he went for a walk with his wife and new puppy.

He returned about a half hour later to find the phone buzzing and pinging with missed calls and text messages.

“Your life,” one message said, “just got interesting.”

Begtrup, a former Cincinnati mayoral candidate who is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention next month, soon found out why. President Joe Biden had just ended his run for reelection , putting Begtrup and some 4,700 other convention delegates in position to choose a new nominee.

For the first time in a half century , those delegates will not perform the ceremonial duty of voting for the winner of the Democratic primaries, a rubber-stamp process that’s heavy on celebration and light on drama. Instead, they will step into an open convention to do one of the most consequential jobs in American politics.

“We live in interesting times,” Begtrup said. “I don’t really know what happens next.”

Neither does anyone else. Just weeks before the convention begins Aug. 19 in Chicago, politicians and rank-and-file Democrats are kicking around all sorts of possibilities. Maybe Vice President Kamala Harris, who won Biden’s endorsement Sunday, becomes a clear front-runner. Maybe other candidates emerge to challenge her, and the convention becomes an old-fashioned free-for-all.

The only certainty today is that once the convention begins, the delegates will choose the Democratic candidate who will run against former President Donald Trump. Their votes, previously pledged to Biden because he won the primaries, will be up for grabs.

It will be a historic moment and potentially one filled with more drama and pressure than any political convention in decades. The delegates, including 143 from Ohio, will be in the middle of it all.

“In modern conventions, the delegates have been almost entirely symbolic. Their main job has been to fill a seat and to clap like crazy when the nominee appears,” said David Niven, a political science professor and researcher at the University of Cincinnati.

“This is really a throwback delegate job,” he said, “to when delegates were little kingmakers.”

Higher stakes and greater pressure

That is not the job those delegates signed up for earlier this year when they sought seats at the convention and were chosen by their peers at a caucus-style event. Back then, Biden faced little opposition and seemed certain to roll through the primaries.

The stakes are higher now. And most of the delegates who will make the decision have little or no experience at a national convention.

“The good news is I’m not alone in not having any idea how all of this is going to work,” said Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a delegate from Lakewood.

She and the other delegates are party loyalists – union members, elected officials, activists – but about two-thirds of them are first-time delegates. Some are so young they’ve only voted in a few regular elections, let alone as a convention delegate.

Ethan Nichols is a 22-year-old Xavier University student activist who led an unsuccessful campaign last year to remove Ohio Supreme Court Justice Joe Deters , a Republican, from a “justice in residence” post at Xavier. Although he’ll be among the youngest delegates, Nichols said he’s not worried about the moment being too big for him.

“I’m incredibly excited to see this process play out,” he said. “An open convention is historic.”

Begtrup, a scientist who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2021, said he’s also looking forward to the convention, even though his role will be different than the one he anticipated when he filled out an online form last year seeking to become a delegate.

He said he expected some party big wigs to dominate the delegate selection process but instead found a bunch of people like him, longtime Democrats who thought it would be interesting and fun to be a delegate.

Begtrup, 40, said the selection process was low key. He said he chatted with fellow Democrats at the caucus in January for about an hour, along with other would-be delegates, and then everyone voted. He got one of seven slots from Cincinnati’s 1st Congressional District.

“I’m just some dude in Cincinnati who gets to go to the convention,” Begtrup said.

'It's kind of uncharted territory'

But as he learned Sunday, it will be a convention unlike any in his lifetime.

The last open convention for either party was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where delegates chose Hubert Humphrey on the first ballot. The last convention that required more than one vote by delegates to choose a nominee was the Democratic convention in 1952.

“It’s kind of uncharted territory,” said state Sen. Bill DeMora, a Columbus Democrat who is the party’s go-to rules guru. “I’m figuring things out. My life just got a lot more complicated and crazy.”

DeMora, who also is a convention delegate, said he’s not concerned about so many first-time delegates trying to navigate a suddenly upended convention process. He said it may be better to have delegates who aren’t set in their ways.

“They are more apt to do what folks ask them to do,” he said.

What they’ll be asked to do, though, remains an open question. Technically, once released by Biden, delegates can vote for anyone.

In theory, at least, this creates the possibility of a convention like those that political parties ran a century ago, before the modern primary system took hold and turned the votes of state delegates into a formality. The next few weeks will likely dictate whether the Democrats’ convention in August will be a chaotic throwback to the days of contested conventions or a more orderly and open selection of a clear front-runner.

Cincinnati City Councilman Reggie Harris said he sees Vice President Harris, who began collecting endorsements from top Democrats across the country Sunday, as the leader for the nomination. He said he expects more clarity before he and the other delegates gather for the convention.

“I think it will become very clear, very quickly who our party’s nominee will be,” he said.

Harris said he hopes the open convention, which some Democrats fear will create chaos and hurt the party’s chances in November, will energize the party faithful and produce a candidate who can beat Trump. “It doesn’t make me nervous at all,” Harris said. “It makes me very excited.”

Begtrup said every delegate should be more excited now than when they were chosen as delegates. Their job may be harder and more complicated, he said, but their decision will carry more weight and responsibility.

For the first time in generations, no one knows for certain what will happen when they take their seats in the convention hall.

“Now I actually have a vote, a vote that matters,” Begtrup said. “It’s good when you feel like your vote matters.”

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Two-thirds of Ohio's DNC delegates are first-timers. Their job just got more interesting