Here’s what comes next for Maine’s Democratic delegates

Maine Democrats participated in the party convention on May 31 and June 1 in Bangor. (Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)

While the Maine Democratic Party has not yet said whether it will be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee, Democratic elected officials and leaders in Maine have individually announced their support, including at least one delegate headed to the national convention.

“Tonight, the Maine Democratic delegation will be meeting, and I’ll be nominating or seconding the nomination that we put our Biden votes towards Harris,” said Laurie Osher, a delegate and state representative from Orono. “I can’t tell you how the rest of the [delegates] feel, but I hope they’re with me. I’ll be making a pitch to them for Kamala Harris.”

Delegates pledged to vote for President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president were released from that non-binding agreement when he withdrew from the race on Sunday. Several of Maine’s Democratic delegates said they are waiting for guidance before signaling who they will back.

“To a certain extent, it’s up to the individual delegates,” said Mark Brewer, who chairs the political science department for the University of Maine. “But also to the individual state delegations to decide what they’re going to do.”

The party is not sharing information about which candidate it is supporting yet, said Annina Breen, communications director for the Maine Democratic Party, on Monday. The state party endorsed Biden after he won the primary in June, but the state party charter does not have guidance for endorsing a candidate outside the primary system.

A rule could be adopted by a charter amendment, though given the short timeline before the convention, which will be held Aug. 19-22 in Chicago, it is more likely that will instead come about through informal discussions within party leadership.

Following the president’s withdrawal from the race Sunday, Maine Democratic Party chair Bev Uhlenhake thanked Biden and said, “we are excited for this newfound opportunity to showcase the next generation of Democratic leadership. The goal of the Maine Democratic Party remains the same: to defeat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and elect Democrats up and down the ballot this November.”

Option 1: Coalescing behind one candidate

While Biden did not formally say he’d released the delegates bound to vote for him, his withdrawal from the race means as much, Brewer explained.

“We also know that the president has endorsed Kamala Harris, but that endorsement doesn’t mean that the delegates automatically go to her,” Brewer said.

One option could be that Maine’s entire state delegation could come out and make a statement saying they’re supporting Harris. This has been the case in several states so far, such as Tennessee , North Carolina , and South Carolina .

Other people could seek the nomination, too. They’d need to get 300 signatures from delegates to be put into the running, with no more than 50 from any one state, though Jim Melcher, a professor of political science at UMaine Farmington , thinks that bar would be hard to achieve for others aside from Harris.

Melcher pointed specifically to the need for money. Donations for Harris flowed in the hours after Biden endorsed her, with ActBlue raising $46.7 million as of 9 p.m. Sunday evening.

Democratic donors may have been withholding campaign contributions to encourage Biden to drop out, Melcher said. Harris has the best chance at getting those donations if she’s the nominee.

Brewer also predicts no other candidate will challenge Harris, given the growing number of officials and state delegations pledging to support her, as well as the fact that the Biden campaign has turned over its operations to her.

“If you’re any other nominee who’s not Harris, you would have to essentially cobble together a national presidential campaign on incredibly short notice,” Brewer said. “Harris is getting the keys to a very well-running car at the moment.”

Osher said she’s excited to vote for Harris at the convention, and that her democratic constituents who were skeptical of her pledge to Biden have echoed the same sentiment to her.

“She’s incredibly qualified, you know, certainly more qualified than [former President Donald] Trump ever was when he ran for president, and she’s been part of a winning team that’s done an amazing job for the country,” Osher said.

The timeline for when the actual vote for a nominee will occur is also currently up in the air.

The Democratic National Committee’s Rules Committee is scheduled to meet on Wednesday to decide whether and when the nomination process could occur via a virtual roll call ahead of the convention. The need for a virtual roll call was triggered by deadlines in Ohio and some other states that require the political parties to have their nominee certified before or during the convention.

Option 2: Individual delegate choices

Another possibility is for the vote to come without the party having coalesced support behind one particular candidate.

If that’s the case, Brewer explained, there will be a lot of negotiations going on — “some of which will focus on state leaders trying to get entire slates of state delegates. Some of it will be focused on the individual level, trying to get individual delegates and everything in between.”

As of Monday afternoon, some of Maine’s delegates were waiting for guidance on who to back.

“I think we’ll see some folks providing an indication of who they support and I think I’ll make a decision based on my sense of who Maine Democrats would like the delegation to back in Chicago,” said Ryan Fecteau, a delegate for the first congressional district. “If that’s Vice President Harris, I will be extremely proud to cast my vote for her.”

Another delegate for Maine’s first congressional district, Marpheen Chann, said, “ I’m waiting to hear back from folks about the situation.”

While Brewer sees a brokered convention as the less likely option, if that ends up being the case, superdelegates could take on a greater importance.

Under Democratic National Committee rules, if a candidate gets a majority of delegate votes after the first round, then the nomination is secured. But if no one gets a majority on the first ballot, superdelegates come into play.

Maine has eight superdelegates, who are party leaders and elected Democratic officials. Some have already expressed their support for Harris , including Gov. Janet Mills, 1st District U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree and Speaker of the Maine House Rachel Talbot Ross .

Since the current pledged delegate system has been in place since 1972, Brewer said there has been “nothing even remotely close to this.” The most comparable situation Brewer sees is the 1968 presidential election, when President Lyndon Johnson announced the March before that he would not seek another term.

Ultimately, Brewer said, historical precedent provides little to no insight into how the coming weeks and months will play out.

“People say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before.’ That’s almost never true in American politics. You’d almost always seen it before,” Brewer said. “But you can really say, ‘I never have seen this before.’ We’ve never seen this before. So, how it’s going to play out — we can speculate, but we don’t have a great example, or even a bad example, to fall back on because we truly have never seen it before.”

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