Will the 49th Democratic National Convention matter?

This is the week of the 49th Democratic National Convention , the latest in a quadrennial series that goes back in an unbroken chain to 1832. It’s the oldest political party in the world. Its first presidential nominee, Andrew Jackson , was born in 1767, near the border of North Carolina and South Carolina, which were both then British colonies. Its latest presidential nominee, Kamala Harris , was born 197 years later in California, which was not part of the Union for the first five Democratic conventions.

This year’s convention is the eleventh to be held in Chicago, which was just an outpost called Fort Dearborn when the first convention met 192 years ago. Chicago has been the site now of 12 Democratic conventions, some of them memorable, including the 1940 and 1944 conventions that nominated Franklin Roosevelt for his third and fourth terms, an event not to be repeated since the passage of the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to two.

Most recently, Chicago was the site of two conventions of sharply divergent character and results. The 1968 convention was scheduled late in August to celebrate President Lyndon Johnson’s 60th birthday, but by the time it convened, Johnson, unpopular because of his Vietnam War policy, had announced he wasn’t running, and he didn’t come close to Chicago.

Instead, dissident Democrats inside the convention hall denounced the war and cheered and wept on the showing of a film of Robert Kennedy, who had been murdered by a Palestinian the night after winning the California primary. Outside the hall, demonstrators filled the lakefront parks and were denounced by Mayor Richard J. Daley and chased violently away from the convention hotel by Chicago police — in footage sent out live on TV.

The Johnson convention managers kept enough control to nominate Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but they lost on the roll call on a resolution setting up a reform commission to change the rules on how convention delegates were selected — with results that reverberated long after Humphrey, dogged by footage of the violence in Chicago, was defeated by Richard Nixon in November.

In vivid contrast was the most recent Chicago convention, in 1996, in which delegates danced the Macarena and renominated incumbent President Bill Clinton without any of the hostility faced by incumbent Johnson in 1968 or Carter in 1980. Outside the hall, all was calm as Chicago basked in 1990s prosperity under the consensus leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley.

As an institution, the national convention was created to fill a gap left by the Framers of the Constitution, who abhorred political parties and did not foresee the need for some mechanism to select parties’ presidential nominees. Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans chose nominees in caucuses of the party’s members of Congress, but that failed when there were four serious candidates in 1824 and a poorly attended caucus chose a candidate disabled by a stroke.

The convention was pioneered in 1831 by the Anti-Masonic Party, a splinter group that started in Upstate New York, and was adapted by New York’s Democratic Sen. Martin Van Buren to nominate for a second term incumbent President Andrew Jackson in 1832. That worked out well as Jackson was reelected together with his vice presidential nominee, who turned out to be (no coincidence) Martin Van Buren.

In Van Buren’s time, and up arguably through Clinton’s, the Democratic Party was a coalition between the South and big Northern states such as New York. For nearly a hundred years, the party required a two-thirds supermajority for the nomination, allowing each side an effective veto. But all was not harmony. The 1860 convention in Charleston, South Carolina, was adjourned when pro-slavery toughs intimidated Northern delegates, and two conventions held in Baltimore nominated Northern and Southern candidates. The 1924 convention, held in New York, produced a near-tie vote on a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan and took 103 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Traditional convention high jinks (boozy delegates wearing weird hats and fanning themselves through un-air-conditioned roll calls) came across poorly over television during the 1950s, and the hostilities and violence of the Democrats’ 1968 convention were even worse. The reform commission, set up mostly by dissenters in Chicago and headed by Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), set up a new process in which delegations had to meet racial and sex quotas and most delegates were chosen in primary elections rather than in sparsely attended state and local conventions.

The new process reflected the waning power of Democratic insiders (categorized by the Democratic strategist James Rowe as Southern governors, labor union leaders, and big-city machine bosses) and increased the role of campaign consultants and contributors. It also produced a new style of nominee: McGovern himself in 1972 and Carter in 1976.

The result is that, since the 1980s, the conventions have become carefully packaged and rehearsed television shows, focusing on the personal traits of the nominee more than on party or platform, aimed at enthusing the party faithful and attracting lightly committed voters. How well this 49th Democratic National Convention fulfills that function will be the political story of the week as a party that was, until June 27, planning to renominate President Joe Biden, is now planning to nominate and celebrate Vice President Kamala Harris instead.

In the immediate post-1968 presidential election years, the power of conventions to change minds seemed apparent, as my longtime American Enterprise Institute colleague Karlyn Bowman has documented in detail and summarizes here .

In those days, when the three broadcast networks dominated television viewing, and when each ran three hours of national convention programming in prime time (8 to 11 p.m. Eastern), voters were more or less forced to be convention viewers. Democrats Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis got convention bounces, although each lost in November in the 1980s. The biggest bounce went to Clinton in 1992 as Ross Perot withdrew from his independent candidacy during the week of the Democratic National Convention.

These bounces came at a time when party identification was more fluid and when there were few options for television viewers. In the 21st century of cable and streaming TV and of highly polarized partisanship, convention bounces have, as Bowman notes, become rarer. Democrat John Kerry didn’t get one in 2004, and neither did Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 or Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. In the 1988 cycle, Michael Dukakis, at one point, led George H.W. Bush by 17 percentage points, but he ended up losing in November by 8 points.

Today’s pundits would be astonished to see oscillations of that magnitude in this year’s contest. Current RealClearPolitics averages, for example, show Kamala Harris now 3 points ahead of where Joe Biden was going into the debate and Donald Trump down just half a point since then. On Friday, the Washington Post’s Jason Willick tweeted , “Predicting now that peak Kamalamania has passed,” based on ace poll analyst Nate Silver’s observation that Harris’s margin over Trump was declining from Thursday to Friday.

So it may turn out that Kamala Harris got her small (by late 20th-century standards) convention bounce just as she was officially nominated, over the internet, by the convention before it assembled.

You could make the case, once upon a time, that the parties’ national conventions were, despite their clownish paraphernalia, something in the nature of deliberative bodies. Delegates were chosen by and represented people with genuine political and public responsibilities, they came together in the one place where party operatives from the various states met every four years, and they bargained and sought to reach results, on platforms and candidates, that would maximize their chance to win elections and shape public policy.

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And if that was no longer true in the post-1968 years, you could nevertheless argue that conventions were opportunities for the party nominees to present their cases to the larger public, to reach beyond hostile or indifferent media and speak directly to the voters, especially those not committed to either side. But now, with a larger percentage of voters strongly committed to one side or the other, and with new media providing more avenues by which politicians can communicate with their party’s base, it seems that some small bounce can be produced, as it seems to have been for Kamala Harris, without a convention.

The form of the party convention remains, 192 years after Martin Van Buren copied it from his Anti-Masonic opponents. Voters will see this week how the world’s oldest political party in its 49th quadrennial convention makes its case after several unexpectedly embarrassing weeks — and whether and to what extent public opinion is swayed.