A Mid-August Fever Dream

I stepped into the multiverse and saw a brokered Democratic convention.

(Photo by Scott Olson via Getty Images.)

Author’s note:

This piece is, in large part, a work of political fiction. It is necessarily tongue-in-cheek, but it also has a serious point: Polling suggests Donald Trump will win the presidential election, something that the Democrats seem unable to forestall on their current trajectory. The following is a look back from the not-so-distant future at what could happen if Biden were to step down…

---

In retrospect, Special Counsel Robert K. Hur may have been the best friend the Democrats ever had. Hur’s report on Biden’s age—describing him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”—put into plain words what everyone was thinking. It provided cover for the Democratic faithful to break with the party line.

By early March, The New York Times seemed to be conducting a sort of coup by the editorial board, releasing a poll (along with Siena College) that showed age considerations leading to an erosion of support even among those who voted for Biden in 2020. And it was open season for other op-ed writers—first Ezra Klein, then Michelle Goldberg and Maureen Dowd—to have “The Conversation” out loud and to openly speculate about who would be better in Biden’s place.

But, in the wake of a relatively successful State of the Union address, more was needed for Biden to step aside than spiky comments by Robert Hur or even Ezra Klein. The anonymous White House aide who is our source for so much of the history of this period tells us that the critical meeting was a discussion between Barack Obama and Joe Biden, conducted in the Oval Office in late March. Obama had quietly urged withdrawal before. Like Lyndon Johnson, Biden had gotten so far as to draft up a resignation note to be delivered with his State of the Union. But, like Johnson, he found it to be the wrong moment for delivering bad news and kept the note in his pocket. 

Now, however, when Obama visited the Oval Office he came armed with internal polling data showing Biden to be not only behind a generic Democrat in a head-to-head matchup with Trump, but trailing several of the more prominent (if lesser-known) Democratic contenders.

There was a long, anguished pause after Obama finished his presentation. “You’re right,” Biden said at last. “It’s time.”

He appeared on television, made a quiet, dignified statement announcing that he would no longer be in consideration for the nomination—and then, needless to say, all hell broke loose. Within days, a dozen candidates declared themselves and began angling for invitations to the state conventions.

Echoing Franklin Roosevelt’s equivocal support for the nomination of Henry Wallace as vice president at the 1944 convention, Biden declared, “If I were a delegate I would not hesitate in voting for Kamala Harris.”

But this statement produced considerable ambiguity—not least amongst the delegates themselves—over whether their pledge to Biden now extended to Harris. The language in the Democratic Call to Convention—“delegates pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiment of those who elected them”—could not have been more vague. Biden himself had also said that he “did not wish to dictate to the convention,” which was equally maddening: The delegates were used to acting in lockstep and seemed to struggle with the realization that they were now free to vote as they saw fit.

For a while in the late spring, it looked as if Harris had the nomination sewn up. She addressed many of the state nominating conventions and showed herself to be a better stump speaker than she had been in 2020. She also proved adept at playing hardball and, behind the scenes, succeeded in persuading the Democratic National Committee to announce that it would not organize any debates.

But by June, the DNC was compelled to reverse course. Harris’ polling numbers remained intractably low in a head-to-head confrontation with Trump, and for her to receive the nomination without any open process at all seemed deeply undemocratic. 

The DNC then lurched to the opposite extreme, announcing a shotgunned series of six debates, held over a two-month window. The idea here was not just for the delegates to get a preview of their candidates before the convention but to keep the Democratic Party in the news cycle: Brutal polling numbers had at last convinced the Democratic establishment that they would need to run to some extent as the underdog.

Going into the debates, Harris was the frontrunner, but it was a crowded stage including Cory Booker, Jamaal Bowman, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, and Gretchen Whitmer. Little by little, the challengers, all gunning for Harris, succeeded in drawing her into small traps on policy. She seemed, on the one hand, to join with the State Department in advocating for a two-state solution, but, when confronted with the adamant refusal of Benny Gantz’s newly-elected government, withdrew to more boilerplate support for Israel. This opened her up to criticism from the left and to a surprising surge of support for Bowman with his promise of backing a Palestinian state.

It was a difficult spring for the party. A new series of op-eds expressed buyers’ remorse over Biden’s withdrawal: Why had the Democrats gone to such trouble to change candidates if Harris was no more popular? And the specter of 1968 loomed large in the minds of the Democratic establishment—the question being whether a brokered convention would inevitably fracture the party. 

But those fears proved largely ungrounded. 1968 had been a uniquely divisive time. In 2024, there were no mass protests on the streets of Chicago and no heavy-handed police action in response. There had been some concern that the brokered convention would be so out of the muscle memory of the party that no one would know how to do it, but that was misplaced. Within hours of his arrival in Chicago, Chuck Schumer was caught on a hot mic saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun.” 

The drama of the early part of the convention was the Stop Kamala movement. Rumors circulated of a Buttigieg-Booker pact, as they did of a Newsom-Whitmer alliance, with longshot candidates choosing to remain on the ballot until they could throw their support to someone else in exchange for a vice presidential slot.

Harris won the first ballot overwhelmingly but was still well short of the 1,968 delegates needed to qualify. Her failure to cross the threshold meant that the 739 automatic delegates—the “superdelegates”—were now in play for subsequent ballots. These were party dignitaries who enjoyed the sensation of king-making and were immune to the argument that Biden’s quasi-endorsement of Harris should be binding. Their concerns were entirely about electability and Harris’ low polling.

Harris won the next several ballots, but her margin dipped every time. The pivotal figures now were those who had the fewest delegates and were timing their withdrawals tactically. There were no smoke-filled rooms at the United Center, but more and more party dignitaries were glimpsed anxiously smoking cigarettes on West Madison Street. Newsom became the critical figure and the widespread rumor before the ninth ballot was that he would withdraw in favor of Harris and in exchange for a slot on her ticket. But negotiations stalled for reasons that have never been entirely clear, and, instead, on the ninth ballot, it was Whitmer who suddenly withdrew in Buttigieg’s favor—creating a midwestern ticket, with the rumor pervasive that Buttigieg had broken an earlier promise to Booker in favor of a fresh one to Whitmer.

In any case, it was enough to propel Buttigieg’s ascent. Newsom belatedly bowed out, and his delegates mostly abandoned Harris. 

It had been a bitter and difficult convention. Almost no one had behaved well. Many on the Democratic side felt that Harris, who had, after all, established herself as a capable and substantive candidate, had been poorly treated. And, at a moment when the goal should have been achieving unity, serious rifts developed within the Democratic Party. But, on the convention’s last day, Joe Biden spoke. The applause lasted for several long minutes. Everyone present knew what he had sacrificed in his withdrawal. It had been the crowning achievement of his career in public service—demonstrating a rare maturity in politics, an ability to put party and country ahead of personal ambition. He thanked Harris and expressed his personal disappointment that she was not the nominee. And he praised Buttigieg as a brilliant and dedicated Secretary of Transportation.

Buttigieg had played hardball as much as anyone at the convention, but he made up for it with a rousing acceptance speech—a full-throated defense of Ukraine, of the need to reverse Dobbs, and an insistence that the country must have the decency to reject Trump.

Pundits had believed that the drama would divide and weaken the party, but what hadn’t quite been anticipated was that it made riveting television. There had never been a brokered convention in the era of around-the-clock televised news, and the spectacle focused viewers’ attention on the Democratic Party in a way that nothing had in years.

The result of the 2024 election is, of course, too well known to review here. And it is not in dispute that the Democrats had a strong candidate in Buttigieg. But he wasn’t the only choice. Plenty of candidates from the Democrats’ younger generation—including Whitmer and Booker—proved that they had the ability to take the fight to Trump. They spoke in clear language as opposed to platitudes (this had been Harris’ limitation). And, in contrast to Biden, they had it in them to simply outwork Trump—to appear constantly on television, constantly on the campaign trail, and, by contrast, to make Trump appear meandering and reactive. 

It was a bruising election cycle. The Democrats endured a divisive spring and a confusing nomination process. The debates exposed some of the rifts within the party and the convention could not hide bare-knuckle politics. But the viewers who tuned in to the wall-to-wall coverage also saw something else: fundamentally decent people who had the country’s best interests at heart. In the end, the party emerged all the better for it. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

---

Follow Persuasion on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: