Your web browser is not supported You're using Internet Explorer, some features might not work. Related pages: EC periods - main page EC periods for congressional primaries EC periods for presidential primaries EC periods for general election EC periods for special elections Electioneering communications periods for national party nominating conventions. About Careers Press Contact. Since then, conventions have become a way to celebrate a predetermined candidate, rather than a means of choosing one.
Later that year, the National Republican Party a different party than the modern Republican Party held its own convention. The major shift came in , when sitting president Andrew Jackson decided that his party, the Democratic Party , should hold a convention, too. Although Jackson tried to portray this as a way of giving voters more power, historian Jill Lepore suggests in The New Yorker that it was actually an attempt to replace Vice President John C.
Calhoun with Martin Van Buren on the ticket. Jackson succeeded and won reelection. Since then, every major party, with the exception of the Whigs in , has held a national convention to nominate its presidential candidate. Still, nominating conventions in the 19th century were very different from the versions Americans watch on TV today.
Roosevelt in Haynes , a lawyer in Baltimore and author of two books on the history of U. One of the other big differences between modern conventions and 19th-century ones is that there were no presidential primary elections. The convention was when candidates were selected. As with the caucus before it, party members eventually came to see this as an undemocratic system in need of reform. In a few nightly doses on television every four years, the Republican and Democratic National Conventions seem like little more than political pageants—pricey infomercials for the parties and their candidates.
Decades ago, power brokers, big-money donors, and thousands of delegates descended on a chosen city with the goal of picking and then nominating candidates for president and vice president. Since , however, that purpose has changed: The conventions now are designed to sell, rather than select, the politicians who rank-and-file voters chose at the polls. They are made-for-television productions that build over four days toward a grand finale—the lengthy address that offers nominees an opportunity to introduce themselves to voters, rally the party faithful, and audition for the role of president.
Technically, the conventions for both Republicans and Democrats are formal party proceedings. Each is a dressed-up legislative session held in an arena, where delegates vote on matters that have both symbolic and actual importance, including the party platform, rules, and, yes, the presidential and vice presidential nominees. Only in the last 30 to 40 years have the roll-call votes for president and vice president been faits accomplis. The conventions frequently began with multiple viable candidates for the nomination who made their pitches to party leaders and coalitions of state delegations.
The parties sometimes needed several ballots to determine the nominee, who often had to negotiate with the party on the selection of a running mate. In , Democrats met in New York for 16 days, the longest political convention in U. It took nine days and ballots to nominate John W. Davis, who went on to lose to the incumbent, President Calvin Coolidge, in the general election. Four years later, Ted Kennedy failed in his bid to wrest the Democratic nomination from President Jimmy Carter in New York by trying to get the party to release delegates bound to Carter.
As Republicans prepare to head to Cleveland, a group of delegates wants to toss Donald Trump from the top of the ticket.
Since primaries and caucuses became the principal means of nominee selection 40 years ago, no candidate in either party who has entered a convention with the most delegates has failed to secure the nomination.
If nothing else, anti-Trump forces should be able to succeed in adding drama to the roll-call vote on his nomination, which in recent conventions have been ratified by acclamation as a show of party unity.
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