Kamala Harris will win the nomination

Get ready for the balloons to fall.
Photo: Getty Images

Kamala Harris will be the Democratic presidential candidate.

With Joe Biden’s surprise withdrawal on Sunday afternoon, the stage is clear for Harris’ successor on the electoral list. But the drama is not about the result. It’s about the process.

For Democrats, the question is whether steps will be taken to quickly elect Harris as the presidential candidate or whether she will at least have the opportunity to face symbolic opposition – similar to that which Dean Phillips had to muster against Joe Biden.

Just hours after Biden’s announcement, elected Democrats from all wings of the party had thrown their weight behind his vice president and supported her as Biden’s successor, as did the incumbent president himself. It is hard to imagine that Harris will be denied the nomination.

Democrats were already engaged in an elaborate process to adjust convention rules so the nominee could be officially selected well before the Aug. 19 meeting. The push for a “virtual roll call” was initially prompted by a quirk in Ohio state law that requires a nominee to be selected before Aug. 7. Even though Ohio changed its law, Democrats still planned to hold the online process – publicly citing paranoia about potential Republican-backed lawsuits and privately expressing concern that open mics at the convention could cause unrest in a party where ideological divides between activists and voters are widening.

During an online meeting of the DNC Rules Committee on Friday, it was stressed at every possible means that, given the late timing of the convention and concerns about lawsuits from Republicans and the Heritage Foundation, a virtual roll call was an absolute logistical necessity.

No final vote was taken at the time — instead, the meeting served as both a comprehensive explanation of how a virtual roll call will work and a pep rally to convince committee members to support it. Instead, the committee will formally adopt the procedure next week.

As political scientist Daniel Scholzman, who studies political parties at Johns Hopkins University, noted, the demand for virtual roll calls had “taken on a life of its own” and, although it was not designed for such circumstances, had developed its own unstoppable momentum.

Even before Biden’s withdrawal, the question was whether his delegates would stick with him. The delegates are not formally bound to a candidate – rather, the DNC rules oblige them to “represent, to the best of their knowledge and belief, the views of those who elected them.”

Under current DNC ​​rules (which are subject to change by the Rules Committee), a candidate needs a signed petition with the names of at least 300 and no more than 600 delegates to be included in the nomination. No delegate can sign multiple petitions, and no more than 50 delegates from a single state can do so. There are 3,933 delegates in total.

The challenge now is whether anyone other than Harris will bother to scrape together the 300 delegates needed to add her name to the nomination before a virtual roll call vote. Before Biden’s decision to drop out, the online ballot would have listed four options: Biden; Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who was running a losing effort against the incumbent in New Hampshire; the unknown Jason Palmer, who won the primary in American Samoa; and “undecideds.”

Just an hour after Biden’s announcement, Barack Obama endorsed an open process to select the next Democratic presidential candidate. “I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process that will produce an outstanding candidate,” the 44th president said.

No one seriously doubts that Harris ultimately has the nomination in the bag. But there are incentives for others to challenge her. From the party’s perspective, there is a desire to at least suggest an open process. From the perspective of individual politicians, there is the opportunity to get a lot of airtime on cable TV if they throw their hat in the ring. Any challenger to Harris would almost certainly lose, but it would be an opportunity to both build a national profile and a donor list if handled skillfully.

This, of course, carries some risk for Harris. She could, at least theoretically, lose. On the other hand, the Harlem Globetrotters could theoretically lose every time they go to court.

At a time when Republicans are portraying Biden’s withdrawal as a “coup” against the incumbent president, the presence of multiple credible candidates offers at least the semblance of democratic legitimacy for Biden’s replacement with Harris. The downside risk, of course, is that even a “mini-primary” could be divisive. But then again, it’s hard to imagine anything could be more divisive after Democrats spent weeks publicly urging Biden to drop out of the race.