All around the political blogosphere you can find folks smacking their lips over the prospect of a brokered or deadlocked Republican national convention. They look forward to the spectacle of delegates assembling in Cleveland with no majority for any candidate, of multiple ballots and governors running as favorite sons, of protracted floor demonstrations and points of order raised from the floor.
Political junkies relish the idea of watching hours of convention proceedings without knowing the outcome any more than sports fans know which team will win the Super Bowl.
I have bad news for those looking forward to a deadlocked convention. It. Isn’t. Going. To. Happen.
That’s because it’s impossible for party national conventions to serve the same function they did for more than a century after the first Democratic National Convention assembled in Baltimore in May 1832.
Back then, the national convention was a unique communications medium, the only place where politicians from across the nation could meet face-to-face, conduct confidential negotiations and reach agreement.
In those days, men of business — and the few women of business — communicated with each other in written letters. Presidents and party chairmen, like business executives and middle managers, spent their days reading their correspondence and dictating replies to stenographers and secretaries. At the end of the day they would proofread the letters, sign them and see that they were put in the mail.
One such man of business was James A. Farley, Franklin Roosevelt’s postmaster general and 1932 and 1936 campaign manager, who signed all his correspondence in green ink. In his memoirs Farley wrote how he arrived at Chicago’s Union Station for the 1932 national convention with no idea how many delegates his candidate had or how he could put together enough votes for the nomination. There was no medium to engage in serious negotiations until he got to the convention city.
Farley also explained how he correctly predicted that Roosevelt would carry 46 of 48 states in 1936. During the fall campaign he took what he called the extraordinary step of placing one long-distance telephone call every week to a well-informed politician in each non-Southern state. To double check, he placed another such long-distance call the weekend before the election.
Long-distance calls in those days were placed through operators and were expensive: $1 a minute when average earnings were maybe $50 a week. The first direct distance dialing call was not placed until 1951. They weren’t available in major cities until the late 1950s and countrywide in the 1960s.
In those days, politicians outside of Congress didn’t see much of each other in person. Train travel was time-consuming and plane travel hazardous. Regularly scheduled jet travel only began when the Boeing 707 was launched in 1958.
It’s no coincidence then that the last multi-ballot national convention was in 1952, when Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson. As long-distance calls and jet flights became more common, some of the communication that could occur only at the convention started happening earlier.
The parties’ switch to choosing most delegates in primaries, between 1968 and 1972, also changed things. Previously, many delegates were chosen by party bosses and did their bidding, like the Tammany New York mayor-elect who, when asked whom he’d appoint as police commissioner, said, “They haven’t told me yet.” You had to wait until the convention to see how these people would vote.
This was not so after 1968, when CBS’ Martin Plissner conducted the first media delegate count. Network delegate counts held up under stress in the close 1976 contest between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Walter Mondale, just short of a majority after the last primary, relayed the names and phone numbers of additional committed delegates to Associated Press delegate counter David Lawsky, so he could claim the nomination at a mid-day press conference the next day.
So what happens if no Republican candidate emerges with a delegate majority from the 2016 primaries and caucuses? Does everybody wait for the convention to convene in Cleveland to see who emerges as the nominee?
The answer is yes — if you do a few other things first. Like ban long-distance phone calls, jet travel, and media delegate counts and of course shut down the Internet. Then the national convention can function again as national conventions did up through the 1950s.
Otherwise the negotiations that used to take place only at national conventions will be going on all around us — as they already are and have been for months.
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