Origins and Historical Development
National nominating conventions emerged in the 1830s as a replacement for the discredited congressional caucus system, known pejoratively as “King Caucus”, whereby party members of Congress had quietly chosen presidential candidates among themselves.
The Anti-Masonic Party held the first national convention in 1831; the Democrats followed in 1832, nominating Andrew Jackson for a second term, and the Republicans held their first convention in 1856, nominating John C. Frémont.
For over a century, conventions were genuine deliberative bodies rather than ceremonial ones.
Delegates often arrived uncommitted or only loosely committed, and the nominee was decided through bargaining, factional deals and, at times, dozens of ballots on the convention floor.
- 1924 (Democrats): the convention required 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis, the longest deadlock in the party’s history.
- 1932 (Democrats): Franklin D. Roosevelt secured the nomination only after the party’s “two thirds rule”, requiring a supermajority of delegates, was satisfied through intense backroom negotiation.
- 1952 and 1976 (Republicans): among the last conventions with genuine first-ballot uncertainty, the latter seeing Gerald Ford narrowly hold off a challenge from Ronald Reagan.
“The convention is the voice, the bone and the sinews of a political party, and sometimes it even nominates an Abraham Lincoln.”
Fletcher Knebel, American journalist and novelist
Convention rhetoric could itself become historic. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s acceptance address to the 1932 Democratic convention gave the New Deal its name:
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932 Democratic National Convention
The Shift from Decision-Making to Ratification
The turning point was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination without having won a single primary, while violent clashes between police and anti-Vietnam War protesters outside the hall exposed, live on national television, the gap between party elites and ordinary voters.
This prompted the McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms of 1968 to 1972, which bound delegate selection much more closely to the outcome of primaries and caucuses.
The consequences of this shift can be summarised as follows:
- By the late 1970s, the outcome of the nomination was almost always settled by primaries and caucuses months before delegates gathered.
- The Democratic Party: following recommendations from the 1982 Hunt Commission, the party first used superdelegates at its 1984 convention to preserve some elite influence, then curtailed their first-ballot voting power in 2018 following controversy over the 2016 Clinton and Sanders contest.
- Conventions became increasingly televised, stage-managed events built around prime-time speeches and coordinated messaging rather than genuine deliberation.
“After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquillity of a political convention.”
Adlai E. Stevenson, reflecting on his time as US Ambassador to the United Nations
The 2020 conventions of both parties were held largely virtually because of the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrating that even the physical assembly of delegates was no longer functionally necessary to the nomination itself.
Embarrassing and Chaotic Moments
The same televised immediacy that exposed the divisions of 1968 has continued to generate unscripted, occasionally excruciating moments across the decades since.
Because conventions combine live television, large crowds and minimal script control, they have produced some of American politics’ most revealing episodes, affecting both parties rather than one.
Far from undermining their value as a subject of study, these moments often expose the underlying tensions within a party more candidly than the official programme intends.
- 1972 (Democrats): poor scheduling meant that George McGovern delivered his acceptance speech at 2.48am, by which point most of the American television audience had gone to bed.
- 1980 (Democrats): after a bitter primary battle, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy shared a visibly awkward, fleeting handshake on stage, widely read at the time as proof the party remained divided.
- 2012 (Republicans), Tampa: actor Clint Eastwood delivered a rambling, unscripted address to an empty chair, into which he improvised responses on behalf of an imaginary President Obama. The stunt spawned the internet meme “Eastwooding” and was widely judged to have distracted from Mitt Romney’s message on the eve of his own acceptance speech.
- 2016 (Republicans), Cleveland: Melania Trump’s speech was found to contain passages closely resembling Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention address, prompting a plagiarism row that overshadowed the opening night. Two days later, Ted Cruz was booed off the stage after refusing to endorse Donald Trump, telling delegates instead to “vote your conscience”.
- 2016 (Democrats), Philadelphia: unresolved bitterness from the primaries surfaced when significant numbers of Bernie Sanders’ own delegates booed him for urging them to support Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama was later moved to appeal for unity directly from the podium:
“Don’t boo. Vote.”
Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia
Contemporary Examples: 2024
The 2024 cycle, arriving amid unusually compressed circumstances of its own, illustrates how thoroughly ceremonial conventions have become, while also showing they retain real political value.
- Republican National Convention, Milwaukee, July 2024: confirmed Donald Trump’s nomination, a foregone conclusion after he had already defeated Nikki Haley in the primaries, and unveiled JD Vance as his running mate. The convention’s most striking moment, Trump appearing days after surviving an assassination attempt, had nothing to do with the formal nominating function and everything to do with the media spectacle. His acceptance speech, at just under ninety-three minutes the longest in modern convention history, opened with a direct reference to the shooting:
“I am not supposed to be here tonight. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.”
Donald Trump, 2024 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, Milwaukee
- Democratic National Convention, Chicago, August 2024: nominated Kamala Harris, but the decisive step, replacing Joe Biden as the party’s candidate after his withdrawal in July 2024, was effectively settled beforehand through a virtual delegate roll call, not on the convention floor itself. The convention functioned chiefly as a rallying and unification exercise for a switch that had already occurred.
Evaluating Their Significance Today
The case that conventions remain important
- They retain a formal function, certifying the nominee and running mate, even where the substantive decision was made earlier.
- They provide a rare period of sustained, uninterrupted national media coverage, framed entirely on the party’s own terms.
- They serve a unifying function, visible in the speed with which Democrats coalesced around Harris in 2024, and can launch national careers, as Barack Obama’s 2004 keynote famously did.
- They can still mark genuine historical moments: Harris’s nomination in 2024 followed Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 as only the second time a major party had nominated a woman for president.
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”
Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address
“When they go low, we go high.”
Michelle Obama, 2016 Democratic National Convention
The case that their significance has declined
- The outcome is settled by primaries and caucuses months in advance; no convention since 1976 has involved genuine first-ballot uncertainty.
- The so-called “convention bounce” in opinion polls, once a reliable and sizeable effect, has shrunk considerably in an era of deep partisan polarisation and pre-existing voter loyalty.
- Running mates and campaign themes are now frequently announced or trailed before the convention even begins, reducing its function as a moment of genuine disclosure.
- Television audiences have fallen sharply compared with the network-era peak, and the decline has continued into the most recent cycles:
- 1952: the first convention with “gavel to gavel” coverage was carried on 104 stations in 68 cities, reaching an estimated 70 million viewers out of a total US population of only around 158 million.
- 1980s: as ratings and advertising revenue fell, the major networks abandoned full coverage; by 1988 they had cut their nightly broadcasts to around two hours, leaving gavel-to-gavel coverage to the newly launched C-SPAN.
- 1984 to 2004: convention ratings fell by around 30 per cent compared with the previous twenty years, as cable channels offered rival programming.
- 2016: opening night of the Republican convention drew around 23 million viewers.
- 2024: opening night of the Republican convention drew around 18 million viewers, and the Democratic convention’s opening night drew around 20 million, a fall of roughly 22 per cent on its 2016 equivalent, despite a US population of over 335 million.
“We didn’t discover our values in a poll taken a week before the convention.”
Ronald Reagan, 1984 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, Dallas
Judgement
Conventions are no longer a key part of the nomination process: that decision now rests with voters in primaries and caucuses, and the convention merely ratifies it.
However, they remain a meaningful part of the wider electoral process, functioning as a nationally televised rally that unifies the party, sets the tone for the general election campaign and can still produce historically significant, and occasionally excruciating, moments.
The fairest assessment is that conventions have been transformed rather than rendered obsolete: from decision-making bodies into carefully choreographed campaign launches, still useful to parties but no longer essential to how the nominee is actually chosen.