What's the point of party conventions?

Nowadays, they're micro-targeted communication fests - but they used to have more substance

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American political parties haven’t always picked their candidates in week-long showy conventions. For the first few decades after the country’s founding, candidates were picked by caucuses of party members in Congress. This reflected the widespread elitism of the American revolution, which was led and directed by people who wanted political power in the hands of well-educated, wealthy elites, not everyday folk. Party conventions started to become common in the 1830s, the era of “Jacksonian democracy”, when the franchise was being extended to all white males and anti-elitism was the order of the day. But even then the rise of the convention was contingent.

The first party conventions in the United States were held in 1830 - 31 by the Antimasonic Party. Now pretty much lost to contemporary political discourse, the Antimasonic Party was the first ever third party in the United States, and one whose purpose was admirably apparent from its name - they didn’t like Freemasons, who they saw as a shadowy conspiracy of business and political elites who shafted the common man. Lacking any members of Congress, the Antimasons couldn’t pick their candidate through a vote of their caucus, so they decided to invite supporters to come together from all over the country and decide together. Unable to find a suitable candidate who shared their principles, they ended up selecting William Wirt, a former Freemason who had not campaigned for the nomination and who later informed the delegates that he would refuse to actually speak out against Freemasonry during the campaign. The party died a well-deserved death a few years later.

Conventions, however, stuck around. Next year, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats held a convention of their own. But even theirs was designed just to solve a short-term problem rather than to become a permanent fixture of the political scene. Jackson wanted to dump his Vice President, John Calhoun, and replace him with Martin van Buren. The problem was that congressional Democrats admired Calhoun and would never agree to replace him, and a convention was the solution. It worked, but almost too well. After holding one convention which sampled a broader range of opinion than just the party’s congressional caucus, it seemed elitist and insular not to do it again. Soon, party conventions became a regular feature of U.S. politics.

The key point about this early era of U.S. party conventions, which lasted roughly from the 1830s to the 1950s, was that they mattered. Initially they were used to select presidential tickets, but soon it became natural to tack other important issues onto the agenda as well. Conventions ended up being the place where the party would hammer out its platform and where deals would be made which would affect policy and strategy. Particularly in an era when rapid communication and travel between different parts of the country was more difficult, conventions played a key coordinating function - they were the only place the party could get together and actually be a national party, rather than a collection of different figures spread across the country.

The modern convention

All of this started to change in the postwar period. The first big change was that the nominating process started to shift out of the convention hall itself and instead take place through the selection of delegates bound to a particular candidate. This was initially mostly through caucuses of party bosses in each state, and later through the open primaries we know and love today. Since 1952, it has never taken more than one ballot for a convention to select a major party nominee - they’ve always already had the votes locked down before the vote even took place. This is in contrast to the earlier conventions, when it sometimes took multiple rounds of voting and horse-trading before a candidate was picked.

This earlier period has lived on in the idea of an “open”, “contested” or a “brokered” convention. Every few cycles, the media will start predicting that a particular convention is going to be “contested” - meaning two plausible candidates will vie for the nomination - and end up being “brokered”, meaning party elites will step in to determine the outcome. It’s a good story to liven up the news cycle in the middle of a boring primary, but it hasn’t happened in nearly 75 years, because by the time the convention rolls around, the nominee is always already clear.

Nor do modern conventions usually feature any serious struggle over the party platform, which is now firmed up in the months leading up to the event in a sort of “shadow convention”. In 2020, when Joe Biden decided he needed to make sure the Bernie Sanders wing of the party was firmly on board with his candidacy, he put together a series of task forces with representatives from both sides to put together a series of policy recommendations. That involved a lot of horse-trading and commitments - but by the time the convention rolled around, there was never any doubt that the delegates would vote for it.

So what is the point?

There’s a reason why conventions have changed in this manner, and it’s simple: in the modern media environment, the purpose of the convention is completely different. It’s no longer about hammering out consensus within the party. Instead, it’s about getting a week of free media to put your message across to the American people.

To understand why this is important, just think about the alternative. In the age of the telegraph and the steamship, it didn’t matter too much if delegates spent a week shouting at and punching each other (which happened more than you might think), looking every bit like an angry mob rather than a party of government. But in the age of 24/7 cable news coverage, that would be fatal. Voters who were just starting to tune in to the election would get a terrible impression. Instead, you want to give those voters a modern media spectacle: a well-choreographed, convincing message for why they should support your party. And the TV networks, which cover the conventions in a fairly uncritical way, give you lots of free attention with which to do it.

This year’s DNC is a great example. Harris didn’t even attend the second day of the convention, instead going to Wisconsin to campaign - a sure sign that nothing significant was going on in Chicago, at least nothing needing her attention. The early days of the convention have been about getting the party’s most effective communicators - Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, AOC - to make their case to the American people and to put forward a message of unity. If AOC and Chuck Schumer were spending the time arguing over health policy live on air instead, the opposite would have been achieved. You want everyone on message, all the time.

We’re also seeing an interesting use of micro-targeting at this year’s DNC. In the age of video clips and viral social media posts, you can generate a lot of content which is then going to be stripped of its context and shared across the internet. Obama’s “crowd size” joke about Trump - which was pretty clearly actually a penis joke, given Obama’s hand gesture - is a great example. Taken in the context of the speech, it wasn’t that brazen, and in fact I spent more time today than I would have liked arguing on the internet with people who claim it wasn’t a penis joke at all. But it was a moment ripe to be clipped, memed, and spread across TikTok for the young vote. The same goes for Atlanta rapper Lil Jon’s appearance during the Georgia delegation’s roll call vote - a smart way to try to appeal to a particular audience in a swing state.

Some people could argue that the transformation of party conventions from genuine deliberative bodies into media spectacles is a retrograde step. It’s certainly an example of how parties have become less important and more and more emphasis is placed on the power and personality of the president, who ultimately this whole apparatus is designed to promote. Who can put on the greatest media spectacle arguably isn’t the best way to pick the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. But in the modern age of 24/7 media and presidential supremacy, it’s hard to see how it could be done differently.

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