Opinion | If Biden or Trump is forced off the ballot, what happens next?

As things look now, both Biden and Trump are likely to have accumulated enough delegates to claim their respective nominations by mid-March. But that won’t become official until their parties meet this summer for their conventions — the Republicans beginning July 15 in Milwaukee, and the Democrats starting Aug. 19 in Chicago.

So what happens if a presumed nominee, by choice or otherwise, doesn’t make it that far? Let’s start with some history: On March 31, 1968, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson made the shocking announcement that he would not seek or accept his party’s nomination for another term. Back then, only 14 states and the District of Columbia held primaries that gave ordinary voters any say in who their nominee would be. In the other states, party bosses — mayors, governors, ward leaders, local chairs and the like — controlled the levers. These local party insiders engineered things so that Vice President Hubert Humphrey got the Democratic nomination, despite not having competed in a single primary.

The turmoil of 1968 — which saw violent confrontations between police and antiwar protesters on the streets outside the Democratic convention hall in Chicago — brought a movement to bring the nominating process out of the backrooms and into the open. For their own reasons, not the least of which was generating more public interest and engagement, Republicans implemented reforms as well. By 1972, the modern system of state-by-state primaries and caucuses was nearly in place.

So were rules to govern possible eventualities that would disrupt that process. Yet it should also be remembered that the parties begin their conventions by voting on their rules — which means all these procedures could be thrown out the window should a crisis hit.

There are roughly 2,400 Republican delegates and 4,000 Democratic delegates. “These people can be teachers or labor union members or evangelical Christians or right to life activists. What they all have in common is some degree of activism on behalf of their political party, even if they generally are unknown to the public,” writes Elaine Kamarck, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management and the author of “Primary Politics,” an authoritative guide to how the nominating process works.

Most of them arrive at the convention pledged to support a specific candidate, but the current rules of both parties stipulate that convention delegates pledged to someone who is no longer running become free agents. Thus would begin a frenzied courtship of the up-for-grabs delegates.

If Trump or Biden were to step aside, other contenders would seize the opportunity to jump into the race. If, say, Biden were to drop out, it is easy to imagine that Vice President Harris would quickly declare her candidacy, along with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who Kamarck says is already “running the best proxy campaign I’ve ever seen”) and perhaps other rising stars, such as governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.

As uncommitted delegates ponder their options, states such as Pennsylvania, which hold their primaries late in the calendar, would go from being irrelevant to becoming important gauges of voter sentiment that could help guide the delegates. Because of that, their secretaries of state might consider proposing new filing deadlines — or even rescheduling their primaries — so that late entrants could compete. There is precedent for them to do that; in 2020, 16 states juggled their calendars, some of them multiple times, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The outcome will be a convention where the result may not be known ahead of time. In other words, it will be the kind of no-holds-barred event that nominating conventions held between 1831 and 1968,” Kamarck writes.

What happened back then wasn’t always pretty. The 1912 Republican convention was a brawl in which former president Theodore Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to snatch the nomination from his own handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, by claiming that some delegations were fraudulently seated. The high-water mark for chaos, however, was the 1924 Democratic convention, when it took 103 ballots to come up with dark horse John W. Davis of West Virginia as the presidential nominee.

Not since the epic 1976 GOP primary battle between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have delegates arrived for a convention with the nomination in doubt. That one got settled in Ford’s favor on the first ballot.

But all of that was before the modern forces of social media, big money and high-tech disinformation reshaped the nature of politics, bringing in new players. Republican lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, a leading Republican expert on election law, says it would not be accurate to call what could happen today an old-style “brokered” convention, because in today’s politics, it’s not clear who would play the role of broker, calling the shots the way state chairmen, ward bosses and senior elected officials once did. The wishes of establishment figures matter not at all to the populist wings in either party at the moment, and any effort by traditional forces to instill order these days might be met with only more bedlam.

The demise of Trump would create an especially large vacuum in the GOP, whose most recent platform was simply to stipulate that the party would support whatever it is Trump wants to do. As we have already seen in the primaries, when candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis failed spectacularly in their efforts to portray themselves as 2.0 versions of the MAGA original, there is no obvious heir to bring order and authority to what he would leave behind. “Are the delegates going to listen to Eric Trump?” Ginsberg asks. “I don’t think so.”