Thoroughly conventional

By Jonathan Zimmerman

The convention season is upon us! Starting with the Republican National Convention next week, followed by the Democrats' the week after, Americans will watch with bated breath as the parties decide their nominations for president.

Actually, those decisions were made months ago. The real mystery is why anyone watches the conventions - and why we need them at all.

The standard answer is that the conventions allow the parties and their nominees to define themselves on the national stage. In addition, conventions supposedly produce a "bounce" of popularity that can catapult candidates into the White House.

But in this era of nonstop news, haven't the candidates already had ample opportunity to define themselves? It's hard to see why they deserve four more days of round-the-clock coverage, or why taxpayers should be shelling out $136 million to fund two marathons of cocktail mixers, buffet lines, and canned speeches.

And the bounce-to-the-presidency idea is mostly a myth. John McCain got a bigger post-convention bounce than Barack Obama in 2008, but Obama trounced McCain in November. Barry Goldwater got a bigger bounce in 1964, but Lyndon Johnson went on to win the White House by one of the widest margins in U.S. history.

And that was back when these events mattered. The Republican convention in San Francisco that year featured an angry debate between Goldwater supporters and backers of the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller, who denounced the "Communist and Nazi methods" of GOP "extremists." In his famous acceptance speech, Goldwater replied that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

Later that summer, in Atlantic City, the Democratic convention was fractured by America's oldest problem: race. In Mississippi, where blacks were barred from voting in the Democratic primary, they formed a new party and sent their own delegates to Atlantic City. But the convention refused to seat them, sparking recriminations that would resonate across the decade.

Elephant in room

Both parties' internal struggles were triggered by primary elections, which had arisen half a century earlier to challenge the "smoke-filled room" approach to candidate selection. Like the era's other electoral reforms, primaries aimed to wrest control from party bosses.

Change came slowly. In 1912, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt took nine GOP primaries to incumbent William Howard Taft's one. But Taft still held a firm grip on delegates in the non-primary states, which allowed him to retain the nomination.

Yet by 1948, when both major parties held their conventions in Philadelphia, primaries had become the main route to the presidential nomination. Having lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt four years earlier, New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey had to persuade the GOP to select him again. So he took to the hustings, winning several high-profile primary contests.

But Dewey's re-nomination wasn't secured until the convention, where supporters of Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft paraded a baby elephant. Not to be outdone, another challenger's backers carried a blond woman in a rowboat with a sign proclaiming, "Man the oars! Ride the crest! Harold Stassen, he's the best."

At the Democratic convention, meanwhile, delegates from Mississippi and Alabama marched out to protest a platform plank endorsing civil rights for African Americans. The dissenters would join the new States' Rights Democratic Party, which nominated hard-line segregationist Strom Thurmond.

Made meaningless

By the 1970s, nearly half the states had established presidential primaries, which allowed once-obscure "outsiders" George McGovern and Jimmy Carter to capture the Democratic nomination in 1972 and 1976, respectively. On the GOP side, meanwhile, Ronald Reagan won all but one of the 1976 primaries west of the Mississippi in his bid to unseat President Gerald Ford.

But starting in the 1980s, the parties and states began to "front-load" the primary elections, holding them earlier and earlier in the year. That allowed front-runners to sew up the nomination quickly, rendering the rest of the primaries - and the conventions - meaningless. By 2000, 44 percent of primary voters cast their ballots after the nomination had been decided. Even in this year's GOP contest, in which Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich mounted unexpectedly strong challenges, Mitt Romney had essentially secured the nomination by April.

So if you're looking for high drama, don't tune in to this year's political conventions. The only thing that would make them more interesting is some old-fashioned uncertainty about the outcome. But the parties aren't interested in that, and the voters are bored.