With Joe Biden’s exit, suddenly the presidential election process gets a major shot of adrenaline. The attention immediately shifts to the process of the Democrats selecting another nominee at its convention in August 19-22 in Chicago. A party’s nominee is always selected at the party convention by a majority of delegates although due to the primary process, almost all the delegates are committed to specific candidates even before the convention starts and so there is little suspense. In this case, Biden already had a majority of delegates. With his exit those delegates become free agents and the process becomes wide open, although the process of finding a new nominee is fairly straightforward.

On the first ballot, a winning nominee would need to secure the votes of a majority of Democrats’ roughly 4,000 pledged delegates. If no candidate won a majority on the first ballot, Democrats would continue on to a second ballot, in which so-called “superdelegates” would have an opportunity to vote.

Superdelegates are mostly senior Democratic party leaders, and they would go to the convention not pledged to any candidate. With the roughly 700 superdelegates added to the voting pool, the winning candidate would then need to secure about 2,300 delegates to capture the nomination.

Although superdelegates would make up a relatively small share of the delegate pool, they could play an important role in choosing the nominee. Their support for a particular candidate would speak volumes and could sway fellow delegates.

As vice-president, Kamal Harris clearly has to be the favorite to be the nominee and her position has rapidly solidified with Biden endorsing her along with a a slew of senior party figures from across the political spectrum, including potential rivals either endorsing her or declining to challenge her. Some state party delegations have already announced that they are going to vote for Harris. So has a major union the Service Employees International Union. People have been donating to the party as well. The liberal political action committee ActBlue announced that they raised nearly $50 million in the seven hours since Biden’s withdrawal announcement .

Refraining from any immediate endorsement are Barack Obama, former speaker Nancy Pelosi, current House majority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Bernie Sanders.

Typically, a party gets a small boost in the polls just after its convention, because the party and its nominees get a lot of positive media coverage and so Republicans would have been hoping for that. The timing of Biden’s announcement will definitely drive media coverage away from Republicans and towards the Democrats. All the media oxygen will be consumed with the usual breathless guessing-game coverage of who the party will nominate and who the nominee will chose to be their running mate. You can be sure that serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) will hate being shut out of the spotlight and will respond with increasingly unhinged attacks, although in his case he has already pretty much maxed out on the unhinged axis.

What Democrats will seek to avoid is a replay of the last time an incumbent bowed out late in the process leaving an open convention and that was back in 1968, when president Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run again. But his announcement came on March 31st, more than three months earlier, and there was already a serious challenger in Eugene McCarthy who was running on a platform against the unpopular Vietnam war being waged by Johnson.

Democrats have not seen a floor fight for the presidential nomination since 1968, when their convention was coincidentally (and infamously) held in Chicago. In a potentially eerie parallel to 2024, then president Lyndon Johnson decided against seeking re-election just months before the election. The assassination of Robert F Kennedy left Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president, as the main opponent against Eugene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam war candidate.

The fraught nominating process was overshadowed by the violence on Chicago’s streets, as tens of thousands of police officers and national guard officers confronted anti-war protesters. In the end, Humphrey won the nomination – even though he had never appeared on a state primary ballot – but he went on to lose to Richard Nixon in the general election.

The chaotic scenes in 1968 inside the convention hall and outside in the streets were not at all the kinds of things a party wants to see at its convention. But this time around it will be hard for anyone else to gain traction to compete against Harris because there is so much less time and it looks like Democrats are eager to unify behind someone who can defeat SSACFT.

If, as appears likely, Harris does become the nominee, what are her chances of defeating SSACFT? It is not necessary that people be wildly enthusiastic about her, though that would help. After all, one of Biden’s biggest achievements was defeating SSACFT but we have to remember that even in 2020, there was no great enthusiasm for him. He was the alternative to SSACFT and to his credit, he did not blow the opportunity, projecting a calm and reassuring image, and that was enough for voters to vote him into office.

What are the things that Harris has going for her? Youth and energy are two qualities that people keep saying they were looking for. There seems to be a surge on excitement and enthusiasm on the part of Democrats. All of a sudden, it is SSACFT whose age and mental decline are going to be starkly contrasted with Harris’s. The chance of voting for the first female president is also another bonus for many voters. I was never a big fan of Hillary Clinton (nor her husband Bill for that matter), but I did like the feeling that my vote would result in the first female president. Those hopes were dashed in 2016 but Harris gives us a chance to have a do-over.

Harris has shown that she can hit SSACFT hard. Here is an ad when she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020 that has been resurrected and is making the rounds where she says that she is the anti-Trump.

Here’s an ad from Kamala’s primary campaign if anyone was curious what a general election against Trump would look like: pic.twitter.com/SGYjgxBlEM

— Adam (@AdamJSmithGA) July 20, 2024

I suspect that that theme is going to be repeated.

How will SSACFT respond? Misogyny will play a role, of course, similar to the way he treated Nikki Haley when she challenged him, because that is in his DNA. What about racism? There was a time when Republicans felt obliged to use dog whistles to arouse racist sentiments. But those days are long gone. Now flat-out, open racists are prominent supporters of the party and of SSACFT and they will be making their presence felt with statements and videos personally targeting Harris, and SSACFT cannot afford to disown them. How will that play out with voters?

There is a lot of uncertainty about what the next three months will bring and there is little history to guide us as to what to expect. Things are moving fast. Fasten your seat belts, it is going to be a bumpy ride.